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Comment by ChuckMcM | Hacker News Reader

I suspect this is to foreclose against a future option for Google to monetize ‘free’ content in the play store without compensating the developers much as they do people’s videos on Youtube.

For those who aren’t aware, in the games industry the distributor has been in the role of adding DRM to games on the pretense that they are “protecting their interests and channels”. As the distributor, Google may feel empowered to make these sort of “protective” changes, and the one that would be most likely (in my estimation) would be wrapping the APK such that it played a pre-roll ad before your free game started.

I could be completely off base here but to my way of thinking it would be consistent with Google’s moves in the past.

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My simpler explanation is that putting "no ads" in title is meaningless and without proof and on its own unenforceable. As a consumer, honestly, as much as I want to rant against big companies and for small developers - yeah, I'm with Google on this one. Putting random unverified claims in title is bad.

(concordantly, I fully support making "no ads" actual metadata searchable/filterable, as well as "Supports Controller" "in game purchases" etc.)

It's worse than just meaningless, it's actively trying to get a bullshit SEO advantage, which is essentially zero-sum at best and makes things worse for users.

If my app is named "CoolBrowser", the title on Google Play should not be "Better Browser than Chrome". If my app is named "SketchyVPN", the title on Google Play should not be "Netflix Region Locking Bypasser".

At best, these are workarounds for the Play store's shitty lack of searchable metadata (why can't I filter out apps that aren't open source?), at worse they're Nigerian prince style scams that suck in unknowledgable users.

> why can't I filter out apps that aren't open source?

This is laughable. It's 2021 and we still can't to basic filtering in our app stores. Maybe google (and Apple) engineers only know SELECT, but haven't learned about WHERE yet? Yeah i know it's a little much to demand. I mean we only went to the moon like 52 years ago.

I basically gave up using the play store since I could not find any way to search/find 'ad free' or 'tracking free' or 'open source' etc.

The very few apps I use from the play store are either ad free or offer a premium version to remove ads completely - it's the only thing I'll put on my phone.

Seems there is too big a conflict of interest for even basic phone functionality - apps with ads make the money tree keep raining.

One day my (paid for prem version) "timed / scheduled silence" app pushed ads out to all users on an update and I had quite the back and forth with them - they fixed it - but did not seem to care one iota that their full screen overlay ads would prevent a mom from answering here phone right away or other basic functions. - It was all about the money and they were going to maximize that.

All the while no incentive for google to make basic functions available in android or find-able in the play store. So little competition for the abusive, ad-ladden, add basic function to your phone parasites.

Glad to find f-droid at least, but I've given up on using my phone for as many things as it's capable of because the search and find is no-ad-hostile.

with currently 2 exceptions, i only use apps from f-droid. I think I'll buy a pinephone one of these days to throw some dev time at it, we really need an alternative to ios and android

It's because Play Store puts a lot of weight on title and very little in the short or long descriptions. For a company that is reputed to be the best in search, Play Store has terrible search policies.

Look up "bypass netflix" and guess what pops up. Unfortunately it's the only way to SEO in the Play Store. The impact is so strong that I avoid branding now, it makes more sense to register your VPN company as "Region Locking Bypasser".

Its the same for Etsy sellers. My wife sells on Etsy and several (non-tech) people that she follows recommend making the title a short description. It's annoying. Yet she does it because it works.

Your point is not specific for ads and completely ignores the dynamics of reviews. Your app will immediately receive a ton of 1 star reviews for misleading the users.

Which is relevant for trustworthy stable apps.

I found it's irrelevant for fly-by-night actually fraudulent apps which are just going to redeploy with slightly different name tomorrow.

(our experienced, mileages, and assumptions/preferences may wary :)

Putting "no added sugar" on a product box isn't meaningless because there are legal reprucussions to fraud. If nothing is happening when games with "no ads" have ads then that is a criticism to bring to the regulators.

