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Our company just got a warning that we have sixty days to release something on Play or have our developer console account closed. The email made it pretty clear that Google wants developers to continuously push new versions to customers. We have no new features nor bug fixes in backlog. There is nothing to update.
The only purpose of our software is to control hardware that our company makes. Nobody uses it for fun, they use it because they have to. If I had a say, I'd automate even larger parts of the customer workflow.
(Yes, at first we released a mobile PWA but ran into limitations related to push notifications and MDM support. We then created the native app, but our customers cannot remotely load APKs not signed by Google).
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".
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
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
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.
> 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...
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"
Are you sure you don't rely on any third-party libraries that have been updated for security reasons? Are you sure there's no Android API being deprecated that you're still using?
I sympathize with the general idea that software that hasn't been updated in a long time is more likely to contain bugs and incompatibilities with newest OS versions. Whenever I've opened ancient apps on my iPhone or my Mac, they generally break either partially or entirely.
In your case I understand it might genuinely not need updates. But across the Play store as a whole, it seems like a largely beneficial policy. If there really aren't any dependencies that can/should be updated, surely you can make a tiny change to a text string somewhere, and get the added benefit of making sure your whole build chain still works? I get that it's annoying, but it really is valuable to weed out the truly unmaintained apps.
No, Google is being aggressive likely due to liability.
I made an Android app that used React Native and it was the simplest thing ever. It had no auth, no telemetry, no persisted storage. Quite literally all it did was take text input and output it's braille equivalent and vice versa.
Had another one that made procedurally generated credits like you'd see at the end of a game. Same thing. No auth, no telemetry, etc.
I made a total of $3.97 for those apps. I did also receive a $350 settlement for some class action lawsuit Google lost about something they did to developers.
Closing my account removes me from potential future class action pools.
No, as someone that did Android development in the past, and still follows Android development due to its Java linage, and being a managed OS for the most part, that isn't the case.
Google has become very aggressive, you need to keep updating the apps, to specific SDK versions, even if there are zero changes to your own application in terms of what APIs got changed.
Otherwise it gets removed from PlayStore.
Ugh, on both mobile platforms, we have/had multiple popular games that their updates keep breaking, and they keep deprecating SDKs for. And each game is at on a different engine revision so we can't combone the work. We'd really like to keep these games up for for our mobile players, but we can't justify the cost, we make some money on these platforms, but nothing that justifies the immense cost.
Meanwhile, our console/steam/gog builds have seen an update or so at our discretion, and have just continued to run happily, and make more money.
Honestly it's hard to justify the maintenance effort to even consider porting out next games to mobile.
But really the people who are hurt are our players that already bought our game, but when the upgrade phones or OSes they no longer have an option to play unless they want to transfer their licenses to PC.
Imagine if we talked about other computers like we talked about phones. It's just so weird
- you can only install programs from our approved package manager
- if you make any transactions through your program, we'll take a 30% cut
- you can't be access those files, you're not root
- you got root?! We're going to fucking sue you (yeah, I know about the PS3...)
- you can't change these settings
- you can't access that hardware
These companies have turned into scorpions[0]. It's myopic and they'll scream about how they're dying even though it's their own damn fault. These aren't just unavoidable things that are leading them to their deaths, but unreasonable. Foregoing larger future rewards (crossing the river) for short term ones (stinging).
It is insanity. Especially as we often try to justify it
This only applies to iPhones, most Androids are rootable, and even un-rooted, it is trivial (I am mean really trivial, like 3 clicks) to install programs from outside of app store.
My opinion is anyone who owns iPhone knows what they sign up for, and does not care. So I don't get your rant.
- Do you own iPhone? Well, you've made your bed, now lie in it. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of phones on the market - if you chose one without 3rd party app store, it's on you.
- Do you own Android? You have nothing to complain about, push any apks you want anytime. Hey, get Samsung - it comes with 2nd app store preinstalled (from Samsung of course). Maybe even root the phone if you want to.
(Note the GP mentions "MDM", and that's why they could not use this route. MDM means corporate security, and they apparently made a rule to block 3rd party installs. This is sad, and I feel for them... but this is a corporate problem, regular users are not affected)
- Are you complaining on behalf of other people? They are all adults and made their own choice. If you want to make a difference, advocate against Apple. Or even better, advocate for regulations against Apple, to make their products worse so that more people move to Androids.
> This only applies to iPhones, most Androids are rootable, [...]
Except that this breaks SafetyNet, which makes a bunch of applications important for my daily life (e.g. my banking app) suddenly no longer work. Sure, clever people find workarounds for this issue, but they are not supposed to work. They are treated as vulnerabilities that are actively "fixed", so it's a cat-and-mouse game that can break with any update. This means I effectively have the choice between a device I control, and a device that's useful in my daily life, I can't have both.
This is obviously a much worse situation than on desktop computers.
> most Androids are rootable
> So I don't get your rant.
My point has nothing to do with what you "can" do. It has everything to do with the need for such efforts in the first place.
These kind of barriers don't concern end users directly. They're just a huge pain point for developers, especially developers who don't make their software for commercial purposes only. The harder it is to develop, publish, and maintain an app, the less cool projects are being developed and the less innovation you get.
Nobody can quantify how much these practices stifle innovation because there are plenty of app developers and there is no comparison to how the app landscape would look if there were less barriers. Perhaps it's not a big deal but the fact is that nobody knows...
> Why did we think this was a good idea?
