Google terminates Play Store account of Simple Keyboard developer | Hacker News Reader

Google terminates Play Store account of Simple Keyboard developer

github.com

228 pointscommoner74 comments

Ah, same old power asymmetry. I can't blame Google for power tripping; I, too, would terminate Google if I had the power to do so.

Made me chuckle, well done

Another malicious developer most likely used his source code and republished/spammed the Google play store with the said reskin. The original developer, is now associated with the malicious developer and has his account terminated. It's not the first time an open source project gets removed from the Google store for "prior violations of the developer program policies".

When I read the privacy policy for the Samsung keyboard pre-installed on my phone and started following the links I was shocked that it was a literal keylogger sending every key press to 3rd parties who said they would use it read every word and phrase I typed to try to guess what my interests were, who I was communicating with, and what my level of cognitive ability/education was! I'd had no idea. Replaced my keyboard immediately.

If an app logged your keystrokes and sent that data to some poor guy in a 3rd world country though Google would shut them down. Samsung is still allowed to host apps on the play store though. In both cases the data being collected will be leveraged against you. Google just doesn't care about malware if the developer is rich enough.

If a company sold me a device with a keylogger installed on I would never buy anything from that company again. I would also not let that device on my network, ever.

I would try to raise a stink with local authorities because that is almost definitely illegal.

In the US we have no privacy rights at all really. Like everything else it's all "agreed to" thanks to a bunch of legalize in their terms of service/user agreement which you can't reject if you want to use a mobile device at all. If I had an option for a cell phone that respected my privacy I'd never buy anything else, but they are all terrible. Apple probably does the best job privacy-wise, and I'm still considering it, but the loss in freedom as far as what I can do on the device would be hard to take. losing Tasker Termux and newpipe alone would kill most of what I want from a mobile device

Normally I'd agree. I refuse to get anything from Lenovo for that reason (and I'm surprised so many linux users are fine with their laptops) but when it comes to cell phones there's no good option, just different degrees of horrible. Your options are basically Apple and Google and anything Google is basically malware designed to collect your personal data. Apple does a little better but is also far more restrictive over what they'll allow you to do and how they'll allow you do it.

The irony is that if you install Lineage OS on a Samsung tablet, your cleaner OS is deemed 'unsafe' because you fucked with the bootloader.

what did you replace the keyboard with?

AnySoftKeyboard, it's on f-droid

It's highly customizable, far better for programing and terminal work, and my only complaint is that the spell check is vastly inferior to the default I replaced. I suppose that's to be expected when you can't leverage the kind of data Samsung gets by spying on so many people's every word. I prefer to look at it as an opportunity to improve my spelling since I've gotten pretty damn lazy letting spellcheck figure out what I intended to type on the desktop.

I think it is better to use real humans for checking violations and sending emails. Yes, humans inevitably will make mistakes. However, unlike a neural network algorithm they can be reasoned with and can correct their mistakes later. I'd take much longer issue resolution with hired operators over the fast AI violation check.

Google heard you, Google don't care.

they care. they care that it would cost them money.

>I'd take much longer issue resolution with hired operators over the fast AI violation check.

Would you also take the cost of their labor?

> Would you also take the cost of their labor?

Google takes a 30% cut on the Play Store, it's their problem to police it properly.

This is Google (as well as YouTube) showing once again they (and their robots) do not care and ultimately, they will never change. The Play Store is evidently hostile to free and open-source software.

> Please do not attempt to register a new developer account. We will not be restoring your account at this time.

Meanwhile on F-Droid, they welcomed Wire, an E2EE messenger. [0] That is at least much friendlier than the Play Store, but this won't be the last time I hear about Google giving no reason to terminate or de-monetize someone's account other than 'ToS violation' without pointing what was 'violated'.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30117423

F-Droid is cool in theory, but it is largely unmaintaned and understaffed. If you upload a new build it may take weeks to get distributed to users.

