I'm not sure what specifically caused it, but a representative from the Play policy team just reached out to us and has given a thorough review of our developer account and reinstated it.
We are extremely grateful to anyone in this community that may have played a hand in having a real person at the Play policy team reach out, as well as the ongoing conversation here to improve overall relations between the Play store and it's developers.
I was just rationalizing in my head that I only hear one side of the story, that surely there were some good reasons they were banned. Google has a lot of users, and I only hear about those worst cases and so on.
But no, get to the frontpage and poof, it's solved. It really sucks for all those startups who didn't have luck getting their post viral.
I had about 30 domains at one point so I set them all up on Adsense as I wasn’t using them. I spent about 3 days setting it up. On the last day I went and checked all 30 domains to make sure I setup all of them. 2 days later I got banned. So I was on Adsense for 5 days total. But I’ve never cared to contest it cos I don’t care. But I don’t understand how Google can’t ignore my views to Adsense.
Exactly, they can definitely detect your own views, why they can't just toss them out, I don't know. One time I got curious what the ads on my site were for and checked a few of the links out. I was banned permanently shortly after.
Some unlucky people had all their google accounts purged including Drive and Gmail (Especially with monetary issues like invalid adsense clicks, invalid charge on wallet, too many app refunds)
Keep in mind that the ban is LIFETIME and any account that you multi-sign at any point in your LIFE will also be banned AND there is zero customer support. Some users have been banned for multisign issues even after 8-10 years.
We need a change in anti-trust law given how many markets are now dominated by network effects.
Any company that controls more than (some) percent of a significant (by some definition) market/medium/distribution channel loses the ability to unilaterally ban/refuse to serve a user except for VERY limited reasons, such as non-payment, intentional vandalism, fraud, or other criminal (not company policy-violating but actual law-breaking) activity. If such serious violation is alleged, account can be suspended pending ruling by regulatory agency. If reg agency rules that no such violation took place, the suspension will be ordered lifted and a fine imposed as compensation--no lawsuit by MomsBasementStartup against WeOwnYouMegaCorp is necessary.
So, if you really want to have the power to ban whoever you want for whatever "terms of service" reasons please you, better make sure you never grow very big. Your ability to reject users falls as their ability to reject you and go with your competitors falls.
As someone who wrote a Deep Learning-based anomaly detection pipeline used in real world I doubt they know precisely what the issue was. It could have been a simple flagging slightly over whatever threshold they set to their system, maybe ticking off a tiny majority voting of their "suspicion" detectors. Not having humans involved, nor having clearly human-interpretable results will be always an issue at scale.
Or it could also be that people who code these algorithms are not quite skilled enough to develop them in the first place? "If it is too big to fail, it is probably too big to exist"
The exact same ban happened to the startup I was working before but unfortunately we didn't post to hackernews or Reddit and they never got their account back.
Banned for the entire life of all the devs that ever worked in the startup because one dev had multiple sign-in enabled
An automated DMCA system could be abused to stifle dissent.
Like JetBrains recent DMCA to shutdown the /r/piracy subreddit [0], not for all the probably illegal stuff, but for "Asking about JetBrains Licensing".
The difference is I give zero shits about twitter, reddit, HN , facebook. Google has absolute monopoly on mail, maps, android, play store, apps, dev, drive.
Is being banned by twitter the same as being banned by google?
I run a Healthcare company and we got banned. No reason, nothing. The only thing I can think of is not updating the expo SMS api in time; we hadn't even published anything before. You may have gotten lucky but there are countless others who didn't.
This has happened often enough in the past that they probably have a procedure in place. It keeps the internet from blowing up in their face but it doesn't solve the underlying problem.
Since you have a point of contact, it might not be a bad idea to ask them what you are supposed to do if it happens again? Surely they don't want you to post on HN every time?
And mine too. I had a small utility calculator app with some 100k download and play store suddenly deleted the account. The app was in partnership with someone. No reason nothing. No way to restore.
Play stores auto termination policy sucks to hell.