Who is "we"? I think this had always been the wet dream of corporate types, not the users. In the PC space there are too many existing ecosystems to implement that kind of control (through Microsoft certainly tried with the whole "trusted computing" stuff) but as soon as there was an opportunity for a popular new "blue ocean" platform, they jumped.
You could see this most blatancy with ARM tablets. Microsoft released two versions of Windows, one for x86, one for ARM. The x86 one allowed installation of regular programs, the ARM version was restricted to Store apps. Made no sense from a technical perspective, the only reason is that they could.
> Who is "we"?
But my point is that the strategy is illogical even when one is simply profit maximizing. You get short term gains but they prevent future games. It need not even be that far in the future. See the iterative prisoners dilemma for a simple example. Defecting will get you higher reward in one round but if there are any further iterations then your rewards are lower.
That's myopia. And I'm not satisfied with any "it's just it is" style arguments because we (inclusive) are ultimately the ones who decide how things are. It's a collective decision, a society. And that's why I press, because we can all do better. A rising tide lifts all ships, kings and peasants alike.
On one hand much of this is valid, but on the other many of the conveniences that desktop devs are accustomed to are increasingly questionable and ill-suited for the modern era.
Perhaps the most problematic aspect is the way that PC apps have traditionally been granted access to any resource at any time without question, with the largest obstacle being the occasional need for an admin password or UAC prompt. It’s been a chronic point of abuse by third party developers, with some of the giants like Adobe being among the worst (using a third party uninstaller after installing Creative Cloud is like shining a backlight in a hotel room). Third party programs must be treated as somewhat adversarial in order to make sure that the user maintains control and knows exactly what the software they’re using is doing.
So yes, mobile operating systems have been abusive, but at the same time desktop operating systems have been negligent and expanding third party app carte blanche to mobile apps is not the way forward.
We do, game consoles, video players, blue ray players, before phones, PDAs were already like that.
Also during the 8 and 16 bit days, all home computers were vertical integrated, outside external expansion ports the only way to upgrade either the software or hardware was to buy a new computer. Sounds familiar?
An improved experience required a whole new package.
The only exception was the PC clones market, that only happened, because IBM failed to prevent it, and they did try to regain control with the MCA design that naturally failed after the pandora box got opened.
Ironically with desktops now being a niche market, we are getting back to those days.
Don't worry. The time when our computers will be locked down the same way will come in our life time.
Rent seekers gonna rent seek.
Scorpions gonna scorpion
But I'm not willing to let that be the answer. It's a thought terminating clique
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thought-terminating_clich%C3%A...
One man's cliche is another man's razor.
Mine is Hume's Guillotine.
It sounds like game consoles :-(
At least your bank, school, apartment, and airline aren't locking core services behind carrying a fucking PlayStation around with you.
Consoles feel different because they're one-purpose machines. Sure, it's irritating if they hardcore a maximum fps or what have you, but it feels less offensive for them to be locked down.
It's kind of like the difference of Disneyland having weird, restrictive, draconian rules versus just a public park. Which is also one of two brands of public parks in your city. That you also have to use to deposit checks.
> It sounds like game consoles :-(
>> - you got root?! We're going to fucking sue you (yeah, I know about the PS3...)
> Imagine if we talked about other computers like we talked about phones. I
That's the goal for PCs too. Windows is already partway there and they keep pushing.
Apple sent the exact same thing out to a just-working-fine app I maintain in the App Store.
well, now you can update it to include links to things customers can buy outside the Apple ecosystem
Its just a proof of a working company behind the app ? add a lorem ipsum string with a reference on it, inc version and re release?
Google should delist the app from search rather than remove it entirely from the play store for old stale apps.
Automate pushing an update every week with no changes other than a bit flipping back and forth or something. If they want to set up stupid shit then they get to get stupid shit
"The email made it pretty clear that Google wants developers to continuously push new versions to customers."
Why. It is not Google's software. Shouldn't that decision be left to the software author.
I think it’s about optics. They don’t want their App Store to appear stagnant.
I don't know if it's just optics. As a user, I personally don't want to see or download apps that are broken, neglected, or completely left for dead. Maintained apps are usually the best ones right?
>Maintained apps are usually the best ones right?
microsoft windows has been maintained thru to the present, but has become increasingly unusable since Win 7. so, no, false.
Win 3.1 is more usable for me than it has been in years. I’m considering giving Win 98 or even XP another spin.
Similarly, modern third party windows software runs better than ever.
Of course, I run it all under Linux…
Because they want developers to use the latest version of their API. And as a user it is a good thing, as the API is getting more restrictive and privacy focused
"Because they want developers to use the latest version of their API."
But the parent commenter's company software did not need to be updated to be useful to the company. Its only purpose was to control hardware made by the company.
Being in control of the OS, can Google in some cases force software authors to rewrite software and "release new versions" by changing/adding/removing APIs, etc.
Release-make sure it works on latest toolkit. Shows you’re alive
I've had a Google developer console/play account for a decade+. Recently had to send some proof of identity stuff in their anti-spam thing -- which I did because who knows one day I might care about the account -- but I haven't released anything there in eight years. No threats of closing my account.
Did they instead just warn that they would unpublish the app? Google does have minimum API levels that they slowly move forward, and they will unpublish your app if you don't periodically rebuild and resubmit.
No, I got the same message. It was very clear that I had 60 days to publish a new app or an update or my entire developer account would be closed and I would have to apply and pay all over again.
https://support.google.com/googleplay/android-developer/answ...
Ah, interesting. I guess it's that I did have a popular app on there (which was then removed after I completed a technology sale) and my details are verified.