If only there was a way to support them...

https://f-droid.org/en/contribute/

https://f-droid.org/en/donate/

https://liberapay.com/F-Droid-Data/

Yes, that's because they deeply care about what is allowed in the store. F-Droid had "privacy labels" before Apple did [0]. They do scan/review [1] submitted apps for spyware, to the extent they can with the tools available to them [2].

Often times, F-Droid volunteers go out of their way and help developers publish apps to F-Droid [3].

Besides, in my experience, once you've setup the distribution, F-Droid pretty much auto-builds and auto-publishes the updates forever, until unless the builds fail or their automated review process detects something untoward.

I'd say F-Droid is pretty cool in practice too.

[0] https://f-droid.org/en/docs/Anti-Features/

[1] Ex, see this review for an app I submitted: https://gitlab.com/fdroid/fdroiddata/-/merge_requests/8605

[2] https://gitlab.com/fdroid/fdroiddata/-/issues/2289

[3] Ex, here's F-Droid maintainers attempting to get an open-source app, Outline (a ShadowSocks client), built by Google, distributed on F-Droid: https://github.com/Jigsaw-Code/outline-client/issues/50

Somehow I think Symbian and Ovi Store had them before both of those, but so is life.

> If you upload a new build it may take weeks to get distributed to users.

Why are you talking about Apple now?

People need to stop bringing up F-Droid in response to Google supsending accounts. F-Droid does the exact same thing. If the distributor - whoever they are - don't like you, they will ban you. Your only option is self-hosting APKs (Android only).

https://old.reddit.com/r/fdroid/comments/ceyzuz/the_fdroid_d...

>Android only

Well, so is F-Droid...

I mean literally, "It's in the name"

(... and now I have EA lawyers searching for me)

> F-Droid does the exact same thing. If the distributor - whoever they are - don't like you, they will ban you. Your only option is self-hosting APKs (Android only).

Interesting. In fact, that is actually a good point. Now you put it like that, self-hosting makes EVEN more sense. Apps like Discord does it with their desktop apps and Telegram does it with their Android APKs. I completely support this.

Now. Here's a very good question:

This is one of the reasons why F-Droid banned Gab, from their own quote from [0]:

'Things like racism, sexism, verbal abuse, violent nationalist propaganda, discrimination against gender and sexual minorities, antisemitism and a lot more things become popular on such instances.'

This same reason can be applied to Telegram. So why have they not taken a 'political stance' towards removing Telegram like they have also removed Gab?

[0] https://f-droid.org/en/2019/07/16/statement.html

The same applies for most of the social platforms. Especially for those with E2EE messages. By definition, content cannot be moderated on there.

It is rather diffucult area and the decisions are often made based on by the popularity and the variety of the users on the platfom . It is easy to ban an app which is mostly used by rightwing-extremists for example, but not the app which is used by everyone. So, what is the right way?

>Your only option is self-hosting APKs

F-Droid (a program) allows you to specify your own repos. Eg: NewPipe

The thing about F-Droid is that you can add alternative repositories that allow you to host the APKs yourself without also writing an update mechanism. Hell, you can even get around the open source requirements F-Droid puts in place that way.

Every app store will try to get rid of applications that make the store's life harder, that's why the ability to add repositories is such an important (and underrated) feature.

Google is not available for Huawei phones, so self-hosted APK is a respect to their users

The sad thing is the fact Google has (almost?) no customer support.

Don't buy or pay for their services. Perhaps one day if they improved, but most likely, as with all they do, it will be terminated/canceled soon after away.

Some Google services have support. I pay for extra storage, and I get Google One bundled with it, which includes a support channel. I haven't tried it myself yet, but I heard that it's reasonable. The real issue is that when you're banned, you get locked out of the whole service.

Someone should make a precedent to prevent such nonsensical account terminations without any explanation in the future. How about flagging application first and just hiding from app store? Give developer some time to fix any issues, if there were any in the first place. Communicate better, please! Even an "AI" could send an email with explanation why app was flagged. Application is open-source and author doesn't make any money from it, is that a problem for google?

