I'm the developer of a relatively popular app (50M+ on the Play Store) and have had very disappointing experiences with the Play Store, but in a rather opposite way from the OP:
Once an app reaches a certain level of popularity, you begin to see "knock-off" apps, which are apps with a curiously similar name and icon (and screenshots and description), but which in fact don't do anything except blast the user with full-screen ads at every turn. It's literally just ads; they don't perform any actual function; they just exploit the SEO boost to serve ads to unsuspecting users.
I have tried "reporting" these apps numerous times (there are dozens of them), but Google has done nothing at all to remove these apps or suspend the accounts of these bottom-feeding "developers". The only conclusion is that the ad revenue benefits Google as well as the bottom-feeders, so Google drags its feet in taking any action. I would bet that if these apps were doing something malicious without a financial incentive for Google, then Google would take them down in a heartbeat.
I actually had the reverse experience to this. My app was 1.5 years old and had 4mil+ downloads with ~200k monthly active.
After updating my app, they banned my app instead of the other clones and crapware. Citing "Repetitive and Duplicative Content". The clones were so bad to the point that they literally decompiled my app, loaded in their own assets and published it.
Appealing did nothing and I got the exact same response as the article. That was 2 years ago.
Going by this, I would assume that my app had better Ad revenue to Google, but comparing in relative-ness, they dont care about the 4-5 figure you make. Another person will take your place in no time.
I couldn't quite remember the reason as it was quite a long time ago and there was a lot of pain, disappointment, unfairness, despair, helplessness which I'd like to move on from. But I remember it was along the lines of:
- Difficult to prove (How do you prove stolen code?)
- I am not supposed to be decompiling another app to find evidence
- What channel do I use when Google makes it so difficult to make a case/complain for anything? (There are channels, but there is no trust in those, they behave like black holes where you put in effort and just maybe, just maybe if they feel like it, they will respond.)
- With the image they portray, I felt that to Google, they would see my case as similar to a single piece of candy going missing in a Walmart store.
I found out when I saw that competitors were copying my Store Listing Text word for word (ASO), and when I downloaded them, I noticed a peculiar bug their app had which was identical to mine. It was a programatic bug due to the way the function was implemented, seeing an identical bug that only fails on the same edge case is a big red flag, so I decompiled their app and saw that my work was copied.
I did send email to the developer at fault but did not get a reply or action.
Given how amazingly good Google is at filtering or identifying content when it benefits them to do so (e.g. Content ID, and I have never seen anything pornographic break through YouTube's filters), I must believe that it would be extremely easy for them to implement the fix you desire.
Edit: Hmmm, assuming the app that you are talking about is freakin' Wikipedia, I'm assuming that if the Wikimedia can't get anyone from Google to pay attention that there is no hope for the rest of us.
Nope, it's not the Wikipedia app, but a different side project. Although there's also no shortage of sketchy third-party "wiki reader" apps that are basically ad delivery systems.
If they were actually good at removing crapware from the store, then a bit of collateral damage would be understandable. Instead, it is still filled with crapware and even when reported they do nothing. And instead, they go for honest developers.
At this point Google is practically almost hostile to honest developers.
Also, it is strange that they value the revenue from these crapware apps more than their platform's reputation compared to ios App Store.
> If they were actually good at removing crapware from the store, then a bit of collateral damage would be understandable
I don't agree. Honest developers should never be suspended such arbitrarily, not even as "collateral damage". Please remember that for an Android studio, being suspended from the Play Store means not only the end of the business, but also the end of the developer's career as an Android dev.
Why would getting suspended from Play Store mean the end of a developer's career ? Could you elaborate? Isn't it possible to continue with a new gmail account? Am I missing something here?
I read multiple stories like that online (I didn't save them but some were published here on HN). As far as the stories go, it looks like Google associates new accounts with the suspended one and suspend them as well. They do this using verification mails, phone numbers and credit card numbers. Google also tells you not to open a new account, and that it will not help you. The OP got such a warning as well, as described in the main article.
+1 to this. I also have several apps in the Google Play Store. Unfortunately, the knock-off apps are all around our apps, sometimes ranking higher in popular keywords. Some even post a screenshot of our apps!
Heck, some apps are so bad that they ruin the reputation of the entire niche (for example, a document scanner app). If the first few apps that a user downloads does not scan documents, he's naturally assuming that no apps can do it.
Reporting those apps never worked, so I stopped reporting them. Instead, we now focus on improving our apps and hoping for the best.
Google wins when users see ads, that's their whole reason to exist. They're not on your side in this battle as those ad impressions are cash in the bank.
Considering the proportion of Apple’s profit in the mobile phone and App Store market versus Google’s profit, I would say there is no golden goose period for Google.
Or, the golden goose is shoveling ads and obtaining data from all their users, but I’m not bullish on the value of that long term, especially if your users trend on the lower side of disposable income.
Globally, iOS is in decline, and Android is on the rise, and there's nothing that could change the tendency. The main driver for mobile growth is 3rd world, where Android is a king.
> Apple continues to face challenges in terms of unit shipments—a trend that is unlikely to be fixed soon. Apple shipped 35.3 million iPhones in the second quarter, down 14.6 percent from 41.3 million units one year ago.