Update: I just saw the post back. Since it went viral google reinitiated their account to probably shut the matter (instead of fixing the main cause of issue it seems)
They (potentially inadvertently) hired a dev team that was previously banned for malware, so Google terminated the account and banned these new partners of the malware team.
Did your partnership have the same problem?
What is missing from Play (or the ecosystem) is a way to ask if the people you just hired are on their ban list, before you register your app with Google.
They were banned for 'association' - that makes me believe that even if you set up a fresh account yourself, if someone that was previously banned works on it, and Google finds out, you could still be banned.
Google is a bitch to deal with, and that they put up layers and layers of barriers to actually talking with a human being is infuriating and a massive risk to anyone doing business through them...
...however, let's consider the other possibility: Google is in a perpetual game of whack-a-mole with nefarious actors who are the ones putting the scams, malware filled trash, etc, on the Android store. They get knocked down and pop up again under a new account, $25 later. These people are never going to admit their actions when telling the tale, however, so I'm always a little skeptical.
That was one thing I appreciated about Apple's process, at least for a company account -- I had to provide various business documents, get a business search done, etc. If I get knocked down, I can't simply make up a new name and appear again. Clearly it isn't perfect, but it does seem to reduce the scum churn.
Some form of 'association' is probably unavoidable, otherwise it would be trivial to game for truly bad actors.
Big problem is that the current policy seems to insufficiently discriminatory between bad actors and accidental policy infringement. Perhaps they can start with short bans and rapidly increase ban length on recidivism.
It's probably good practice to get the source code and assets from the partner in any case. You may choose to sign and deploy it yourself, or if you delegate that to the partner and they get the banhammer, you can republish under your own account.
Republish a banned app without modification under your account is the fastest way to get yourself banned -- it kind of make sense when you consider how spam app works.
Once your app is flagged as spam/scam, the only way to recover is get a human review from Google.
Would a bank hire a security company that has a previous bank robber on staff? Would you put your kids in a school that has a previous child molester on staff?
You can make any move seem reasonable if you make a sufficiently bad analogy.
A more comparable analogy would be one where the hypothetical security company isn't told who of their staff is banned, or for what reason they were banned. Maybe they were a bank robber, or maybe they were just doing business with bitcoin, and it's the bank's policy to ban all such businesses. And the security company isn't just not hired - they're banned from being hired ever again, from 88% of all banks in the world.
Maybe its ok for some infractions to be automated but for things with huge penalties like life-time ban of developer or removing an app that took months of work... there should be a panel of real humans or some kind of human process.
No it's worse. Yes Microsoft used their market share and deep pockets to drink other companies milkshake, but they didn't use control over the OS to prevent uses from installing competitors software.
As a friend said 10 years ago, this is the end of general purpose computing.
The playstore termination happened to me too. I happened to chance on some forums where you can pay money to people who can use multiple accounts and IPs to get your competitors banned by repeatedly hitting report and then copyright/infringement.
After a certain threshold, google bot bans your accounts and then sends you an automated email.
Whoa! Where can I read more about this? If there aren't any news articles on the topic (in which case, this is a prime story opportunity for some enterprising journalist/blogger), can you link to the forums?
They seem to think they have plenty of developers to burn through like this as if they were some sort of consumable.
But if every developer who has been banned can get other developers banned just by association, this will start slow and then move like an epidemic.
They don't know it yet but unchecked this will seem to them to instantly become an existential threat to the play store. There's nothing like a geometric progression to make you think everything is a-ok just before it all goes to hell.
Yeah Amazon (especially AWS) is pretty decent with customer service all things considering.
I've heard of people getting hacked and having huge bills because they stared up bitcoin miners with their account. I think AWS actually refunded the charges.
Scary to think if Google would do the same as easily.
I know one person that is using Google Cloud for his company. He used to work at YouTube, so it's very handy for him since it works very similarly. But otherwise I don't know anyone using it for any production workloads.
Welp, today you get to meet one, hi, I'm klardotsh!