No added sugar is something that can be objectively measured. What does "no ads" mean? No Google ads? No sponsored content? Nothing referencing paid products? No soliciting?

Yes, this time it is digital so it's hopeless and since someone may get into a long dispute over product placements, every app should be equally likely to be bringing in protocols that are purely for ads. The only solution is to let the distributor just remove all information that might inform our decisions.

Here is the FDA's rules for the term "lite":

https://www.accessdata.fda.gov/scripts/cdrh/cfdocs/cfcfr/CFR...

Certainly not perfect, but better than if the next time a product at whole foods gets caught in a fraud we let Amazon remark everything as "food".

That would explain why they are trying to convince/coerce/force developers to hand them their signing keys during the last years.

An alternative explanation is that Google was paid off to facilitate state-sponsored attacks.

I wouldn't go as far as to claim that as fact, but it's nevertheless egregiously bad that Google suddenly wants a mandatory backdoor into every new app.

I think the signing keys are required because of features like "play as you download" etc.

[Not an Android dev]

As we've seen with the complaints re: AMP [0], Google is incredibly talented at building "it loads faster" features that are primarily a way to give them greater control over monetization in ways that are less than transparent. Requiring signing keys can be both of these things at once.

[0] https://searchengineland.com/google-throttled-amp-page-speed...

The real Google response would be - it's to facilitate a migration to new signing keys in case the developer:

1. Loses their signing keys

2. Needs to migrate to a better signing algorithm

Google can just handle that on your behalf. Additionally, there's no more need to care about signing keys at any point in the development pipeline. Rather than keep it secret, anyone with proper access to the Google developer console can sign and release apps

More cynically, what they're really guarding against is other app stores. It's MUCH harder to migrate an app from the Play Store to another store if the signatures don't match.

* Without a matching signature, the user can't pull their data from Google in the same way. They'd have to completely uninstall and reinstall the app, potentially losing data if the app isn't backed by a server.

* With a matching signature, the other app store should pick it up seamlessly.

Modifying apps without opt-in seems like a step further than they'd be able to pull off without massive backlash right now.

Frog leaps out of boiling pot, this news and more at 11.

Can we just all agree on an alternative language that means "no ads"?

How about "coool" spelled with 3 o's? As long as you use that everyone will know it means "no ads" if we can get some media to write about it.

I mean, this is exactly what happens on the internet in China when words are banned. No media writes about it but it spreads through social media fast enough such that it's not really possible to ban words. We can do the same for censorship in the US by Google.

How about “Let’s go branding!” /s.

> I suspect this is to foreclose against a future option for Google to monetize ‘free’ content in the play store without compensating the developers much as they do people’s videos on Youtube. As the distributor, Google may feel empowered to make these sort of “protective” changes, and the one that would be most likely (in my estimation) would be wrapping the APK such that it played a pre-roll ad before your free game started.

I'd be quite surprised if Google forced ads into apps that don't have them, knowing full well that Apple would not do the same thing for iOS apps.

While Google and Apple are in different businesses, they are both reliant on the same set of users for their different business models, and from users' perspective, they offer products that are both competitive and mutually exclusive (very few people use both an Android and iPhone daily).

It's one thing to force ads in front of Youtube videos - a given video is hosted on one platform, and users click links to the videos they want to watch with little sense of loyalty to a particular platform in the moment.

But doing the same thing to mobile apps across an entire operating system risks people actually eschewing their product in favor of their competitor's, which would jeopardize the core of their entire business (search revenue is incredibly vulnerable to traffic on walled garden mobile platforms - it's the reason Google correctly saw iOS as such a threat and responded quickly with their investment in Android in the first place).

> the distributor has been in the role of adding

That would cause (relative) avoidance of the distributors - and in the case of APK, any site could be a distributor.

You are underestimating the prevalence and reach of centralized app stores. Consumers could side-load, but the vast majority will not, and that's where the money is.

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