Off topic, can anyone recommend an Android keyboard that allows copy and paste the way Swype did (swipe to c, swipe to v) since Swype went out of business and the stock Google keyboard bizarrely doesn't let you copy and paste?

Using Google's Gboard (stock on my phone), long press allows copy or paste. Selecting the text to copy is annoying, though.

I don't know of a keyboard that replicates Swype's exact behavior (swiping from the Swype button to C or V).

For rapid text manipulation, AnySoftKeyboard lets you swipe up from the spacebar to show a utility menu with buttons for cut, copy, paste, undo, redo, text selection mode, home, end, and the 4 arrow keys. Copying and pasting in AnySoftKeyboard is pretty quick. It's also free and open source.

https://anysoftkeyboard.github.io

I like it -- it's less taps than Swype-A, Swype-C because you usually select all and then copy right away. Thanks!

https://github.com/Julow/Unexpected-Keyboard

Floris keyboard (also on f-droid) has copy & paste buttons directly above the letters. Faster than swiping.

I would recommend FlorisBoard[1] to anyone looking for an alternative to Google/OEM apps. It is in beta and lacks a bit of polish, but the rate of development is very high and the results already much better than some of the other open source keyboard apps which have stagnated for a long time.

[1] https://f-droid.org/packages/dev.patrickgold.florisboard

That's unfortunate. Luckily there's still the package in F-Droid.

Google should be forced and compelled to accept everything in F-Droid into the Play store.

Google ought to have to appeal for removals from this avenue, and that process should be intentionally difficult.

F-Droid developers should be able to opt out, of course, but this constraint placed upon Google would bring many developers and apps back that have (unfairly) faced the night of the long knives.

This is an honest question - totally non rhetorical. What would be the difference between this, and consumers just using F-Droid?

Google has a history of removing non-malicious apps from Play that apparently break no terms of service.

Developers so removed should be able to (partially) re-monetize by coming through F-Droid.

The problem at Apple is worse; perhaps this would work there too.

If Google Play wasn't a monopoly (read as: if Google was forced to include say at least two open app stores not related to them on the Android main page), they would think twice before bullying developers. I'm sure the folks at F-Droid would be happy to host the app, but what's F-Droid exposure to non technical users?

An interesting definition of “not a monopoly”: being forced to advertise your competitors on your own platform, for free.

Yes? That would be a step that would disrupt their current monopoly status.

That would be a necessary step due to the deep difference between a traditional computer operating system and a phone/tablet. On the PC the user loads the browser, searches for a software doing X and is presented with choices in theory not filtered by whoever runs the search engine; on Android/iOS the manufacturer owns the only default installed repository interface, and users are instructed to grab apps only from that, skipping search engines, therefore excluding an app from the store equals to making it impossible to find for most users.

> I'm sure the folks at F-Droid would be happy to host the app,

Empirically yes:)

https://f-droid.org/en/packages/rkr.simplekeyboard.inputmeth...

Since he may be in the EU, I wonder if he could appeal the decision using Article 22 of the GDPR "The data subject shall have the right not to be subject to a decision based solely on automated processing, including profiling, which produces legal effects concerning him or her or similarly significantly affects him or her."

https://gdpr-info.eu/art-22-gdpr/

How does the GDPR apply here? This decision wasn't made by processing the personal data of the developer.

Wasn't it? I'd assume a lot of data flows into the decision making for these, even if they ignore a lot of it.

If developer was a Business, they might try asking for mediation: "If you are a developer based in the EU and you offer goods or services to consumers located in the EU, you may also apply to resolve a dispute with Google Play through mediation." [https://support.google.com/legal/answer/9792937]. No such luck for open-source developers.

What part of that do Open Source developers not meet?

Many OSS developers do not have a registered business. (I sure don't.)

I wonder if it's an automated fuck-up or real malice here, because "it's OUR data" etc.