Don't get me wrong - I hate it and wish we were on AWS for a multitude of reasons, but we use Google Cloud at Lumen5 and despite my personal distaste for it, it mostly "just works" most of the time, even if almost zero of the setup is intuitive. Their Kubernetes offering is a stronger sell than AWS's (IMO) which is a big reason we've stuck with it.
At this point it's hard to quantify the likelihood of being ruined by Google arbitrarily banning you, but at some point that needs to factor into the calculation just like an SLA or major disaster insurance. If there's a 0.01% chance you'll get screwed by Google, but the service is 10% better/cheaper, maybe that's a worthwhile risk? But the numbers are not moving in the right direction.
Bear in mind that Niantic (company behind Pokemon Go) was originally an incubated project within Google. So they have plenty of reasons to stick with GCP for the hosting. As for Snapchat they were originally on Google App Engine so that incentivised them to stick with the platform as well. But for new companies starting today it'd be a tough sell to use most of GCP.
I moved all my deployments to google cloud. I've started to use it originally because BigQuery was light years ahead of any foreseeable competition (Athena didn't even exist). I've stayed for awesome firebase. gcp has great offerings.
Google Cloud looks fantastic, but I could never trust it for anything beyond hobby projects: Google's policy of minimal support and seemingly-arbitrary algorithmic decisions regarding customers makes for more risk than I am willing to accept from a single component.
If Google's leadership were self-aware at all (they're not), they'd spin Google Cloud out from under their anti-customer super corporate.
GC should be aggressively isolated from the stupidity in the larger company when it comes to how they incorrectly deal with pretty much anything that involves humans. They'd need to put someone in charge of it that has vast experience building very customer-focused enterprise businesses. They need to de-Googleify the whole business top to bottom. This would also go a long way toward eliminating the well-earned fear about how Google loves to kill off products/services.
If they don't do that, they will never stand a chance competing with Amazon or Microsoft in cloud. They'll be a far smaller, permanent #3 in the US market, best case scenario.
I just started using BigQuery, and I have no idea how people tolerate it. Can't delete a column. Can't rename a column. Can't change a datatype of a column. If I added a wrong column, I have to recreate the whole table (via SELECT * EXCEPT).
Our startup has $30k free credits from Google cloud but I would have to be crazy to put our production website on Google and their ban hammer + "charming" customer support.
Similar attitude toward employees and even customers is spread across companies: there are always a near infinite number remaining.
It could be a perverse inverse manifestation of the 20/80 rule on an algorithmic or institutional scale: so long as we're only losing x% it doesn't matter because some in the excluded group might have been more effort to deal with.
>become an existential threat to the play store.
This will require a viable alternative and a wide spread reputation that they are a regular business killer.
To this comment and others. I don't actually even mean that the existential threat is people choosing to leave. I mean that the progression of banned accounts will spread like an actual pandemic because of the rule that any account that associates with a banned account will also become banned.
I mean to say that everything will seem fine and suddenly they will find that their algo has banned most of their users, like a play-store zombie apocalypse. It will seem instant and inexplicable to them, and the damage will be done.
> They don't know it yet but unchecked this will seem to them to instantly become an existential threat to the play store
Unfortunately when there are realistically only 2 app stores, and considering Apple devices cannot use the Google Play Store it doesn't matter. Google can do what it wants, just like Apple can do what it wants as for there is no real consequence. There will always be another developer willing to take a dollar less for the same thing and abide by the 'rules'. We absolutely need diversification, but until these companies are split up it will never happen.
He's not saying developers will stop choosing the Play store, rather that the Play store will have banned everyone that would potentially use it, as associations explode.
It may be my wishful thinking, but I sense that there's a number of dominant players in various areas (I suppose some of the FAANG) merrily leaving a trail of burned customers, following a similar "geometric progression" toward some critical threshold of awakening, when it's too late to gain back the trust everyone knows they don't deserve.
Google is automating things to a scary degree, with no way to appeal or ever even talk to a human. Unless you are a big corporation and have an account manager things can be tough. Similar with GCP, countless horror stories over the years. I wonder if Google ever plans to address these issues or if in grand money scheme of things it just doesnt matter.