I don’t know what you mean by “decline” and “rise”, but for discussions regarding future business viability, I look at net income instead of units sold.
One company is in the business of selling devices and services, the other is in the business I’d giving them away to siphon data to support their ad business. Margins on advertisements are going down, and if people with disposable income aren’t on your platform, then the ads aren’t worth much either.
It has become almost impossible to find apps in the Play store. I tried for 15 minutes to install a game on a tablet that my other tablet had. It had the exact same title. Turns out it was a completely different (and much harder) game. Making my daughter angry when later on travelling by car when she couldn't read many many English popups.
But I guess this is "just" the way it is when a namespace becomes too popular.
Just recently there was news about Google removing 85 apps like this from the Play Store. I have no idea why that was news, that should be just another day, because 85 adware/malware apps is basically nothing compared to the size of the Play Store and the sheer amount of actual junk you can find on there.
Is your App also available on iOS? if so: how would you compare your experiences?
Stories like these are driving me away from Android and I'm considering a switch, but it would be pointless to switch to another ecosystem when it's plagued by the same issues.
if you have good SEO you do not have to pay google. Ironically.
so by allowing the copy cats, they kill the value of your good SEO and force your hand to pay for premium placement, generating revenue that wouldn't exist to them without the malicious clones.
Who is talking about "SaS" (sic) and how is that in any way relevant? Apps are local... to your phone. Your opinion seems to be that all phone apps are a "scam"?
I can't even begin to understand what you're talking about.
I keep hearing stories like this and I remain utterly bemused that the median narrative about Android vs iOS has barely changed in response. There's a lot to love about Android, but I think more people in the tech sector need to realise that their mental model of the phone marketplace has more to do with historical perception of Android being "hacker friendly" than the current realities.
Android is open source! Oh wait— it's becoming more closed every release cycle, to the point that a pure AOSP experience is something only a determined geek would ever love. iOS and Android are now both blends of open and closed source, albeit in different ratios.
Google's app store is developer friendly! Oh wait— approvals are now slower than Apple, they're banning developers with no explanation, yet the store is still full of crapware and scams. At least Apple's policies seem to have a tangible trade-off.
Android gives customers hardware choices! Oh wait— the choice is between a cheap device that got its final software update five days after it shipped, a mid-tier device that might get updated next year, or a flagship which will probably get next year's major update and only security fixes thereafter.
Android gives customers software choices! Oh wait— what's the current messaging platform that Google is pushing this month? Do you, the human reading this paragraph, really care if there are eight hundred or eight thousand camera apps in your phone's app store?
All those things don't really matter, the only thing that matters is that you cannot sideload apps in iOS. As long as you can sideload apps in android, it will always have a better reputation than somewhere you cannot.
But even those things you mention, they are all part of a scale, even if android becomes more closed-source it's still miles more open-source than iOS, even if it delays new app submissions it's still doesn't require a mac to develop for, has a choice of IDEs and a dozen other development friendly features that we often take for granted outside iOS development.
And it is ludicrous to suggest that android has the same hardware choice as iPhones just because apple now has mid-range level priced phones. Hardware choice means that some models have replaceable battery, physical keyboard, bendable screens, childproof, waterproof and many more options.
Just resign the app IPA file and you can literally drag and drop it through Xcode onto your iOS devices. Unless you mean pirating apps with sideloading...
When the number of devices number in the billions then of course sideloading could be considered a niche interest.
But for people involved in software development it's extremely useful being able to sideload the latest build of an app to show to stakeholders.
Until it isn't. The moment a popular enough app gets banned by google play store, the use of sideloading will skyrocket. If apple decides to ban Telegram, there's nothing you can do (which it did btw at some point).
The ability to sideload is more important than it's usage, both for your personal freedom and for keeping large companies in check.
Until you discover that for example Android Auto is banned in your whole country, while being completely functional after sideloading the apk. And the only reason why there aren't hundreds of millions people sideloading apps (yet) is relatively slow rate of car upgrades. This is only one example.
I'm an iPhone user currently, have been for some time.
However all of the points you mentioned are still true.
There is no open source in iOS and the entire platform has an anti open source culture. Android has a lot of open source apps available, including an app store meant just for open source (https://www.f-droid.org/).
If you don't like Google Play, at the very least you can distribute your app independently without jailbreaking the phone. It might take the users fiddling with their settings, but at least the option is legit.
Also on Android you can have actual Firefox (not allowed on iOS), with ads-blocking extensions and everything, as the default browser. And apps don't necessarily insist on opening up their own freaking web view, or if they do, most of the time there's an option for opting out.
And yes, you can find really good Android phones for cheap. Like the ones from Huawei. Which I stay away from, but for other reasons.
Apple's phones age well and I like to be environmental friendly, so I'll keep this iPhone 8+ I have until it breaks.
But my next phone is not going to be an iPhone, sorry.
> There is no open source in iOS and the entire platform has an anti open source culture.
People really have short memory and unfortunately have too much biais to even make a simple Google Search to get some informations. Trying to define this as "one is better than the others related to X" is childish at best.
