Comment by cocoflunchy | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cocoflunchy | Hacker News Reader

I have the same experience with the Google Play Store. For all the complaints people have about the Apple App Store, at least their reviewers are human and you can discuss things with them. And they block updates but don't remove the app without warning!

My experience with the Google Play store: I get an email on a friday night after working hours stating that the app of my company was removed after a routine check and that I have to follow an appeal process to get it back. (The reason being that we had 2 apps in the store, one for production use and one for training). Only after pinging people I knew working at Google was I able to get my support case prioritized and the app unblocked.

A second time we had our app deleted from the store because we used background geolocation and failed to comply in time with the new reporting requirements. Once again, no warning and no grace period except a generic "Google Play policy update" email 6 months earlier...

I guess we're just lucky to have a B2B app that we can install via APK to our customers' phones if needed.

The number of times I've heard of people only getting support from Google because they know someone on the inside is quite astonishing.

If I were an Google employee looking to make a few extra bucks I'd definitely start offering to help "nudge" account issues for a few extra bucks under the table.

What is astonishing is that despite the scale at which they operate we rarely hear about the problems. False positives seem to be ridiculously low.

Is it really rarely? I feel like I'm hearing about it all the time. The comments in this thread reenforce this feeling. Having to make it to HN frontpage to get support from Google seems also a much too common occurrence.

My assessment would be false positives are way too high and customer support is close to non-existent. And we're hearing only about a tiny fraction of the problems with the majority being stuck in customer support hell.

HM is a bubble with bias against Google. People here seem to believe that bashing this company publicly will somehow change how they operate.

Interestingly enough, back in the day Google used to be a darling of HN community. I suspect folks might be disappointed to see how things turned out at the end.

Well, yeah. I too am in the bubble of realistic experience of having apps repeatedly pulled out from underneath me.

Excuse me for being in that bubble.

It's almost as if over a decade or more if time that people can see the result of behavior they didn't see as problematic initially.

Or that google might have changed how they operate in small ways as they are steered differently.

Expecting any one person to still have the same opinion of any one other person a decade later might be asking a lot. It's nothing strange that a community of people would have differing thoughts on a whole company of people and product and policies.

Google was a hedge against Microsoft which was a hedge against IBM.

The tech world is always running from one monopoly to another.

People should think differently about Google because it is different and now has become the monopoly.

> HM is a bubble with bias against Google.

It seems that way to you because the front pages of Reddit, HN and Twitter are Google's only support channels.

> Interestingly enough, back in the day Google used to be a darling of HN community.

For example, back in the day Google search was useful. Things change, darlings go to the most hated list.

We hear about problems on here all the time... and that's probably about 0.01 percent of the problems that actually happen.

Given the diversity and sheer boneheaded stupidity of the problems we do hear about, there's no chance that they don't have a ton of false positives... especially among apps developed by people who haven't yet learned how to work around whatever stupidity currently obtains. But you can't learn definitively, because they keep changing the stupidity.

After my app got some traction due to a reddit post i made, admob instantly disabled earning for 2 weeks due to "suspicious activity" or something like that.

I tried to reach someone to at least get a clarification...am I not allowed to have a surge of ~100 real users? but there really was no way to present my issue to anyone. It really is bad, there was nothing I could do. If this wasnt a hobby project I would have been really frustrated instead of being just disillusioned.

Its a remake of an old 90s game that is also offline so there is not much risk in it.

I suspect there are a lot of these stories never shared.

It seems to me what people are complaining about isn't the false positives, its the fact that there aren't proper channels to address the issues - and your basically a hostage till someone at Google decides to take pity and talk to you.

This. Reality is going to cause false positives. While you can try to minimize them you'll never get rid of them.

The measure of a system is how they are dealt with. Note that this is not limited to Google by any means. I'm thinking of the police throwing some people in jail as terrorists because they pinged on a geiger counter. Cancer patients, not terrorists. Compare that to what happened when my wife tripped a detector in China. The officials knew it was almost certainly a false positive and were looking for why rather than playing gotcha. (However, I think they went too far in the other direction--it was due to a nuclear heart test, but they didn't even doing the simple test of seeing what the distribution of the radioactivity was.)

Dont worry, google is working hard to make sure that even employees are unable to do anything of that sort. Gather the world's information and make it uniformally unsupported.

This is good. It will tie the fates of small time customers/users to the elites, so the situation gets fixed or the business collapses.

I agree. A process that's broken for everyone gets fixed. A process that can be worked around by everyone who has the power to get it changed can stay broken indefinitely.

Google has many processes that are broken for everyone and don't get fixed. That's why monopolies are bad.

> A process that's broken for everyone gets fixed. A process that can be worked around by everyone who has the power to get it changed can stay broken indefinitely.

OK, but the only processes that are broken for everyone are processes that are mandatory for everyone. Using a different process is a perfectly workable way to get around a broken process.

Agreed. The current state is the most awful for the powerless. At least this change evens the playing field a bit so that when $HUGE_CORP gets burned they will raise enough hell to (hopefully) fix the process.

Occasionally this happens, see Epic Games, and then the $HUGER_CORP has their security teams look for spurious "vulnerabilities" and then uses their PR team to have them dragged through the mud, etc.

Just speculating, but another possibility may be a new kind of business popping up: Google App Store experts who can somehow prevent these problems and/or make them go away.

Similar to Google-SEO consultants, or college-admissions consultants who help rich kids get into universities they normally couldn't.