This has been the way Google has worked from the beginning. Stories like this need to be shouted from the rooftops every time they happen, just to warn people. Google got to where they are today by building absolutely everything with a mind to scale, and justice doesn't scale.
Was the greatest trick that Page, Brin, and Schmidt ever pulled, convincing the world that they don't exist?
No, that's ridiculous. There are real people making real fortunes here. If they're not ethical, it doesn't take a conspiracy theorist to point that out.
You haven't played it long enough to see how it becomes the paperclip maximizer, I posted the link to the game because everyone can find the Wikipedia link.
i can and did look it up, since i hadn't heard of it before. however, that doesn't answer the question as to what the commenter meant with their comment in the context of my reply. i meant "that" as in their whole comment in context.
One might imagine a near future where some sort of automated deep learning system at Google makes these account termination decisions -- and not only can't they be appealed, but the reasoning behind the decision is unknowable, even to Google.
I've got to wonder if, after basic Twit-shaming becomes no longer scalable, Google support will basically end up taking the same essential shape as IRS support - if you receive a nastygram, you turn it over to your professional account/attorney/googvocate who's entire specialty is knowing how to "talk to" the organization.
They’re actually fantastic and have a genuine desire to arrive at the correct number. I had one take over an hour on the phone to explain to me the logic behind the IRS’s position and, once it became clear that the problem was with a corrupted data import and the cost basis was incorrectly computed, took two more hours of his own time without me having to wait on the phone to arrive at the conclusion that the IRS actually owed me money. He could have resolved the call immediately by saying that he saw my position and that he’d cancel the correction and I probably would’ve accepted it. Instead, he went the extra mile and figured out the correct refund, costing the government hundreds of dollars and two more hours of his time.
I suspect the IRS gets a bad rap because people don’t like owing money and the IRS is usually right when they send corrections, but my experience left me with nothing but respect for their front-line support. To remain as friendly and courteous as they were considering the rage that must be directed towards them on a daily basis is pretty impressive.
Yeah, the IRS is actually very good and the people who answer the phone know what they are doing. I also like that they really try to get a solution you can live with.
Never dealt with the state of ND, but my one dealing with Illinois makes me think its not confined to the tax department. I detail my problems with their DOT in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5521011#5521345
I've had to work with the IRS in two separate instances in my life and both times they were helpful, patient, and went above and beyond to make sure matters were resolved properly.
My experience is the IRS telling me I owe them $20,000, me calling them three separate times and having estimated wait times of over 3+ hours each time, finally just giving up turning it over to my accountant, who charged me $400 to find out that in fact the IRS owed me $3,000. So I dunno, to me I think it's a pretty good comparison, but obviously from the other replies mileage varies.
Point taken, and having seen published phone numbers for various specialty IRS attorneys I did actually think about making a quip to that effect. Furthermore, the IRC itself is more understandable than Google's (et al) "AI"-dartboards.
But the comparison is still appropriate due to the sheer gravity of both situations. If your issue hadn't been worked out over the phone (say it required more subjective interpretation), you likely would have hired someone. Nobody wants to get walked on by an 800lb gorilla.
I hope you've had a bad experience with the IRS because otherwise it's really frustrating to see the government-targeted analog of libel. Imagine working hard and professionally to serve your country only to have your reputation tarnished like this.
My interactions with tax prep professionals and software have all been far, far worse than my interactions with the IRS. The IRS says exactly what they mean, while everyone else "interprets," does a bad job of it, and leaves you stuck with the bill plus the hassle.
That was not a political comment - merely remarking on the practicalities of dealing with large powerful organizations.
While some aspects of interacting with the IRS may be refreshingly easy compared to expectations, they are not setup to be universally so. See the steep after-the-fact penalties for getting some types of things wrong (as opposed to simply just preventing them in the first place), as well as the prohibitive fees associated with "private letter rulings".