WebKit, you mean the source code that was forked from KHTML and because it was GPL, Apple would then do incomprehensible code dumps to comply with the law? WebKit that was forked by Google because they couldn't collaborate with Apple?
I'm glad that they ended up releasing it, but to show that as an example of open source from Apple ... indeed shows that people have short memories ;-)
> WebKit that was forked by Google because they couldn't collaborate with Apple?
You say "they couldn't collaborate" I say "Google really wanted to compete".
Remember that it was Google who decided to perform a fork because they had a different approach than Apple for how "multi-process" should be implemented. Google had an implementation that they didn't want to integrate into the Webkit branch - hence the Blink fork.[1]
Also Apple would have been happy if they could use the Google's implementation instead of using their own - they said that repeatedly [2]
You can also find more details of the story here. It looks more and more obvious that the decision to create a WebKit fork was more political than technical : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5490242
I am not defending Google. Google is really shitty in terms of open source collaboration. Many of Google's OSS efforts are OSS just in license, but not in spirit.
All I'm saying is that Apple's WebKit is not a good example of OSS and if that's what you have to show for iOS, then it's a really sad state of affairs.
The discussion is indeed relevant to developers and developers can distribute apps outside of Play. How is that not relevant?
Also, having worked on an actual anti-ad-blocking platform I can tell you that Safari's content blockers are shit. They are the easiest to detect and circumvent and the reason for why many publishers still don't is because (1) they don't know it's possible, or (2) they are afraid of pissing visitors off, especially given growing GDPR concerns.
The most potent ad-blocker on the market is uBlock Origin. And Firefox on Android supports it, the only mobile browser that does. Soon to be the only desktop browser too, but that's another discussion.
>Ad-blocking is easy and well-supported in Safari. Safari’s tracking prevention extends far beyond anything Firefox has even with the best extensions.
Do you have any links so I can read further on this? I'd like to compare it to both Firefox's built-in tracking protection (and fingerprinting resistance) and the functionality provided by e.g. uBlock Origin.
Not any links on hand, but try it yourself. Load up Firefox with the best tracking prevention tools you can find. Go to https://panopticlick.eff.org/. See how many bits of entropy you have.
Blocking JavaScript is the most potent form of fingerprinting resistance.
It's not comfortable to whitelist websites or pieces of functionality from websites, but at least you have the option. If on desktop Chrome, enjoy it while you still can, because Google just deprecated the underlying APIs ;-)
So my Firefox has less bits of entropy than my Safari, although I do admit that my Firefox has a custom configuration (it isn't out of the box), but so does my Safari.
Also Firefox might have plenty to work on in regards to resisting fingerprinting techniques, however there are ongoing projects for that, for importing techniques already used in the Tor Browser:
> a cheap device that got its final software update five days after it shipped
Xiaomi Redmi Note 4, released 2016, MTK-based cheap smartphone, current official stable ROM is V10.2.2.0.MBFCNXM released May 2019.
> Apple shipped 33.8 million new iPhones during 2Q19, which was down significantly from the same quarter one year ago. Regardless of the slightly lower market share and device selling prices, the iPhone installed base continued to grow. The numbers show that now 3rd placed Apple may soon drop into 4th, with Xiaomi only 1.5 million handsets behind Apple.
You dilute your argument by mentioning this point.
Google does give better hardware choices. I am using a $150 android-one phone (Xiaomi A3) which has a high end comparable back and front camera. And comes with 2 years guaranteed OS updates.
Compare with the cheapest latest iPhone (iPhone XR) which is 5 times more expensive at $750.
Yes everyone should be rich enough to buy a 1000 dollar Apple phone. Also, you get to decide if I want more than one camera app or not ?
Stop imposing your world view on others. Android made smartphones accessible to many people across the globe. You won't mention that would you ? Won't fit your narrative.
> Yes everyone should be rich enough to buy a 1000 dollar Apple phone.
I bought an iPhone 7 from Net10 about 5 months ago for $220 shipped. It requires a minimum $20 a month plan for 12 months before I can unlock it. About 2 years ago I got my mom an iPhone SE for $140 with similar plan/unlock. Both brand new.
They’re not everyday prices and not the newest model but it is possible to go iOS without breaking the bank.
The "1000 dollar apple phone" thing is such a weird myth.
My wife has been using the iphone 5s for years now, because the later models are too big for her to hold comfortably. It originally came out in 2013. It is still supported by Apple, and hers currently runs iOS 12.4, which came out last month. She is on her second 5s, because she dropped her first one in the lake trying to take a picture of our dog. I use it from time to time to help pull up music or navigation in the car and it runs just fine, it's a perfectly usable phone.
These days, you can get a "renewed" one for less than a hundred dollars, unlocked, straight from Amazon.
Android is the phone ecosystem where you actually need to spend a thousand dollars* on phone hardware, because all of the inexpensive android devices are cheaply made garbage that feel like they should come filled with candy. They are stuffed with manufacturer bloatware (if you're lucky, or malware if you're not), and are obsolete right out of the box. If you spend a hundred dollars on an android phone, I absolutely guarantee you that you will regret it.