They will suspend the account if you don't complete identity verification, though supposedly you can reinstate it if you disclose your personally identifiable information.
Google and Apple need to be regulated out of the app store business. They have no business doing this bullshit.
It's time. Governments need to put an end to the app store.
I’m with you, let us install programs like on a PC.
It wouldn't even be hard to achieve security: (1) sandboxing, (2) permissions system, (3) database of bad app signatures, (4) heuristics based monitoring. Most of this is already in place. There's no excuse except money and power.
> Most of this is already in place.
No, it's in 10 different places.
Because that's worked so well for PCs?
PCs don't have sandboxing or permissions.
That’s a pretty broad statement, and sure, you can get an OS with neither, but broadly speaking modern operating systems that people use do have sandboxing and permissions.
In fact, I am using a PC right now that is working pretty well.
Could you just get away with modifying something small, uploading the update, then revert the change, and reupload?
Either way, it's nonsense that they force this, especially for those who made an app however long ago and just uploaded and forgot about, or that version was the only one they intended to make. It's crazy how much Google gets away with bullying us.
Not OP, but depending on the industry, this could be enormous amounts of backend work. I have projects that needs to be validated, which effectively means a huge amount of human testing for any change. The Process is confirmed to work on version X.Y.Z and nothing else.
I imagine that if this sort of bullheaded google policy persists, companies will start adding “piñatas” into their code that have no real impact and can be changed with barely any validation required.
This lets google beat the version numbers out of it at will.
I'd target an about page or something similar, just have a sentence or two that get picked at random from a selection each build. Then have a monthly build job that runs and publishes.
Luckily there is no regulation in this industry, just demanding customers.
The main issue is that we support way too many different workflows based on customer requirements and actual hardware configuration, and even a slight change to a component often means we have to do manual UX testing.
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Ah interesting. Even so for like a small styling change?
A change is a change. I have certainly made a few “safe, meaningless, no possible way it could break something” edits which blew up in some unexpected way. Why take the risk for some inconsequential update? Someone has to sign off on why this commit needs to be fast tracked outside the normal process.
Almost any software I can think of has different processes for testing/validating changes depending on impact/priority.
e.g. I'm typing this on Firefox, which has a much different process for point release vs their 4-week release cycle.
I guess you can always change the style and location of UI controls just to mess with your users. After all, Big G does it all the time. :-)
Change font on One letter on one screen. Revert back 60 days later. Wash. Rinse. Repeat.
It's a pain in the ass, but to be honest, I've been asked to do worse with my time.
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At least they aren’t trying to claim a bug bounty :)
Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.
Only 15 years of experience in the field and now running a consultancy company, but what do I know.
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If that's the thing Google is trying to address, they can easily incentivize it - Java apps are usually quite easy to decompile and check. Search for library versions in use, force upgrades on security vulnerabilities.
But they're not doing that. So clearly their goal is something else.
> Java apps are usually quite easy to decompile and check. Search for library versions in use, force upgrades on security vulnerabilities.
You don't even need to do that – for a while already, Google's toolchain has been adding dependency metadata to all apps by default (encrypted, though, so only Google can read it) and they've indeed been using that to warn about outdated or vulnerable dependencies. According to https://support.google.com/googleplay/android-developer/answ..., at most they'll only block you from releasing further updates including dependencies with critical vulnerabilities, though…
"Force" upgrades? What do you mean?
Check for vulnerabilities in dependencies and do the same thing they described in this post, just with... meaningful feedback.
I'm more an infra guy, and such scans are actually absolutely awesome. I see everything in my k8s clusters, all java/python dependencies that need attention.
I'm more surprised how anyone can run an app for more than 2 weeks with no high severity vulnerabilities. I guess mobile doesn't have the same attack vectors, but still
Mobile has unbelievably smaller attack vectors due to the hefty sandboxing, as long as you're doing normal things and not including a bunch of janky ad libraries. You're largely just contacting APIs you control and not running arbitrary code, and there's no outside connections coming in at all - lots of extremely bad CVEs are completely irrelevant in that context.
Sure, you can bend your scope to make them relevant... but if you've got someone who can control your system in ways you didn't build by bypassing the OS protections, they already have control of the device and can do darn near anything. If you haven't protected from that, and it's frequently not possible, many other protections are meaningless.
Your backend though has to handle this kind of malicious-modified-client scenario, as well as random connections from code you don't control at all.
(This is not true for all apps of course, but for B2B stuff? Most small companies? Frequently valid)
You are right, but those "janky ad libraries" are the very reason most of the apps on google play were created.
If you're not an app that's intentionally risking your users' safety though, you probably have some reason to trust the ad vendor to do their part. It's calculated risk for most non-malicious apps, and the major vendors are broadly fine in that respect. Ignoring privacy anyway.
And we can ignore the shovelware, which probably is actually a majority of apps. Those won't care about security patches, and will probably go out of their way to hide them so they don't appear vulnerable and don't have to do maintenance releases. They wouldn't be affected by forced updates.
So as a conclusion, it seems we agree that those that are the ones creating most risk for users will not be impacted.
I am sticking to android ecosystem as best one I know, because I still have choices + I can use fdroid for a lot of my apps.
But when my mom uses a tablet or phone ... I have absolutely no smart advise to give her. All apps are hostile and annoying. The play game subscription is fine (apps/games cannot have apps and are fully unlocked) but other that that play store is a minefield.
Yup, pretty much. Which makes me wonder what the actual goal is, especially since they've had vulnerability scanning for years iirc
What is the threat vector here?