Your appeal to the individual people working there is fallacious, as it would preclude any criticism of organizations as a whole. I have no doubt that the individuals working there are all trying to do a decent job, just as at Google. The problems are at higher levels of complexity. A program segfaulting is not an indictment of the transistors.
"See the steep after-the-fact penalties for getting some types of things wrong (as opposed to simply just preventing them in the first place), as well as the prohibitive fees associated with "private letter rulings"."
Fees for private letter rulings don't seem like a problem to me, because people always have the option of arranging their affairs in a simple and straightforward manner. In order to deter gamesmanship, there needs to be a substantial cost to running close to the edge.
It's only a substantial cost to someone operating on a small scale, so it actually exacerbates the ability of the rich to engage in more gamesmanship than the middle class suckers.
This is one of those situations where it's not what you know, it's who you know. The only thing that matters is if you know someone who can bypass their support and flip a boolean.
I guess the hope is to get on the front page of HN and hope someone in Play policy team sees it? Pretty sad way of handling it. I wonder if this was an automated action? I also wonder why that personal account was terminated.
For others interested, we just had a sit down with the developer and asked why they were previously terminated. They disclosed years ago they had created an app, and then decide to rebrand it for other use cases - basically "templated" apps in the play store. They were then terminated for violating the "spam" policy.
> These are becoming quite common. If my account would be terminated my business would be dead. How is Google not handling this better?
After drilling down into these posts it's very common to find those developers stealing user data, using forbidden advertising techniques, infringing copyright or simply trying to scam around Google's 30% payment cut. Apple would kick them off the App store immediately as well (and even tell them directly that running to media won't help).
If anything, Google is finally starting to clamp down on malware and developers abusing user data.
If we stipulate that you are totally correct (which I sincerely hope you are), what about the effect that permanent blacklisting can have on an individual's life? And if somebody gets banned, apparently now they must become "unclean" and be kept far away lest they "infect" the company.
I wonder which is harder/takes longer, starting a new business after a SEC violation, or some othe serious misdoing, or getting back on the Play Store.
Sifting through valid and invalid complaints is hard if your goal is to please your customers, scale, and automate. Something has to give so vendors choose to optimize around one or two key metrics:
* Customers with high volume/spend/influence
* Loud/Viral complainers
At the expense of:
* Everyone else
This is a difficult problem that requires massive investment and dedicated care. I earnestly think Google is trying, maybe they're hiring more people, maybe they're investing dev time in better tooling, but its not cutting it as evidenced here.
It's a matter of policy for them to never disclose anything but the vaguest possible details about the case if there's any suspicion of wrongdoing on the user's part.
This does not just apply to shutting down accounts - this also applies to whether to refund money due to borderline fraud by Google. Google is hostile to all customers, I do not trust them when it comes to monetary transactions based on my own experience.
To any Google employees who read HN: please raise this general issue in your internal groups and try to push to change this culture of faceless algorithmic decision making. Companies should not have to rely on getting to the HN front page to have a human being actually look at these issues. You have a voice internally and if you don't use it, in some way you are complicit.
Unfortunately, this is the way things go. If you are going to build a business on top of something offered by Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple, etc, you will never rest easy because you should know your app can be killed at any time for any reason, right or wrong.
These companies are omnipotent and untouchable. They have these automated systems in place because they have determined them to be the most cost effective way of dealing with these issues. Even if there are specific cases that seem ridiculous, or clearly harmful to the company itself, in aggregate this is the system that works for them.
I learned this very early. For example, while in high school I had a (very) small business buying things locally and reselling on ebay. Despite having 100% positive feedback, a scam artist one day claimed to Paypal that I shipped him a brick when it was supposed to be a cell phone. The scammer had a brand new account with no feedback at all, and I had no previous issues, but Paypal decided to trust the scam artist over me with over 5 years of positive feedback. I refused to pay back the negative balance that Paypal claimed I owed them, and lost access to my account for over 15 years. During that time, I started a successful e-commerce business doing annual revenue of $5-10 million. I'd have used Paypal to process all customer payments had my account not been banned. Instead I integrated with Stripe, and Paypal lost out on upwards of $500,000 in processing fees (and counting).