In the latter case, I fully expect them to remove OpenBoard and the developer's account next.

Some time ago, I was searching for a no frills keyboard app and this was just perfect for me.

Stands for its name absolutely simple!

Sad to see it go!

Makes me thing devs need to have a home page / github for all their projects, and more than one place to download their software.

Completely unrelated, but this keyboard feels a bit useless to me. I understand the appeal, but why would you not have emojis on a phone keyboard? Surely that counts as something that should be part of the basic package of something. Or am I overestimating how many people use emoji?

> why would you not have emojis on a phone keyboard?

Because I don’t use them

> am I overestimating how many people use emoji?

You are probably not. But why should I care how many of the people who won’t use my phone need them? Not all apps have to cater to the majority of people.

I use this keyboard because it does not have emoji. I have never used emojis in my life. I cannot figure out half the emojis that I get on Signal because I can't zoom in to see what it is. I do wish this keyboard had better spell correction though.

It's not the emoji, it's all the apis needed (or at least used) to do autocomplete suggestions that include emoji and spell corrections and so on. Not every android keyboard is doing this... but a lot of them are just spyware for ad targeting. So you say to a friend potatoes are great :smile: and you get display ads for potatoes on all of your devices.

Ah I see, that makes sense.

Bummer for the developer, but bad stuff happens randomly to people. Google is able to operate because of the scale of automation they use. I use Google services but often back up my data.

For this developer, as someone else said, Fdroid is a possibility. Same problem as with Apple’s store. I have one app on Apple’s store, but it is free and simply an example program for a book I might finish writing someday.

I would feel nervous depending on either company’s App Store for my livelihood.

These two companies destroy thousands of businesses with each update of their policies or operating systems and we have just come to accept, in some cases even endorse, this tragic state of affairs.

I never thought Microsoft would turn out to be the good guys but here we are.

Microsoft are definitely not the good guys. They're just as awful, but happen to have failed in the phone space. The true good guys are the ones developing open source phones and operating systems, like you see with the Pinephone.

I agree. I know two women who both had their businesses tank because of changes to SEO policies.

I guess what I was getting at is that there is so much uncertainty dealing with huge mostly automated corporations, that we must be adaptable, “antifragile”.

I'm not saying that Google was right to do this, but this has to be taken with a grain of salt because we don't really know what the circumstances were. Can the user prove his claims that he wasn't notified about violations in the past? No he can't (more info here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burden_of_proof_(philosophy)#P...). In this case, Google would have to prove that they actually emailed the person, but I doubt they will reply as they might not even be watching this space. Should we just assume that this person is telling the truth? Are there reasons why someone would lie about this?

One is a developer putting his reputation on the line for a free open-source product he has put hundreds of hours of work into. The other is a faceless trillion dollar advertising company operated mostly via black-box Machine Learning with a very public history of incorrectly censoring users and terminating accounts. I know who I would tend to trust.

I am not picking any side here. I don't know the developer, and I don't know Google. My comment was more on the philosophical side, showing that someone is making a claim that he can not prove. This applies to a lot of stuff that is posted online, and the problem is people just take things for granted, when a lot of them are just some claims by unknown people. Anyway, I don't expect most of the people to understand the nuances, but maybe at least 1 person will open their eyes due to this thread.

How does one prove that they did not receive the violation notifications? Regardless, is it that hard for Google to actually list out the specific violations in the termination notice and provide a direct, responsive way to address them?

This is an excellent point. You can't prove much. If the person or the AI closing the account knows enough to make a decision, those details can be repeated again.

This is how it's done in the real world. When judges sentence someone, they repeat the charges and the guilty verdict. When parents scold a child, they tell the child why.

I mentioned in my first comment that he can not prove this, and the Wikipedia link explains why he can't (fundamental law rule). I definitely agree that Google should list the reasons for what they did. Ideally there would be a public mechanism where everyone can see the history of violations associated with a developer account.

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