Comment by suddenexample | Hacker News Reader

Comment by suddenexample | Hacker News Reader

A question for Googlers who may be responsible/adjacent - what is the intended function of this warning? It seems to be attempting to filter out low quality apps, but instead seems to be killing any attempt to change the status quo. If the app has fewer users than competing apps, the message Google is sending is "we don't need any new apps that do similar things to existing apps" and "if you're a small app, don't even think about unseating the dominant players."

Google's Play Store policies have been harebrained for quite some time - previously with the 15 reviewer approach they decided to make it even harder for developers with fewer resources to distribute their apps. It's ironic that even though the iOS App Store is arguably more of a walled garden, it's so much friendlier to human beings who are trying to build a product. But at this point it seems ingrained in Google to release self-defeating features (remember the finder network that prioritized "first of its kind privacy" over being able to find things?)

> we don't need any new apps that do similar things to existing apps"

I’m not a “Googler who may be responsible”, but my understanding is that Apple does this too… and Google App Store has a reputation for being lower quality.

I assume it’s because unoriginal apps at some point are just “polluting” the market and making it harder to find higher quality products. Which is generally what users want. Some things are redundant - how many flashlight apps, weather apps, ChatGPT wrappers, etc are needed? I guess Google doesn’t see value in hosting and distributing such apps.

I’m not sure I agree with this, but I understand it. Target or Walmart don’t need to sell your random trinkets that no one buys, and Google is deciding that the same applies to their store. At least with Android you can generally side load and access alternative stores, so you can build a richer marketplace where different “stores” can serve different customers.

quoting from a nice piece: https://lmnt.me/blog/app-stores-and-payment-methods.html "It still blows my mind how little the App Store has improved over the last decade. It’s barely changed. Almost every bad thing about the App Store still exists. And almost every good thing that happened for app distribution and payment methods is just the result of regulation."

It's almost as if monopolies are bad for innovation. Who would've thunk.

How can you not have a monopoly over something you create?

I don't really understand this thinking. If a long tail of mostly unremarkable apps make the good ones hard to find then that is a flaw of the ranking algorithm.

If an app is not even in the app store, how can it possibly attract user interest? What if users happen to like some quirky feature that seems unremarkable to app store reviewers?

App stores need better search and filtering.

> App stores need better search and filtering.

I used to think this, but then I just abandoned their search and now use Kagi. (I use the !gp bang for the Play Store, no App Store bang seems to exist.)

I can't imagine ever going back to native store searches now that they're full of ads.

Can Kagi filter apps by things like what permissions they require or by their monetisation model?

We need more than a search engine. We should be able to query the app store database using _all_ the properties that the app store knows.

On top of that we should be able to ask LLM style questions about the functionality of the app.

I’ve had some luck asking ChatGPT “How does AppX make money?” I’ve also asked it to find me games based on genre, style, and control constraints “without ads or with removable ads” and it does a fair job.

Sure, could be a neat feature, but practically, 95% of the time that I’m searching for an app I know the specific app I need already and am just searching by name. The !gp bang doesn’t search Kagi, it directs to the app with the matching name on the Play Store, but skips having to wade through ads to get there.

The other 5% of the time where I’m looking for an app for a particular function, there usually don’t exist enough apps that perform that function for filtering on search results to be worthwhile.

> Some things are redundant - how many flashlight apps, weather apps, ChatGPT wrappers, etc are needed?

For what it's worth, the wording Apple uses in their App Review Guidelines [1] is:

> 4.3(b): Also avoid piling on to a category that is already saturated; the App Store has enough fart, burp, flashlight, fortune telling, dating, drinking games, and Kama Sutra apps, etc. already. We will reject these apps unless they provide a unique, high-quality experience.

[1]: https://developer.apple.com/app-store/review/guidelines/

I’ll give credit to Apple for formally writing a policy to this extent, but it’s disappointing. There’s always the risk of putting in a lot of time for an app that is genuinely unique but Apple may not think so.

I’d much rather Apple let in junk apps but do more to promote curated lists of good apps. I like the “Editors Choice” section. I think it is generally a step in the right direction to surface decent apps.

Plus there’s also already some kind of precedent: Maps does an acceptable job promoting third-party “Guides” to attractions and food for many cities.

For what it's worth, that bit of the policy was written early in the life of the App Store, when there really was a glut of low-effort novelty apps, particularly in the categories they mentioned, and when app discovery features in the store were more limited. It's probably not as necessary nowadays, but it does help guide developers away from writing apps which users are unlikely to find useful. (And if you've genuinely put in the effort to create something novel, it shouldn't be difficult to convince the reviewer of that - App Store review is a two-way street.)

Don't you mean ocean into which you can throw your message in a bottle and occasionally get a response to? ◝ ( ⁰ ▿ ⁰ ) ◜

> I’m not a “Googler who may be responsible”, but my understanding is that Apple does this too… and Google App Store has a reputation for being lower quality.

It doesn't help much for Apple. You can search for pretty much anything on the App Store and get at best a handful of useful results, followed by page after page of complete dreck.

>I assume it’s because unoriginal apps at some point are just “polluting” the market and making it harder to find higher quality products.

Originality and quality are orthogonal.

I don’t get how FDroid can be so much better.

I’ve given up on Android, but when I used it, I always checked FDroid first.

Maybe because it's not owned by a revenue-maximizing advertising company.

Speaking as a user, I do find that low number of downloads and reviews for an app strongly correlates with low quality and outright scams. The problem is that you have all those shops cranking out barely functioning apps for trivial things just to get into the listing and hopefully capture a few installs from users who don't have the time or the inclination to do proper vetting. And those apps are so pervasive that they drown out the genuinely useful and well-made new apps.

i'm guessing it's intended to warn that you're about to download one of the 500 apps that look like the ChatGPT app, but aren't actually the ChatGPT app.

Correct. Google's incentive is not to maximize players in the space. Their user isn't the developer; it's the person who downloads things onto an Android phone. If those users get burned too often because it's too hard to tell legitimate apps from knock-offs, they'll stop trusting the whole Play store and probably the whole phone platform (in favor of Apple instead).

Google has the numbers to know that "buyer [or in this case, downloader] beware" isn't good enough because people aren't smart enough. It sucks, but at scale it's a pattern we see over and over and over again (see also "Why does Windows force updates," "Why is Apple so paranoid about side-loading," "Why is it so hard to get an app on Apple's App Store in the first place," and "Why does Facebook log a big warning in the browser console to not paste any code in there and hit enter").

Its a nice theory but if Google actually cared about that Play Store would periodically take out the trash by prompting users to confirm they DON'T want recently installed/unused apps to be sent to /dev/null.

It is ALWAYS tied to someone's promotion or career advancement.

I'd assume someone has a KPI to increase number of app updates...

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