But still, Paypal succeeds, and does not care.
Another example - I was an investor in a small dating app a few years ago that was doing quite well. Despite successful ad campaigns on Google, and in Apple's app store, Facebook just decided to one day block the advertising account, permanently and without reason. Despite vast effort (spanning multiple years!) to at least figure out why we were banned, no explanation was ever offered, and the app eventually was starved out due to inability to access a prime advertising channel that our larger competitors were able to access.
There is simply no way around this kind of thing. My advice is to never build a business that relies on one of these platforms - use the web to your advantage, don't get stuck behind someone else's walled garden. Try to make apps only ancillary to your business, not the main component. Be able to diversify advertising channels. Own your core competency - don't let someone else steal it overnight.
And finally the reason for the throwaway account, I believe there are rogue employees at these companies who can just shut down accounts for personal vendettas, bribery schemes, or just the lulz. We suspect that's what happened to us at facebook. So I do not want to jeopardize any current businesses I am running or investing in that is personally tied to me.
Just asking out loud, if you were a developer that was experimenting with building apps and you accidentally violate some Play store terms of service, would Google removing your app be a permanent black mark or how can you show that you were acting on good faith?
Doesn’t it amount to mobbing to terminate all accounts related to companies associated to a previously banned individual account? What’s that individual to do? Turn to horticulture?
Is there some reason Google has zero support for developers?
Any of the other big corps I've had to deal with as a dev usually have some option to email support to resolve issues. Some of them have amazing support, with live chat.
But Google is an impenetrable blank wall.
The obvious answer is to save money.
Maybe they reckon the Play Store is saturated so it doesnt really matter if 5% of devs say meet an impassable roadblock ,it wont affect their revenue.
Even Adwords, their supposed jewel in the crown, has the worst customer support I've ever experienced.
Have you ever tried contacting them? It's all offshored to India/Phillipines. They refused to honour their GSuite free credit offer, then hung up on me when I insisted they escalate the problem. The difference between their outbound sales lines and their inbound support lines are laughable.
I assume it's better when you're pumping hundreds of thousands through them every month. Even so, it inspires zero confidence in Google as a customer-facing organization.
As far as I'm concerned, Google gives zero fucks about individual paying customers. It's obvious why this is so - their search ecosystem is leagues ahead of competitors, and it's so dominant that it's a licence to print money. They don't need to offer you good support, because you need them.
It's also why I don't hold out much hope for Stadia - an ecosystem that relies on developer goodwill needs excellent front-facing support, and Google just doesn't do that.
As a side note, I truly believe Amazon is well positioned to invade search and dethrone Google (though it would be a case of "The King is dead. Long live the King!").
"their search ecosystem is leagues ahead of competitors"
Not sure what u mean, but if u just mean Google.com I dont believe thats true anymore.
I switched to DuckDuckGo a while back and it seems basically the same except u will get less 'sponsored' results garbage, and also I feel a little bit less en-bubbled when using it.
Yes, I meant Google Search itself (plus the broader AdWords partner network, YouTube, etc).
I'm on DDG for my primary search engine too, but
(a) I fall back to !G for at least 50% of my queries.
(b) You and I are a tiny, tiny minority. DDG users are not even a fraction of a rounding error in the global search userbase.
DDG is nowhere near being a serious threat to Google - it may well in future, but right now, Google still rules the roost (Facebook being the only other equal). You only need to look at their respective financials to confirm it.
Pivot to a product that doesn't require Google approval?
All the top apps today come from big companies. Mostly Google, in fact. The era of the app startup is over. Why do you want to compete with Google while under the control of Google?
If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — forever. - Orwell
> Pivot to a product that doesn't require Google approval?
Honest question: what do you pivot too? Apple has different but equally bad risks of having your hands tied or just being barred. What's a safe platform to build on these days that actually has a market?