I'm not exactly an apple partisan here, I work on android apps for a living, I've used android phones for years, I actually like the Android OS and I want it to thrive, but the current state of the overall android hardware and software ecosystem, outside of the very high end devices that most people frankly can't afford, is just dire.
*- I have a pixel 3 XL, I know a thing or two about spending a thousand dollars to get a usable android device.
There are enough cheap to mid range devices that do the job in Android. I dont think you understand the value of even 100$ in a developing country. Most people don't care about updates in this scenario. They want a phone that works. And far more people in the lower strata have access to cheaper Android phones than Apple.
If you are looking for a brand-new phone in the solidly mid-range for around $250, you can look at pocophone or OnePlus for smaller but still well-known companies making excellent phones. These phones compete in pretty much every way with the more expensive offerings by google or samsung, and have no vendor bloatware.
OnePlus's latest models have become a bit pricier, going on $450, but you can still buy the oneplus 6 straight from them for a good price.
So your iPhone 7 actually costs $220 + $20 * 12 = $460
Is that correct?
Not sure what the situation is over there, but in my country I've got a $5 prepaid plan with unlimited minutes, 10 GB monthly bandwidth and I can stop paying at any time.
So I hope you don't go around pretending that the $20 you're paying per month isn't for that phone ;-)
Again why should consumers not buy a newer phone for cheaper. Who are you to tell them what's right for them ? In India $220 dollars is a luxury many people can't afford.
An iPhone SE is $238 in India, $299-449 in the US. Similar pricing exists for the iPhone 6 & 6s, and the iPhone 7 is quite good while still well under $1000 most places.
The average wage in India is a little above 5 dollars a day. That's about 160 dollars a month. Translated to American wage standards, the $238 dollar iPhone would cost about $6000 (1.5 the average monthly wage).
A $238 dollar smartphone is inaccessible to most people in India. A "well under $1000 dollar" iPhone much less so.
Dollar values don't really translate as well to other countries as much as we'd like. Translating the price to a month's wage can bring a lot of perspective.
You'd probably want to use median rather than average for such comparisons - I don't have those on hand right now, but it'd be interesting to compare/contrast.
> Xiaomi has now been India’s top smartphone seller for eight straight quarters. The Chinese electronics giant shipped 10.4 million handsets in the quarter that ended in June, commanding 28.3% of the market, research firm IDC reported Tuesday. Its closest rival, Samsung — which once held the top spot in India — shipped 9.3 million handsets in the nation during the same period, settling for a 25.3% market share.
I'm not sure why you've been downvoted. The current trends are quite interesting: Huawei & co. are bending over backwards to introduce innovative solutions into their phones, whereas Apple seems quite conservative and seems satisfied with putting in more powerful chips mostly. I'm amazed what you can do with some Chinese phones, and I wonder why Apple is less aggressive about new features than they used to be.
Guidebook, a 70+ person company, also appears to have just had their account banned as of yesterday morning.
It's an app that tells you what's happening at conventions. Hard to see the bad faith there, but I bet the conventions they've signed contracts with this week will be very unhappy.
The co-founder has taken to tweeting at his network to try to find a contact. Crazy to think a rogue algorithm might put 70 people out of work if he can't find someone quickly enough.
It's the danger of building your entire business on someone else's platform.
Now Android is a bit more open than Apple's App store since on can install third party apps outside Google Play, but I personally always got an answer from Apple, even if it took 3/4 weeks, every-time there was an issue with a deployed application.
Google? Unless you know somebody there or you are a big shot it's impossible to contact them, and they don't want to talk to you anyway. And one can only go so far with Twitter shaming...
Good luck to the OP, because he's going to wait a long time for an answer...
It's pretty ludicrous that this is an accepted notion. App stores are anticompetitve practices at their finest. (Especially Apple's situation, where they're competing with offerings from companies like Amazon, and slapping them with 30% cuts that price them out.)
We have two smartphone platforms that have basically full control over third party software. A company or individual that produces application layer software can hardly just come out with their own OS (and expect any amount of mass adoption). It's preposterous.
This goes even deeper than the issues with the Microsoft investigations of the 90s, but the only difference is a lack of monopoly-level marketshare. Which is hardly a sufficient excuse to permit this kind of behavior.
The technology is largely irrelevant here. If you wrote your app as PWA and then got banned from the Google App store you'd still be losing access to that market and ecosystem, and the mechanism for delivering an app to users. That's the real problem here.
PWAs offer something similar but not really the same, especially if you're charging for the app itself or doing IAPs.
Been arguing this forever. Jobs was actually correct. He just pivoted because he figured out that an App Store could make him billions and control end-to-end the economy and the device, which is always what he's wanted.
Web apps are the way to go. Not mobile apps in a store.
I'm not entirely sure why anyone thinks downvoting observations from reality will change their outcomes but hey… this is slashdot^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H HN I guess.
Yep, but it's also the danger of building a business on algorithms. If developers start not to trust Google anymore then Google is going to lose quite a bit of its edge. Algorithms shouldn't have the last word about people. They can advise but not judge and people accepting wrong advices from algorithms should not get their bonuses.
