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Comment by greysphere | Hacker News Reader

Starting around January, our app (Dominion[1]) has randomly had updates rejected (including one that _delisted the existing app_) because of our app description. We make some irrelevant changes and resubmit and, so far, it's been accepted each time. We've had the same description for over a year/10+ releases before.

The latest rejection:

>>> The app title or description does not accurately describe the app’s functionality. Issue details

We found an issue in the following area(s): Full description (en_US): “▪ Tutorial & Rules ” <<<

So we changed this to:

▪ In app Tutorial & Rules

And it passed. Every release is just a bucket of stress that we are going to lose N-days of revenue again for no obvious reason.

[1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.templegate...

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"Pushbullet connects your devices, making them feel like one." It's a "sync" program. Pushbullet talks to a lot of things and manipulates a lot of the user's data. So it's inherently a security risk.

Google also has a "sync" program, which syncs things within the Google ecosystem. Google doesn't want others encroaching on their domain. Nor do they want easy import and export from their ecosystem. Although, unlike Apple, they don't come right out and say that.

"If we only published the guilty than no one would be afraid" - attributed to Lavrentiy Beria.

("punished", not "published"). My bad.

I'm starting to think the reviewers have a quota of rejection to fill up and they reject apps randomly over some arbitrary concerns to meet it. Or maybe just to show they are doing they job. Or worse, the app store off shore validations, so the sub contractors script it to reject random stuff to pretend they have humans behind it.

Thanks for all your work!

If you don't mind some off-topic feedback on the Dominion website - have you considered making the Tables screen default to "New" only? At busy times, that screen consistently lags for several seconds while displaying hundreds (thousands?) of running and finished games. It's always a pain to wait for it before de-selecting "Running" and "Post-Game".

The website is a different group, but I'm a fan of their work too! Their forum is: http://forum.shuffleit.nl/

Let me know if that doesn't work. I used to work for them (only to make the release deadline). I can contact the creator directly if necessary. But the forum is probably the better route to take.

I find it incredible that Google's sharedholders did not do anything about the company just plain losing money "here and there" which probably adds up to billions.

Just because someone wants to get promoted by making another half baked pseudo-AI to check apps, or someone making the 6th chat program (sorry, all people quit already after the 3rd change).

I'm wondering if the & sign is causing the issue. Perhaps the AI reviewers can't parse it well?

Yeah I wondered that or the bullet character too. The thing is we referenced other apps that used this exact formatting. But yeah, could just be a bug that was introduced at the beginning of the year that hopefully they can figure out and fix.

I've been having the same issue with an app. Random rejections with a single line copy-pasted from the (genuine) feature list in the app description. In this case the lines just start with a regular dash ("-").

This together with the sometimes 10+ day review times makes it impossible to maintain an app on the Play Store now.

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