- They now require a DUNS number to submit an app
- You now need 10-15 people to "QA" your app before submitting
- Now this.
It just seems that Google wants the "major" apps and nothing else.
The big corps are NOT autonomous, they are moved around like chess pieces. They are tentacles of a bigger entity, whatever that is.
Even for non-us residents?
https://developer.apple.com/help/account/membership/D-U-N-S/
> If you’re enrolling as an individual, you don’t need a D‑U‑N‑S Number.
These things are easy to get, the idea is to at least slow down the deluge of scam apps and barely working "vibe coding" apps.
> You now need 10-15 people to "QA" your app before submitting
Again, enforcing at least a baseline of testing isn't bad.
Both Apple's and Google's stores suffer from a massive problem with low quality apps and it's honestly more than time that this gets tackled.
When you add bureaucratic hurdles to a process to try to slow down abuse, you often find that abusive users are more willing to navigate that process than legitimate ones. (We've seen this with email spam already - spammers are perfectly willing to set up DKIM and DMARC, and have stronger incentives to do it correctly than legitimate senders.)
In this case, it's not just a bureaucratic hurdle, it's adding a real external cost - app authors now have to go and deal with their government to get something DUNS accepts as a certification of entrepreneurship.
For single developers and legitimate startups, that cost is practically irrelevant and they're going to have to do it anyway to file taxes - but scammers run into the issue that they'll have to either use their own identity or have to clone someone else's which carries significantly more risk when the cops come investigating.