You are right, unfortunately in the current case, their algorithms have determined many developer's careers and will continue to do so.
As long as they have the monopoly, "developers start not to trust Google" will never be a problem as there is no other choice and Google sees no reason to change.
Yeah, it's about control. I tend to prefer approaches where I control the underlying platform. Unfortunately that's not always practical. Certainly not if you're marketing mobile apps to a large audience.
Jesus, what the hell, why would google take them down? I've used the app a few times, it's a great idea and works fairly well. Definitely better than 99% of apps on the play store.
Google is equally horrible about adwords (and probably most other customer service related issues).
They terminated our adwords account saying that there was something wrong with the site it was advertising and giving a list of 12 extremely general things which might be the problem, none of which seemed to apply.
They also provided no way to respond or get in touch with anyone at all. Their advice was "fix whatever you think may have been the problem and try again".
This wasted a huge amount of time as we tried everything possible to fix the issue to no avail: they never said anything had been fixed and never sent more information.
Finally I got a contact at Google. They looked at our account, said it seemed to be a glitch, and reenabled it.
That's no way to do customer service and is one reason why I think Google should be broken up, if only so that each part is smaller and feels the need to be more accountable.
Google’s dominant position in the market is enabling it to abuse its position by treating customers unfairly and not as one might be treated if there was more competition.
I don’t think it’s spiteful or childish to suggest breaking up a monopoly in these circumstances although I would say less drastic options should be tried first.
>I don’t think it’s spiteful or childish to suggest breaking up a monopoly in these circumstances although I would say less drastic options should be tried first.
You've shown your hand here, in a way, by suggesting that Google is a monopoly in this instance. Android devices can install apps via other sources, like F-Droid or Amazon, or even just by side loading. There's no denying that out of the box, most Android devices are setup to favour Google's Play Store, just as Amazon's Kindle devices are setup to favour Amazon's own store. Does this make them a monopoly? If so, what do we make of iOS?
monopoly doesn't mean that you cannot go elsewhere, it has to do with the reality that when an entity has such a dominant position in the market they are not the same as if they wouldn't have been. Often this comes with extra constraints on how they are allowed to behave, such as using their dominance in one market to buy their way into others, or how they charge for services.
As far as units sold, iOS makes up about 14% of the market, Android makes up 85% and a majority of apps sold are via Googles App Store.
The iOS app store is a monopoly. Are you arguing otherwise? There's no way to run an alternative store there.
If it's really so easy to ship an alternative store on Android and Play Store isn't an artificial monopoly why are there no successful alternative stores? Is it because Google's is really the best possible store and thus a healthy, functioning market produces no competition?
Are people really choosing to be stuck giving Google 30% of all sales and recurring revenue because Play Store is that good? They wouldn't rather use one of these other stores to save 30%?
Although it is possible to distribute Android apps through other channels, you should not forget that for some applications you are still bound to Google.
Due to the changes in Android Oreo regarding background services, you need Firebase Cloud Messaging (FCM) for a Messenger or other communication app to get the device out of Doze mode and to deliver push notifications without delay.
If Google closes your account, you can still distribute the app through other stores, but FCM won't work anymore and there's no replacement for it.
Oreo allows you to add an app to a Doze whitelist even if it is distributed outside the Play Store. In fact, it is easier that way because the Play Store review policy restricts why an app can ask for that.
Yes, this Doze whitelist has existed since Marshmallow, when Doze was introduced. However, adding your app to this list does not affect the limitations of background services implemented with Oreo.
If you want to implement your own push notifications, you need some kind of persistent connection to your server. Before Oreo, this was simply possible with a background service.
But starting from Oreo, your background services are shut down after 2 or 3 minutes, as soon as the corresponding app is no longer in the foreground.
Of course, you could try to use a foreground service (which must display a notification). But even then the user gets a constant warning displayed like "App xyz is running in the background" or "App xyz is using battery".
Many users are not developers. If they get such a warning, they think something is wrong with your app. This is just not a good user experience.
You are virtually forced to use FCM. And that doesn't work without a Google account.
Background Services have always been killed on short notice. AFAIK, the OS regularly restarts them, even if it is completely idle with zero memory pressure. It used to be that way in KitKat and prior versions too. Using a Foreground Service have always been a hard requirement for persistent network connection — unless you were ok with reestablishing the connection every hour.
"App xyz is running in the background" or "App xyz is using battery" aren't normally shown when you foreground Notification is properly constructed. If you correctly set icon, text, notification channel and other properties, the notification bar should have only your notification and nothing else. At least it have always worked that way on devices I own.
>The iOS app store is a monopoly. Are you arguing otherwise? There's no way to run an alternative store there.
I have to agree, it is a monopoly within the context of iOS devices. Apple works fairly hard to patch iOS in order to prevent the latest jailbreaks, thus removing a major avenue where a user would have the freedom to sideload the apps of their choosing.
In Google's case, while I don't think the Play Store is a monopoly, it is clearly a dominant player on many Android devices around the world.
A better way of defining (near) monopolies is through market power [1]. It gets at the heart of the matter for which 'monopoly' is just a proxy - the ability of a company to shape the market, even if it has competitors.