There is already this service which works to get your Facebook account back:

https://hacked.com/

That would almost certainly violate some contract you signed when you were hired.

Most definitively, but at least people who do not have connections inside of google could stay in businesses. Which speaks to just how big of an issue all of this is.

Oh, I've no doubt that's happening in all the major tech companies.

Amazon employees got caught doing this.

https://www.justice.gov/usao-wdwa/pr/six-indicted-connection...

There could be an app for that -- a clearing house that lets you submit an issue and have it taken up by an employee, with anonymity, for a fee. It could be the Uber for access to insider support.

Stuff like this does happen at the big companies, but it's also rooted out (when you're that big, you can afford to have internal security teams that investigate this stuff) and the offenders get fucked by legal (and fired, obviously). Usually quietly because of the PR damage it would otherwise cause.

Every time I get fucked-up support dead-ends like this now I go to war against the management of that company. I pay to get hold of all the home phone/cellphones/personal email addresses of the highest position employees I can find and bug the shit out of them until one of them capitulates and gets a minion to fix the problem.

I just harassed the C-suite of a unicorn that wouldn't give me a refund for something that wasn't delivered. "We can't give you a refund because FedEx says it was delivered." IT WAS DELIVERED TO SOMEONE ELSE AND THEN FEDEX COLLECTED IT AND RETURNED IT AS YOU CAN SEE IN THE TRACKING LOGS. "Thank you for your e-mail. As the package shows that it was delivered you will need to take this up with FedEx. I cannot help you further with this enquiry." A weekend of texting and emailing the management and now suddenly I have them giving me their corporate email addresses and a promise to have it fixed after the holiday.

I swear I am not a Google plant. I JUST went through the same process the OP did (literally yesterday).

The Play reviewer took down the app because they thought they needed sign-in information to test it (like the OP). However, this was based on a misunderstanding of some menu item in the app - the app, in fact, is perfectly usable without signing in.

I replied to the original email I had received about the problem, and... A few days later, a real human replied that they agreed with my take, and had removed the objection. However, they had found other policy violations, regarding the maturity rating viz-a-viz the app contents (it's a game). They included screen shots, showing that they had not only played the game, but pretty thoroughly, too.

Again, I followed the recommendations to comply (went over the rating wizard) and requested a re-evaluation. This was done a day later and the app re-instated. Done.

I was super surprised about how well the process worked. I even went through the trouble of completing their little support survey with praise. I had been bracing myself for a Kafkaesque nightmare when the app was taken down, considering just how many app updates Google reviewers must be going through on a daily basis, and I'm pretty sure each violation is met with some sort of discussion from the developer's side. Not to mention the reputation Google has earned for support. It goes to show that people have different experiences, and not all of them are negative.

EDIT: Just wanted to add that I don't think the OP's story is particularly egregious either. So Google auto-translates your app title? I guess you opted into this somewhere, at least they don't do this for my app. And I would never assume that Google would sit and hand-translate app titles to every language. And in either case, it actually looks like OP got timely and fairly accurate advice. I must sound like some starry-eyed Google fanboy, but I'm really not, just not seeing it here.

Google did recently update its review process. I was complaining about its previous review process for 10 months at least. It's a little better now.

Previously, an app was suspended without any warning. You even couldn't comply with their requirements neither because they would deactivate access to the app in question in Google Play Console. Your only chance was an appeals request. Your app still suspended in the meantime which could be months. And you might loose all ratings, reviews, and downloads of your app.

My feedback at this time was:

> An easy but important improvement in Google Play:

1.) Don't suspend and remove the complete package id from Google Play, but instead just prevent the specific app update from publishing

2.) If the app update doesn't comply with Google's policies, then give developers the opportunity to fix that

3.) Developer submits a new app update which does comply

4.) App update gets approved by Google

5.) Google is happy and developers are happy

Which might be the case now. At least in Germany.

> So Google auto-translates your app title? I guess you opted into this somewhere, at least they don't do this for my app.

The way I understood it, what they are actually doing is auto-translating the localised (by the developer) title back to English for the purpose of running automated checks on it, and rejecting based on this automatic translation turning a word that implies nothing about price in the original language into the English word "free".

I understood it like you did. She--the author--even wrote that she had translators for all the languages supported by the app, hence the 50-to-30 chars kerfuffle.

>So Google auto-translates your app title?

I mean my reading is that she and her translators hand translate the title, and then Google uses Google Translate to make sure it follows particular rules, and one of the rules it should not say it is free?

>And I would never assume that Google would sit and hand-translate app titles to every language.

maybe the assumption is that they would not autotranslate app titles for the target language of a particular app store. I mean you do understand that the app stores of different languages are obviously not in English? And that there is a very long and funny tradition of translating from one language to English and back to show how things get lost in translation?

At least if they used google translate they should have some sort of tool that allowed you to see if there were some suggested texts that would be less problematic so a reviewer (or bot in this case I suppose) could ask the developer. So that it could say you used the word vrij, which is most commonly understood as free, but there are these other usages which did you intend. Get a result and then run it past a human very quick for an ok / not ok decision. But no, Google translate is good enough.

>just not seeing it here.

I have a hard time seeing how it is not crystal clear.

on edit: fixed missing words.

> And they block updates but don't remove the app without warning!

Epic would like a word.

The key is whether or not your violation impacts revenue. Almost any other issue will not get you the full wrath of Google and Apple. Cut them out of their 30% and they'll act harshly.

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