There is likely some causation there but not necessarily in the way you are implying. Some companies GET big because they have a top app that is making a lot of money.
TLDR : The guy that opened the company's account had got his own account terminated years ago.
So their company account was closed as associated to that one.
I don't know what got in that guy's head when he created that account, google is very strict when it comes to terminated devs trying to republish apps.
I'm not comfortable with the idea that Google can effectively dictate the employment prospects of all Android developers forever, regardless of past behavior.
Lifetime bans are pretty harsh, but some form of time-based penalty is probably quite reasonable to keep out truly bad actors and recidivists. (Even with the current measures, the Play store was/is teeming with malware and scammers.)
Perhaps some simple form of exponentially increasing penalty (start with 3 months, double/triple/quadruple at every next ban).
I don't follow. We're talking about terms under which people/companies are allowed to put Android apps in the Play store. Why would that need some form of justice system?
Hi, Looks like you've put a ton of effort into building this app, so now time to put some effort into the business side... pay for a support contract and call them on the phone .
You don't need a lawyer, emails will hit the bot wall, just call them , and keep calling them, and it that doesn't work, go visit them. Got to fly to CA, then do it, turn up at their door and talk to them.
Once more for the people in the back: Do not base your company on the goodwill of an external entity with whom you have no real communication or recourse!
So now anyone who has ever owned a terminated account is a Typhoid Mary and as Google refuses to provide any details about their bans and cuts all communications with banned accounts, it's like being exiled by a commandment from high above. People talk about possible future AI abuses but here we are with people getting abused by an AI system right now. Being banned from ever having a Google Play account is a death sentence for an Android developer, especially since anyone who ever comes into contact with you risks being exiled by association.
Exactly. This is deeply troubling to me. I'm going to assume the best and apply Hanlon's Razor and think that this isn't their intent, but it will certainly be the outcome.
I really hope they reverse course, and soon. They are creating a world I don't want to live in, and as someone who loves Google products and has a lot of my life wrapped up in them, I'm actually starting to worry about getting infected with Typhoid myself just through accidental association.
That's what happens when you build a store architecture where its the only way to release an app.
When stores were introduced offering built-in DRM, not allowing native apps, and only providing a license to use the software, it was only a matter of time before these things happened. Having no control or ownership of what you put on your machine was a death sentence.
Problem is, people love stores like Steam and frequently defend it when its nothing more than a Google App store. Despite having no ownership of their games, draconian return policy, and games permanently locked to your account.
I own over nearly 100 games on Steam, mostly bought on sales. Despite the tons of titles I bought, I miss the experience of actually owning a copy of the game, along with the box and manuals that came with it. More importantly though, I think it's scary that Valve can one day decide to totally ban a user from their purchased game because they didn't like the behavior or actions of an account holder (e.g. cheating in a Valve game or account getting hacked).
True. But that's the only place where people usually download apps. It's very rare that a company will release an android package and it requires changing security permissions, at the very least, temporarily to install it outside the play store. Also, the play store offers a built in revenue model + exposure that selling directly from a site would be difficult to generate.
I guess you can chalk it up to the general ignorance of the public regarding security and non-app store installation.
Sounds like F-Droid and/or self-signed downloadable .apks are the immediate alternatives, and perhaps if that becomes enough of a percentage of app installs, somebody in the Play Store command chain will realize they're shooting the golden goose.
Amazon was banning 3rd party sellers residing in the same building as some of their previous offenders for almost a decade already, so Google has still some stuff to do to catch up with them... With bot customer support they are on the same level of usefulness. After a certain point big companies start behaving like big companies; one can only hope there will be another stream of profitable creativity allowing their new competitors to rise with nicer attitude towards customers until inevitable fall to degeneracy after reaching a certain size threshold.
That's viable. You can also use any of several alternative app stores. There are lots of people like myself (although we're the minority, obviously) who don't use Google Play at all anyway.
We are extremely grateful to anyone in this community that may have played a hand in having a real person at the Play policy team reach out, as well as the ongoing conversation here to improve overall relations between the Play store and it's developers.