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Comment by nout | Hacker News Reader

You can update the version number and re-release. I think this may grant also adding the update note "Updated version number. Nothing else. Thank you Google".

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That works if meanwhile Google hasn't decided to increase the target api level requirements [1]. In that case you may not be able to just republish the app, and extensive refactoring may be necessary.

Forcing apps using old sdks out of the app store is probably the main reason they do this.

[1] https://developer.android.com/google/play/requirements/targe...

That is only really necessary if your app is using old privacy or security problematic APIs.

Which is usually the root cause of this complaining - "why do I have to refactor my app so it won't demand access to all private photos and documents anymore?!"

Who actually asked for this? It's been nothing but a pointless nuisance to me as a user. Samsung complains at me if I choose to give an app persistent GPS access, in the rare occasion it even lets me. I want my programs to do as much as possible, not be hamstrung.

There’s a few apps where I want to grant broad permissions from the outset, but generally that’s not what I want, especially when it comes to photos, contacts, etc. In most cases there’s no benefit whatsoever to granting e.g. access to my entire photo library and it seriously irritates me to see apps insist on said access.

In fact if I had my way, I’d never see a prompt and permissions would default to “only selected” (collections) and “no access” (location, wifi, etc), with the handful of exceptions having access granted manually.

I gave Telegram access to only a few photos, and it pops up the "give me more access" dialog EVERY SINGLE TIME I open it. Not when I want to send a photo, every time I open the app!

As I user, I would have asked. I don't want to have a random closed-source app to access all my data (and you shouldn't too)

My new startup idea: “upload the same release with a different version and build number about once a month till the end of times" as a service.

My new startup idea: malicious compliance as a service

You forward us complaint emails and we create some AI slopscript that fulfils the least compliant interpretation of the rule it can think of.

The goal would be to use automated nonsense to try to frustrate MBAs who have managed to burrow all the way to the brain of a tech giant and are now burdening humanity with their folly.

They're ahead of you.

They're already using AI slop to come up with these rules in the first place, to verify compliance, and to respond to your complaints.

It's AI slop all the way down.

And the shittier things are, the more raise they get for successfully moving the needle of utilization of AI in the business model.

Now I’m envisioning a future where nothing works and everything is halted endlessly because it is being handled by LLMs talking to LLMs, which summarize things so that other LLMs make a decision that gets expanded to a huge text with inconsistencies that in the end don’t make sense anymore.

The singularity but stupid

No, it's intelligence. _Artificial_ intelligence.

Whose LLM wins. Yours or Googles?

PG & E's, unfortunately.

You can ask apple for all the Training that you will need for that.

This app is has less malicious compliance than others

Others = FAANG

> You can update the version number and re-release.

You kid, but Google makes substantial security and privacy SDK / API changes from one Android version to the next (reactively in response to abuse by 3p apps) & maintains backwards compatibility for a limited time period, post which incompatible apps are not visible to latest Androids on the Play Store. This means, developers have to continually update their "targetSdkVersion", if nothing else.

https://developer.android.com/guide/app-compatibility / https://developer.android.com/google/play/requirements/targe...

Every once in a while they'll bump the minimum SDK version or whatever other upload requirements, so if you do that you may have to tweak a few other things to stay compliant, at which point it seems like their system is working as they intended it.

Since they have 60 days to release something, they should have a dummy application which does nothing, but which just increments its version number.

I am not sure

I quote

----

Limited Functionality and Content

We do not allow apps that only have limited functionality and content.

Here is an example of a common violation:

    Apps that are static without app-specific functionalities, for example, text only or PDF file apps
    Apps with very little content and that do not provide an engaging user experience, for example, single wallpaper apps
    Apps that are designed to do nothing or have no function

https://support.google.com/googleplay/android-developer/answ...

Clearly Google has no problem with apps that are just a WebView wrapper over a website, so they could just create one of those. I think there are automated tools for that.

New business idea:

AUaaS - App Update as a Service

This effectively exists already in the form of paying third-party for a maintenance contract. Actually bumping the version number and repushing an app is the trivial part of being forced to do yearly (or w/e) updates - there’s a bunch of grunt work that can’t be automated in a trivial way - bumping your API targets, fixing anything that breaks from that, updating your build pipelines, fixing anything that breaks from updating your build pipelines, etc.

or "bug fix: google bugging us"

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