Comment by euph0ria | Hacker News Reader

Comment by euph0ria | Hacker News Reader

The company I work for has forbidden the use of Google and their services (if possible) such as GCP etc. due to how they treat their customers. In particular, there never seems to be any human being that you can talk to and find out what you need to do to fix the issue. We do not want the same to occur to our production systems if there is an overflow from a Play Store ban to GCP etc. The business risk is too high when you rely on Google's services.

Some examples:

Suspended GCP even when everything in order - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32547912

Ban app even when competitors are similar - https://www.vice.com/en/article/z3vdpj/google-play-store-ban...

Play Association ban - https://old.reddit.com/r/androiddev/comments/ts6jfg/google_h...

Ban due to wrong wording - https://twitter.com/hermaritz/status/1371383715381805061

Terraria banned - https://twitter.com/Demilogic/status/1358661840402845696

New project banned - https://medium.com/@amton15127/why-you-should-not-use-fireba...

Google bans company - https://www.reddit.com/r/tifu/comments/8kvias/tifu_by_gettin...

Google bans mail - https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/a-serf-on-googles-farm

Ban app for communicating changes during covid - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23221447

Adwords ban - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23224791

Serverpunch bad support - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17431609

Delete app - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20826618

Google bans game with pandemic - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23229073

Google bans dev with no recourse - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15197357

These are the ones that got the limelight. Multiply this list x100 to get the true number of fuckups.

Thank you for this collection of references.

The business continuity risk of using google is just too dangerous, while the odds are low, the consequences are disastrous for a business and there is never any recourse.

> In particular, there never seems to be any human being that you can talk to and find out what you need to do to fix the issue

This isn't really 100% true. It's just that Google uses third party contractors for the grunt work and they are working off a script. You can contact them but the comms with them is weird you won't get a direct response only canned responses as they are not allowed to talk to you directly. I'm pretty sure that these contractors are working out of India due to the times they would "respond" to the ticket.

I went through this recently with one of my apps because you can use the Google picker to load files. Very strange and stressful process I was this close to just deleting that feature due to the insane process.

Example was I had a spelling / grammar mistake on my landing page (minor) and they knocked back the application by sending me a premade email with all the rules that need followed which was full of spelling mistakes. Then once I corrected this they said I had a broken link (it was a link to instagram which didn't work and I took it off) again the email they sent to me was full of broken links. Very weird.

> if there is an overflow from a Play Store ban to GCP etc

This only happens if you're using personal google accounts / @gmail accounts to manage gcp resources. Even if you don't use Workspace as your main directory, you can set it to be a SAML consumer so you still get full Workspace data governance.

Eu's digital gatekeepers law will kick some of these bad behaviors in the curb. But letting large tech companies go unaccountable despite their near total domination in certain aspects of life has been something incredible that we have done.

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