User installs the game, has fun, uninstalls or leaves it there where only they can run it.
Sure if you never accept any external input of any sort and handles no user data or input, you can assume things are fine.
But if that random game should, say, fetch user avatars from the web, then untrusted input to a way out of date image decoding library would be a nice path to a remote code execution vulnerability.
Or if the app registers any intent handlers that other apps and websites can trigger, or establishes TLS connections to any third party site, or...
Sure, Google is making sure app vendors comply with regulations in specialized industries. /s
If Google doesn't do what vendors in specialized industries want, they'll stop using it. Does it want customers?
That was definitely a logical way to interpret that comment. /s
The message is that the app developer in question's argument that they have nothing to update is most likely false, not that special industries is a driver for the policy.
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.
> 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 ) ◜
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.
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.
>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.
> 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.
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...
I noticed this banner on one of my own apps while installing it for my mom on a new phone. The banner said "This app has fewer users than others...", almost as if they are discouraging users from installing it without even informing me. I looked it up online and it seems like many people have begun seeing this. I am linking a thread. If anyone from Google is reading this, such opaque policies are not appreciated!
It does seem like an Anti-Pattern.
Presumably (some faction inside) Google wants to warn users about scam apps. However this seems like blatant shaming and ostracization of smaller developers who did not spend $$$$$ on Marketing through Google's Ad Network.
Seems Monopolistic of Google to me.
> Presumably (some faction inside) Google wants to warn users about scam apps
Or (the ads faction that effectively runs the company) wants to warn users about apps that don't spend much on AdWords and Play Store ads.
That feels more like it, I opened the Play Store to check it out, there was an ad for some waifu-gacha 3 star app with 1k downloads, 19 reviews, released last week, reviews imply it's something that was taken off the store before reuploaded under a new name. No banner saying it's questionable.
Although, I spent a while trying to find an app that did have the banner, and nothing seems to get it on my account.
exactly. Imagine the audacity of this company. I have a paid app and they are already charging me a percentage of the revenue. And behind my back they have begun running this banner.
I doubt they're aware of you enough to do it behind your back. They're more wanting to flag this "Bank of 4merica" app you're about to install has 8 other users.
I am obviously a very small player doing things as a hobby, I don't matter to Google. But what I am pointing out is that they already take a cut of whatever few dollars I earn (beyond the initial $25 I paid years ago just to get on the play store). If you see the thread, the OP asked their customer support and they said: "Especially, since the response from customer service seems to suggest that the best way to get it removed is to run Google AdWords (which I am already running, btw)"
If the angle here is running ads and if they are already taking a cut, why are they doing this? If the angle is security, why not test the apps and have them removed! And in either case, why keep the developer in the dark? And why is there no way for small time insignificant devs like me to know how to get rid of the banner!
I think "Bank of 4merica" shouldn't have been there in the first place. Especially for a store that is running billions of $$ worth of transactions. This is Google, again, pushing a cost that it has to pay to external actors.
So they should just outright ban the apps of the developer in the article? :P
They should ban - and file criminal charges against - the developer who uploads a Bank of America app but isn't Bank of America. They should not do that against developers who upload their own non-fraudulent apps. Why is this concept difficult to understand?
Asking seriously. I don't get why these types of questions even come up. Google already claims to manually review all apps, so they know the Bank of America app isn't Bank of America, so why is it even allowed on the store? Why would anyone think it's hard for them to draw a line that would exclude fake Bank of America apps, but wouldn't exclude normal apps? I could understand the concern if it was a completely unmoderated store, or if the only tools available were some kind of keyword filtering. But that is not the case.
Quite simply: Because you can't have one without the other and you're living in a dream world if you think that your kind of outcome is even possible with a setup where a private megacorporation takes over the role of prosecutor, court and police.
No matter how you scream, if you demand Google play the cop, they'll play the cop in the easiest, cheapest possible way in situations where anything is unclear. The situation in this very topic was exactly caused because Google is trying to play a cop while crushing small devs underneath their anti-fraud measures.
There are no better outcomes in this situation. Not on Play Store, not on AppStore, not on any other store. Megacorps can't be cops, courts and enforcers at once and do a good job of it.
Let's talk more when you decide that perhaps policing should remain in hand of governments where it belongs.
Why would they allow this hypothetical app in the first place?
Because the people up in this very thread demand it?
Regardless of what people in this thread demand (which I think is unlikely given the example), why would it be in anybody's interest (besides the developer) for Google to allow an app that commits trademark infringement at best (and, as implied, is probably some vehicle to steal confidential information like online banking credentials)?
It seems to be the "government is either big or small" false-dilemma argument, applied to Google.
That (wrong and stupid) argument goes like this: "We can't make it illegal to poison the water, because that would make the government big, and big governments do bad things like eugenics/Mao's Great Leap Forward/the Holocaust. Better to leave the water being poisoned, to avoid any risk of that happening!"
In this case it's "We can't require Google to ban obvious trademark infringements, because that would make Google's app store review onerous, and onerous review processes block legitimate apps like Netflix and Fortnite. Better to leave the trademark infringements there, to avoid any risk of those apps getting blocked!"
I love your comparison becuase it aptly shows how you demand Google to do the job of government which is utterly abhorrent to me. Just without oversight a government has.
(Usually while also complaining how Google can't be trusted too :P)
It also disadvantages any apps that compete with Google's own apps.
Calling it an anti-pattern is a euphemism. Let's call it what it is: a completely stupid idea.