For example, Microsoft never once had monopoly on operating systems...
> There's no denying that out of the box, most Android devices are setup to favour Google's Play Store, just as Amazon's Kindle devices are setup to favour Amazon's own store
They don't just "flavour" Google's Play Store, they make it non-removable. Same for Google apps, services, search, accounts... At that point the so-called "openness" of Android is just marketing talk.
Google is what, a 3/4 TRILLION dollar company, based on market cap! It's absolutely unfathomable that they have such a prolific reputation of non-customer service and inability to contact them. Any other company would suffer massive consequences with customer service that poor. What will it take for them to turn this around? Maybe they believe they are too big for this to matter?
Some people wrote below but I didn't see the key words that came to my mind. You are not Google's customer. You are Google's product. The customers are the ad/tracking networks.
Unless you pay Google for some services, you are their product. Products don't complain. They sit in the super market waiting for a customer we to pick them up.
We have discussed plenty that "if _it_ is free then you are the product", I am afraid in majority of Google's end users, this is true.
This is incorrect. I have rented a movie from Google. I am their customer in every sense of the word. I cannot get customer service for my rental. Whether something is free or not has almost nothing to do with the service you get unless your account is in the tens of millions of dollars.
You are still more of a product than a customer. Renting a movie vs giving your data. Guess which is more important to google?
If Google were purely in a business of renting movies, it would have give you some customer service. But it isn't in that business, so it won't give you a damn.
Google rarely gives good customer service to any of their customers. Good customer service requires lots of humans, which, in the Google hivemind, "doesn't scale" and is therefore not worth doing.
Not to defend Google, but I have rented a movie once, saw it does only have subtitles in languages I don't understand and was able to speak to a customer support via live text chat and get the refund on the same evening.
It's frustrating as hell, though, that I can't tell what subtitle languages are included with the rental...
You may be grossly overestimating ad prices. A datum is damn near worthless, but data in the aggregate is valuable because of the scale of these companies.
User tracking seems to be far more valuable than ads. I'm currently subcontracting for a specific large media trust. Ad contracts are in total about 6 figure numbers. User tracking, sponsored content and skins (custom stylesheets with a sponsor's branding and tracking) are very substantial 7 or 8 digit contracts.
While it's true his own activity isn't worth much, it's still a piece of a very lucrative pie. There are services already oriented specifically around user tracking.
I guess they're oing by the principle of individual behavior is unpredictable, but mass behavior is.
If you're a Google Ads buyer, Google is easy to contact. If you're a mere Google products user, good luck getting help via their crowdsourced message boards...
What kind of google people are you contacting though? From what I have heard its very easy to contact someone who will help you set up your ads account to spend money but I imagine its a lot harder to find someone who can do anymore than show you how to use the product.
That's for reaching a basic customer support line that'll do little more than tell you where to put in your credit card info. If you need serious help, especially with account problems, you better know someone inside.
In theory yes, but I can't imagine what the claim would be; "They won't let me make a business out of selling apps on their platform" ?
It feels like monopoly would be easier to prove: "There is no other competitor to provide an app on these devices and people depend on them for critical tasks". In a way, this mimics the breakup of Ma Bell. AT&T controlled all the phone service, and they also created all the hardware that ran all the phone service. Rather than divest their ownership of the hardware, AT&T proposed to break itself up, so "local operating companies" would own the last mile, supposedly creating competition.
Google could do the same thing by allowing device manufacturers (or whomever) to install their own Play Store, and users of devices could choose what Play Store to use.
Get 100 developers and small companies with similar stories and it should be easy to convince a jury that Google arbitrarily, without cause or review, destroyed these people's livelihoods and should be held liable and accountable.
EULA is not some magic shield against the actual court system, either.
> In theory yes, but I can't imagine what the claim would be; "They won't let me make a business out of selling apps on their platform" ?
The narrative is that they killed the business without a fair due process. Then they wouldn't listen to the "customer"'s complaint or questions for clarification. It is bad "customer" service.
> they have such a prolific reputation of non-customer service
No, they don't, because Android developers and users are not Google's customers. Google gets no direct revenue from them so it has no incentive to provide the kind of customer service that would be expected for a paying customer. The only incentive they have is to provide whatever services will get them more revenue from their actual customers: ad purchasers.
Obviously, they get a cut of App Store revenue. Android is worth many billions of dollars to Google, and having quality apps on the store is an essential part of the ecosystem.
To be sure, this is Google failing in a way that they should care about, and likely do care about, but failing none-the-less.
The reason is because their culture will not allow them to succeed in these types of human interactions. And there is no doubt that that culture is poisonous and will ultimately bite them hard, on Android, on Search, and I think most of all on YouTube.
IMO, this will eventually cost them billions of dollars, whether it is in lost revenue due to apps that are no longer on the store, end users switching to alternative products, or hostile legislation and fines.
> this will eventually cost them billions of dollars
It does - in Google Cloud. This reputation of automated customer service played a non-trivial part in the initial lukewarm response enterprise customers gave. The Eng teams at potential customers looked at the way Google treated their marketing teams and steered clear from Google's - sometimes superior - offerings.
Yup. For whatever Amazon's other faults may be, they will do stuff like assign actual human salespeople to your account, who have the time to listen to you and the authority to do things. You can create problem tickets for their services, which go to skilled engineers somewhere that have the time and authority to run down and address any weirdness you encounter with their services. Plus they keep even their old services online for a sort-of ridiculous amount of time to keep up with slow-moving corporate update processes.
Is this not the case for GCP? I recently switched to a company running on GCP and I don't have tons of exposure to our infra, but from what I've seen, GCP reps are VERY hands-on. Even in my non-infra role, I've been exposed to several different instances of them being hands on: in setting us up, in discussing our resource needs (we're a very heavy GPU compute customer), in tracking down issues (even when the problem is likely on our end).
I don't actually know - I haven't used it myself. I've read a few comments in various places suggesting that GCP support is as nonexistent as the support for other Google services. I think somebody said they were hosting their whole company's data and services on GCP, and their entire company's account was killed because supposedly some malicious activity was detected. No details of what the activity was or why it was thought to be malicious, just poof, all of your servers and data gone, and nobody you can talk to about it.
It's possible that was misleading or they've improved since then, I don't know. Your claim that they do have quality support for corporate accounts is an interesting point on the other side though.
Yea I wouldn't take my experience as too dispositive: I gather that my relatively small company punches significantly above their weight in terms of compute needs, and I only have relatively tangential exposure to our interactions with GCP. It's just that those tangential data points have all happened to point in the direction of robust and responsive support.
I, personally, will NOT allow my team to use any Google service, API, etc. for business purposes as it can be summarily revoked. Microsoft and Amazon can do this too, but it seems like the probability is much lower.
> this will eventually cost them billions of dollars
It might, but that problem, if you think it's a problem, is not fixable by Google providing better service to developers, because better service to developers would prevent their current business model for apps from scaling, and without scaling it won't make them money.
> their culture will not allow them to succeed in these types of human interactions
Their culture might be the immediate cause, but I think the root cause is the economics of the business model they have chosen. The only way to fix that would be to choose a different business model, and the obvious alternate business model would be to sell their services like search, maps, gmail, play store, etc. directly to their users, making their users into customers. But I don't think that option is open to them at this point, and it might not be open to anyone without a huge disruption of the entire industry.
Except they get a cut of app sales and in app purchases, so this doesn't make any sense. Why would they bother running the Play Store at all if it didn't make them money?
> they get a cut of app sales and in app purchases
Yes, but that doesn't make developers their customers. It makes developers their business partners, and business partners in a hugely asymmetric relationship, since there are zillons of developers and would-be developers and only one of Google.
Basically, an individual developer is negligible to them because there are always more where that one came from. So they have no incentive to handle particular edge cases with particular developers; they just remove that developer and another one takes their place. Most developers don't throw edge cases at them, so this strategy works fine for them.
They know that whatever algorithm is used here will fire off some false positives. They also believe that paying people to review in order to correct the false positives is not worth it.
If you pay for an app, you are a Google Play customer. They are acting as a retailer, purchasing software from a vendor and distributing it to you as a markup. The developer of the software is the "third party" in the transaction.
I'm not sure why there are downvotes on this comment. It's pretty clear this is the case - what Google Products have dedicated account executives that give you their phone number? Ads and Cloud. The two direct-buy relationships you can have with Google. Even G Suite doesn't merit dedicated CSMs until you're fortune 100...
I once made the mistake of renting a movie from Google Play Movies. I am a customer. The "my purchases" page just shows an error, so I can't find the titles I own or have rented. There is no place to report this except in a user to user forum.
Without knowing more about the "sophisticated anti-piracy system" employed by the app author, it's hard to determine if Google's claim of malicious behaviour is valid.
This could be something as simple as bytecode obfuscation, or something as complex as scraping every bit of personal information available through possibly-questionable means and sending to an insecure server. Copy protection schemes are notoriously user-hostile.
That doesn't seem to be a problem in any other field of security in the world. If you steal a shirt from a shop you'll get told whether they hace security footage of you stealing, an alarm went off or a security guard saw you.
It might be more convenient for google to not say, but it's pretty disrespectful towards clients that choose their platform to make a living and might get caught as a false positive.
"Your app has been removed because it was found to be malware. Please reply to this message if you believe this to be a mistake." Doesn't help malware authors at all.
They apparently don't offer an easy way to contact someone if there is a mistake or get a human to check the algorithm has correctly identified malware of it if has flagged a legitimate app.
There is a very simple solution. Have a competetent reviewer look at the code and decide whether the intent is malicious or not.
If the intent is clearly not malicious and no rules were broken, the reviewer should file a bug report to fix the virus scanner and reinstate the developer account. No further explanation required.
If rules were breached but it may have been done in good faith, issue a warning to the developer and explain in general terms how to fix the problem. Charge a review fee high enough to deter any abuse of the review system.
It scales just fine if they charge enough to discourage abuse. Also, the law should frankly require them to offer proper conflict resolution if they run one of two commercially viable app stores.