"Are you sure you want to install OSM? Don't you know Google Maps is better? You should try Google Maps"
On the other hand....
https://chromewebstore.google.com/search/ublock
As a user who suddenly knows nothing about uBlock the ad blocker, are you going to trust an addin with 2k installs and 4.3 stars, or an addin with 30m installs and 4.7 stars?
Install base can be informative when choosing.... anything, really. In many people's minds something that is used more is better in some metric, be it performance, reliability, price, et. al.
EDIT: My numbers were way off :-)
I agree with what you have said. It's what you mentioned at the end about people judging based on metrics - it should be up to people to judge for themselves, not the platform! The platform should present data, not try to sway opinions. Besides the message itself is so hand wavy if I am using the phrase correctly, what is Google trying to convey through the message? If something is a legit scam, they should either not be publishing such apps or be testing and removing them.
I am increasingly convinced they are trying to direct traffic to apps that use their Ads network under the guise of such vaguely-about-security messages.
> it should be up to people to judge for themselves, not the platform!
If you download an App using MSFT Edge on Windows, it will warn you (MoTW). If you download an App using any browser on macOS, it will warn you (also MoTW). But if you grab apps via the App Store, there's no warning.
Is that also unfair?
While it's been many years since I did hands on end user support, or even worse, support for family friends back in the 9x days, people still have little clue about what they're doing without a big flashing warning sitting in front of them..., which even that sometimes does not work.
Even I'll often choose an extension for Firefox that has more installs. If I'm going to get a SAML decoder, I want the least phishy SAML decoder available.
You get warnings when you install apps from Microsoft Store?
Play Store isn't a web browser.
edge exe/msi downloads, not store. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_of_the_Web
That's my point. The apples to apples comparisons are Microsoft Store vs Play Store vs App Store... or Chrome vs Edge vs Safari. NOT Play Store vs Edge and Safari.
Play Store is NOT a web browser. It downloads from one place and one place only.
It sounds like showing those numbers already conveys the information you find useful; the question isn't whether the number of users is informative, but whether it's reasonable for Google to bucket apps into groups of competitors and then choose a threshold of minimum number of users to avoid actively discouraging additional users. I'm not opposed to the idea of owners of app marketplaces taking a more active step in curating things to try to help users, but this way of doing it seems pretty dubious.
You're going off the premise that I'm an average user who would otherwise stare blankly at a zsh terminal.
Those warnings in the Store aren't meant for you or I.
That's exactly the problem in my opinion; most people will see the warnings and immediately just backtrack without investigating further, and in their shoes, that's not necessarily the wrong decision. I honestly think that having a warning like this isn't a bad idea, but that the heuristic being chosen for when to show it isn't a very good one, and as others have pointed out, it's a metric that benefits larger entrenched players at the expense of smaller competitors. It's hard for me to imagine that this isn't intentional, and that makes it even harder for me to trust that this is actually the correct heuristic to use given the obvious incentives they have for picking it.
There's a weird nuance to this just because algorithmically PageRank itself was even somewhat anti-competitive.
"This page has fewer links to it than others, therefore it will be buried in search results"
I think most people appreciated Google's early search algos that prioritized "well-traffic'd" sites and sources over others. Obviously that was a long time ago before SEO (and Google themselves) destroyed everything. Back then there were actually still competitors in the search market so it didn't matter. Not the case now.
I always thought the idea there was that a website needed to grow organically before google would rank it highly, which makes sense to me. Prove yourself first by building a network, they aren't obligated to help out.
The difference here is that the play store is the one and only way to get apps for a regular user. By putting that banner up, they're discouraging anyone from trying it even if they found out about it through other channels.
The analog in 2000 or so would be if Microsoft added a warning banner to any website you visited in Internet Explorer with a low link count.
I don't really see the difference.
The entire point is that you can find the app through other channels -- articles, posts, social media.
They just link to the Play store, but that's how you find them. The banner shouldn't be discouraging if you've come from a post that explains it's brand-new!
Freshbot was a well-known effect back then (arguably still is, at least I see effects that look very similar where some new content section will rank quickly and amazingly well for a week or two and then slowly sink to the level you'd expect from such new content).
But in the end, it's network effects, only that this banner seems to enforce it manually and explicitly. The old way would've been to not show apps with few users in the top spots.
This article and the comments here are kind of scary. It feels like Google's only supporting apps that "drive engagement". That sounds like they want to force developers into producing stuff they can show ads in because they need more ads, not like they need more apps.
It also feels a bit like how software people STILL haven't figured out how to deal with a product that has a finite development cycle. Which is to say, a piece of code that is done and doesn't need any changes. You don't have Hardware stores forcing supply companies to come out with a new version of shovel every year right? A shovel is a shovel. There are probably 8 different types for various uses and within those perhaps two or three variants. So 24 or 30 variant of 'shovel' and your done. Some software can be like that too.
The subtext though that Google is actively hurting their developers for unspecified goals which look like they are desperate to make more money but it certainly could be some other thing. It reminds me of all the wailing about people whose web pages fell in the rankings because they hadn't been "updated" but when you've got the most useful description of say the scientific method on the web, why should you need to update that? It hasn't changed. And yet the 'older' your page got, the lower and lower it ranked.
> It also feels a bit like how software people STILL haven't figured out how to deal with a product that has a finite development cycle. Which is to say, a piece of code that is done and doesn't need any changes.
The problem is that platforms these days are in a constant state of slow rug pull. Even if you have absolutely no bugs to fix and no new features to add, you still need to keep things updated just to make it work on the most recent version of the platform (which users are going to be on because that's the only one that receives security fixes). A slightly less damning case is when the app works but doesn't integrate well with the new parts of the platform, or even just its changing look and feel. E.g. old Windows apps often work fine but don't support hi-DPI properly, meaning that they look very ugly on that 4K display.
I don't think it's a problem that can be fully solved, but the impact would be much less severe if platforms stopped churn for the sake of churn. For example, we don't need a "fresh new" UI redesign every 3 years. And when it comes to API stability, Win32 should be considered the exemplary model of that - yes, it is a lot of effort to keep things working 30 years after they first shipped, but that's the only way if we don't want to be an industry that's constantly building castles on sand.
Why does it seem like Google is trying to kill Android, or at least their app ecosystem.
- 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.
My leading theory is they're preparing for a increasing onslaught of spam "vibe-coded" shovelware
"I love sowing but I hate reaping"
Indeed, and on the other end they are locking down the OS more and more. Pretty soon I suspect all my reasons for going Android over the years will no longer be valid and we'll just have a choice between overlords rather than have one closed and one open platform.
That boat sailed for me years ago. iOS respects my preferences regarding data sharing, app selection, etc, much more than Android.
I had a PWA turned app on the android App Store and I just gave up jumping through google’s hoops to keep it up. I feel like Google is killing Google, like some bad actors have gotten control of the reins and is slowly steering it off a cliff.
My problem with Google Play is the obvious fake reviews, there is no way Microsoft has 4+ ratings for most of their apps. It's too easy to buy a wave of 5-star reviews.
I'd be highly surprised if Microsoft was buying reviews.
>They now require a DUNS number to submit an app
Even for non-us residents?
Its an EU DSA requirement for app stores to display information about developers publicly available. Apple is also doing it. And I guess these companies are applying the requirement worldwide unless some countries are opposed to it.
DUNS is used globally.
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what do you think the solution is? should we just all use fdroid?
When something is off, way off, or you can't find a plausible explanation, that means it is a long term thing not in the general populace's sight, yet. It comes later, might be a move in order to pave way for something or moving something out of the way for something.
The big corps are NOT autonomous, they are moved around like chess pieces. They are tentacles of a bigger entity, whatever that is.
the Apple App Store has always required a DUNS number.
No, it hasn't, and doesn't.
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.
Yes, for businesses. That's true for Play Store also https://support.google.com/googleplay/android-developer/answ...
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> They now require a DUNS number to submit an app
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.
> 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.
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.)
The main goal of SP, DKIM and DMARC wasn't to slow down spammers by setting up "bureaucratic hurdles", it was to prevent domain spoofing, though, and arguably it's succeeded at that.
> 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.
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.
It would be great if they added something like a “frequently uninstalled app” label. That’s much more helpful for users. But I get why Google prefers this kind of warning — it supports their ad business.
(I really want “frequently uninstalled” label for games: because games are very often 100% different than what they show or describe)
Would hurt some utility apps though - sometimes I download an app to use for one thing, it works perfectly, and I uninstall it.
(You get an automatic refund if you pay for an app and then uninstall again quickly. I've repurchased apps that I've been refunded for in this way - I don't want to punish developers who make apps that accomplish their function quickly.)
Are you sure the refund is automatic if you just uninstall? That seems strange.
It may have changed in the past few years, but it definitely worked like that in the past. (You can search and find various accounts of it.)
In what way does it support their ads business?
Because if a developer spends heavily on ads — especially misleading ones for games — they’ll get a lot of installs, and the warning disappears.
Very sad state of affairs on Play Store. Independent app developers are clearly not welcome there. I already pulled all my hobby apps from Play Store, just to sleep soundly at night without thinking how to pass yet another app review after update, when policies keep getting more ridiculous each time. To the point where one update finally was pushed to the store, and another got the same issue again. The biggest question is, how does one closes their Google Play Developer Account? There is no button in admin for that.
This sucks for developers, but it's also really bad for open source. The only way to get notifications working without arbitrary limits for several open source messaging apps is to run your own notifications server and then you'll need to build your own copy of the Android app for whatever service you're running.
Examples:
1. Rocketchat, which uses this as a sales funnel (I strongly recommend against using it for this reason)
2. Mattermost allows you to use their free notifications server but without any uptime guarantees unless you pay. I haven't used it enough to know if this is a problem in practice.
3. Nextcloud is pretty great, no limitations on using their notification server, but it would be problematic if you require a high degree of privacy and need a fully private setup
4. Dishonorable mention: Odoo who don't even provide source code or a license to build their mobile app yourself
Setting up a notifications server takes some technical work, but nothing too crazy.
But then, you need to get your private app published in the Play Store. Impossible. Brick wall for most people.
Based on another comment on this thread, it sounds like maybe the easiest way would have been to leave all those apps up without updating them, and then hopefully get a 60-day warning that you can ignore.
I did ignore it and I got my developer account banned. They didn't even refund my 15 $.
That's incredibly frustrating, and I wish I were more surprised that it's somehow easier for someone to get banned when they don't want to than it is for someone else to intentionally close their own account
> It feels like Google is unfairly punishing smaller, specialized developers in favor of mass-market apps.
This seems like a problem across Google generally. Search seems like it has been tuned toward the mass market in almost every query, which buries high-quality content, which is by its nature rare, specialized, and less well-known.
They have also tuned the features of Search in this direction, for example replacing queries with similar but more common text strings, and applying “did you mean” redirection more often, instead of just executing the search as typed. They now do this even if you quote the search string!
Google tests and tunes its algorithm updates. If an algorithm update results in lower prominence for sites they consider popular, they tune the algorithm to “fix” it. As a friend said, the modern Google would never release an algorithm update if it doesn’t put Home Depot on the first page for “buy power saw.” Result: a generous in-kind marketing subsidy for whoever is already popular. I’m convinced this is why Fandom and Quora still hang around polluting SERPs. They’re well-known because they’re well-known, like the Kardashians.
How does something like this ever get into production, especially at a place like Google, unless being hostile to new apps and developers is the plan? Or do they want to push potential developers into Google's double-dipping: pay them money to get on to the Play Store + pay a lot more money to get eyeballs on your app and thus more users.
This almost smells like a google throwing their hands up and saying "Well maybe it's a harmful app and they should use something else ... I dunno, put a warning on it."
I see similar-ish warnings on Amazon about "frequently returned item", but I've no idea if it is true or why. Maybe an underlying vendor for the same item is bad? Amazon (who doesn't care about bad vendors as far as I can tell) just slaps a label on it and throws up their hands.
I find that "frequently returned item" warning really useful. It's a reminder to look at the 2 star and 3 star reviews. Sometimes it's just a sizing issue. At other times some subset of people have a specific issue. The issue may or may not be something that affects me (e.g. some people can't operate something that doesn't have really clear instructions).
I do too, but I think it's important to consider that these are actually pretty different. In the Google example, the banner is being displayed because of something that isn't necessarily the fault of the dev and isn't itself an indicator of problematic behavior (and indeed is the starting position for all developers of a new app), whereas at least Amazon (presumably) is basing it off of actual performance data that indicate poor performance/behavior.
It's not even clear if frequently returned item is a fault of a given seller. May sellers are involved in the "same" item on Amazon.
Yes 100% agree
I find the “frequently returned item” warning totally confusing. It usually isn’t reflected in their reviews that I can tell….
I have to wonder if there’s some sort of strange meta where people search for one thing buy something and not realize that they’re actually looking for something else that’s difficult to search.
Or buy something and the warehouse ships them another. I bought something from amazon where reviews said about half the people got the wrong product, and I got the wrong product, returned it and got the wrong one again, and then they wouldn't let me try again.
In a twist, I had previously attempted to order the right product from a different vendor, but I put the wrong one in the cart, and had to pay a restocking fee to return it. They sent me the right one when I ordered it properly.
"frequently returned item" = "frequently uninstalled app"
Fewer installed is not it.
Amazon does something similiar so google copied. Before you get a buy now button you need 25 reviews which you get by sending free products to volunteers.
Apples/Oranges. The equivalent of "frequently returned item" is "frequently reported app"
Typical Big-tech approach: the solution is a non-solution without giving much thought to it but looks good for the board of investors and/or stock owners and they can say "we are stopping scam apps on our marketplace" on the next slides created by marketing. They just don't give a shit. (Just read the book "Careless People" - read it if you are not convinced. Engagement over everything)
Off-topic to the comments here, I am impressed by how the poster has described their issue so eloquently!
They mentioned 6 reasons for why they have an issue with the banner : each of the 6 is a valid concern and put very eloquently and clearly.
I suppose I only noticed this because I am used to speaking/writing/reading/listening mid-quality English in day-to-day life as a programmer.
It’s tempting to anthropomorphize a company like Google, and assume that every behavior is part of some evil master plan. Just as often, it’s some small group of people within the company making a dumb mistake. I’d guess there is some team tasked with reducing the “app spam” problem, where there the store and (app review process) is crammed with thousands of near-identical apps, torturing the naive user with ads as they attempt to perform basic functions.
This targeting of this warning is over-broad, preventing honest new app developers from getting traction. That’s bad for the long-term health of Android’s app ecosystem, and a competitive disadvantage against iOS. There’s probably some other team at Google who is responsible for improving the development experience for Android, who hates this new warning.
Talking about the harmful outcomes of this warning, it’s good to get the news far and wide and try to get it fixed.
Analyzing why the thing got pushed in the first place, it seems to me a symptom of the challenge of coherently managing a hundred thousand employees.
I was involved in mobile game development for several years, but I’m no longer active in that field. In my opinion, one of the reasons they do this is to maximize Ad revenue. In this case, it’s obvious that if you see this warning on your product page, the quick fix would be to spend money on Ads to gain a few more users as soon as possible. This also creates a competitive bidding situation across the market, as more developers buy ads, forcing others to do the same to keep up.
This was discussed a couple of weeks ago on reddit: https://old.reddit.com/r/androiddev/comments/1jddo84/the_new...
Alternative app distribution systems are the future. I love you f-Droid.
It's almost as if monopolies are bad, actually
All this just confirms for me the fact that how important the web is, thankfully it is still open / neutral and a good mobile web app is important for smaller devs.
Thankfully the web has always been neutral, which has allowed all these monopolies to thrive and exploit it, otherwise who knows which proprietary app hell we would be in.
Nothing stopping Google or Apple from adding warnings to websites. They do control chrome / safari.
They already do if you dare to try to host a web page without TLS. Hit http://httpforever.com/ for example and it will say “Not Secure” next to the URL bar.
This and the recent Apple App Store fees have justified my decision to only distribute via the web. Thank Tim Berners-Lee for this open ecosystem, and for everyone contributing.
Thanks Tim Sweeney for fighting to open these closed feudal systems.
Thanks to all the Tims!
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Yeah, google isn't a harmful monopoly at all, as this article clearly shows.
Comment was deleted :(
> Many users download our app to solve a specific problem (car issues), use it once successfully, then naturally don't open it again until needed months later. Low daily engagement doesn't mean low quality - it means the app successfully solved the user's problem!
What level of Enshittification is it if you actively penalize other apps for not enshittifying enough?
both app stores are not friendly to developers.
How do they measure users? If I install the app, but never use it, do I count?
If I uninstall it, do I still count or not?
This is the same thinking by Google that has ruined the web as everyone chases the perfect SEO optimised page.
A page that presents and answer to your problem in the first sentence as soon as you open the page? Low engagement time, high bounce rate down rank. A page that buries the not actually an answer under 1500 words and 4 images? Perfect page, up rank.
Lack of transparency adds to the kafkaesque nature of it
... These sorts of patterns do not help at all, and will hurt those who have critical need for apps without a lot of users.
Speaking as somebody, who owns some mid-grade thermal cameras that stopped production in the past few years after a decade run, that depended on and are solely controlled and run on apps that were removed from the app store or no longer can run on modern phones because they are in 32-bit format ; this sort of thing would further punish that type of software and only speed up its demise.
When you spend thousands and thousands and thousands and of dollars and resources into getting unique capabilities like that, that can only be controlled through Android apps often, and is the only way to get that capability for some (this will apply to multiple and I imagine with niche capabilities that only have one or two methods of Access)
- this hurts a lot of opportunity, and this type of dark anti-pattern is far too blunt
All the manufacturer has to do is publish an APK on their website. If all apps did this, Google would have no power. It's very easy for a volunteer to host the APK somewhere in an archiving effort. Much easier that it ever has been on iOS.
Yeah, but if you're a new app, Google doesn't let you have your APK signing keys, so you either have to go through Google to get an APK you can publish (with all the resources), or users can't cross-upgrade because on phone storage is tied to the signing key.
They don't give a fuck. Just like Microsoft doesn't give a fuck about casual users running older software, or Apple doesn't give a fuck about power users who don't need their hands held through everything on their goddamn computers.
All these gigafuck companies have a minimum viable user in mind: someone who has disposable income, free time, and wants to use their phone to shop for shit or endlessy scroll on whichever social they happen to like most, and that's what their products are designed to do. Everything else is ancillary.
Spoken as someone who works on a niche app for both platforms that works with hardware we make: we get NO support. Arbitrary system changes fuck up our app constantly, without notice, and we have no recourse but to fix it ASAP and tell people to not update.
These are the kinds of policy/feature decisions around a product that infuriates me:
1. Because it’s fucking stupid if you think about this for more than 5 seconds. You can think of edge cases where this will be problematic immediately.
2. Some PM at Google is making mid 6 figures to come up with this simp brain decision that has devastating rippling effects to the developer community and trust while also fucking over the cash cow market, that is a mobile App Store, by stifling dev incentives to develop on your platform.
Amazing. I wish I could have been a fly on the wall for that meeting
Is Google Play like the Apple app store where Apple takes a smaller cut for apps with fewer users?
If so, there's obvious financial incentive for Google to push more people to a smaller number of apps.
In a way yes, though it's revenue based (if you make less than $1M/year) rather user based. I don't think it has much of a financial impact though as, from what I remember, the long tail of apps doesn't make them very much money in comparison to the whales.
It's insane to me the hoops people will jump through and the abuse they will endure to publish apps on these platforms. You have a choice. Stop it.
It'd be great if Android devs could organize and push our reps (I know it's likely futile) or something to get Google to stop bullying us. It's exhausting dealing with the non-stop struggle they force onto us, especially as someone who's trying to make a living by starting (in my case) a one person business building Android apps.
Play Store/Dev Console:
- the pettiness of and delays by their production reviewers
- won't take action on obviously spammed negative (or positive) app reviews
- allowing expired/fraudulent payment options to take advantage of trials
- not showing all possible search results for search terms which cuts off a ton of other apps from having any visibility
- among many other issues with the Play Store/Dev Console
It's beyond exhausting.
Add to it the fact that Admob:
- won't serve 98% of requests with impressions, having any way to contact them for support or get meaningful support (also have left their contact options unfixed for years which feels like it's being done on purpose)
- will put serving limits on the smallest friggin things, serving limits when they allowed a single user from a country that gets flagged for serving limits all the time was manually blocked months ago from my account after my first encounter of serving limits for the reason of ads being served to users from that country
- will put serving limits even after adding your device's ID/Add ID as a testing device
- etc etc etc
Nevermind that we don't even know if they're actually serving ads or not in our apps and just pocketing what they don't report to us.
Google Ads:
- Block ads all the time for any reason. In my case, my app is purely a crypto market charting and analytics application (yeah I know crypto markets/charts are looked down upon here, but whatever I and others use it. It's not a gambling or trading app, just analytics. please save your hate for NFTs) and it doesn't allow transactions, trading or anything of the sort. Just data. But because "crypto" is in the name of my app, I can't use my app's name in ad copy, nor the word "crypto", etc. And the support team refuses to understand this or make an exception. Because of this policy I can't even show ads in certain countries or languages unless I find some convoluted workaround.
Everything with them has just been a non-stop uphill battle. It's soul crushing and makes you feel helpless and hopeless. They don't care about us even when we've been/are the substrate for the Play Store.
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The actual article uses fewer. Some monster chose to change it.
My understanding is the rules on less vs fewer are not strict and in this case it's fine, just like 20 items or less is actually fine. Regardless, it's just made up BS, like the rule that sentences cannot end in a proposition.
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Crafted by Rajat
Source Code