Apparently he had zero trouble with antivirus apps fixing his situation. But I guess Google is so special it can't accomplish what companies with a fraction of Google's budget or manpower can do.
Doesn't have to be taken away by Google either. They're extremely bad at processing DMCA notices, so a competitor or malicious teen can take you off the store for weeks. No recourse.
I guess you can say that. So ... maybe his investment of time and money in the android ecosystem has been taken away. And this should give pause to other such investors.
What if the reason is they were scraping all your private data against the Terms of Service, and hiding it in obfuscated dynamic bytecode loading... if that was the case, you think it's still bad that they can be kicked off the app store?
I mean, we only have the developer's word that they weren't shipping malware in these bytecode files, unless someone reverse engineers it (unlikely), or Google publicly explains the reason for the banning (which they never do).
> dynamic bytecode loading from a local app resource
I'll bet you 5 bucks it's this. Your "anti-piracy" is their "evading our malware analyzers".
From the Terms of Service: "The following are explicitly prohibited: Apps or SDKs that download executable code, such as dex files or native code, from a source other than Google Play."
Can't tell obviously if that's the violation, but at least it's a good bet.
My developer account has been getting mails about "apps that are not compliant with permission requirements". The problem is that these are 3 year old, UNPUBLISHED apps.
Turns out, you cannot delete old apps . You can only unpublish them. Google will still keep the app up if even one phone has the app installed.
I wrote back saying that this is a years-old app that I no longer even have the source code to. The reply was "we can't do anything. You need to figure it out. Or else".
After days of constant emailing, NOTHING HAPPENED. Finally I got a a notice my apps were deleted with a warning email.
Here's my fear. I have two more apps like this. I'm pretty sure they are going to go through the same procedure. Is my main developer account going to be banned ?
They probably lost the signing key along with the source code. Without the signing key, there's no way to update the app. Otherwise, they would simply upload an empty app with the same package name.
It seems to be that someone else does some shady activity and then some AI at Google over-generalizes and bans legitimate accounts. And the emails are the same 3 form emails that say nothing.
I wonder if you can get decent support by walking into one of the Google campuses, or if you would get in trouble with security...
Apple have also gotten rejection happy. But the good thing with Apple, is that they have a team of people, who will tell you why, and help you fix your issues. I have had those guys help me track down bugs, and suggest UI fixes.
Apple have gotten better, and it seems Google have gotten worse.
Google needs to be clear on what causes apps to be removed, and based on account history should be way more lenient on what would cause account termination...
I.e. 4 years good standing 3 strikes, 5 years good standing 4 strikes, etc
Google doesn't need to do anything. There will always be more new developers entering than people kicked out, as there are only two practical places to sell phone apps, Google and Apple.
I think part of their reasoning is that if they publish the rulebook, then people will find ways to misuse the services in a roundabout way. It’s easier to find bugs in source material you can see, than that you cannot.
I don’t agree with this, but I think it’s most likely the reasoning.
Because it sounds right and seems like common-sense. I did put "I think" and "likely" in there so I would have thought it was obvious I was speculating.
Do we need to ask everyone whether they have "particularized" knowledge for every comment they make?
Google simply doesn't have any interest in customer service. It's just not part of the culture. When new services launch, it appears as if Googlers are running some of the interactions to give a good first impression, but soon after the buzz dies down, there's no longer any incentive to continue doing so. They automate as much as possible, and outsource the rest to farms abroad. This pattern repeats across all Google products and services.
It still amazes me the extent of BS that developers will put up with to get their apps into users hands. The level of profit-driven gatekeeping exhibited by both Apple and Google is fundamentally unacceptable to me, and one of the many reasons I will likely never release an app for mobile. The web is still the last bastion of developer freedom, albeit not the platform users have been trained to use these days.
Although I'm generally not a big fan of regulation, this is one area where regulation might be appropriate. The two marketplaces run by Google and Apple are so large and substantial in their size and outsize economic influence that there should (ideally) be laws granting developers of apps on these platforms some set of rights, and some form of fair due process if they're accused of ToS violations.
We'd have to either have Congress enact something (a long shot), or have individual states grant such protections to developers or companies based in the state. The most crucial state in this matter is likely Delaware, since many companies are incorporated there.
This feels like an awfully familiar story. I do wonder if there aren't enough resources allocated at google to handle these types of cases. Instead we have them ending up on HN to reach some type of fix/closure from the google team.
I had an issue with some google phones at work where no one knew the password to them or whos phones at the company they belonged to so I performed a factory reset on them which I then discovered had caused them to go in to a theft protection mode which essentially bricks the device until the original users password is entered. I attempted to contact google but found that there is no way to do that unless the device was purchased within one year even though I had the original boxes and proof of purchase to show the devices are not stolen.
The whole reset protection thing is a horrible system as well, I understand trying to stop theft but why didn't they make it so that when you reset it the device locks for a few days and keeps pinging back to the servers and if the original owner hasn't marked the device as lost/stolen within that time then it just unlocks.
Since this event I had a family member call me up asking how to get their phone out of reset protection mode because they forgot their account password. I had to tell them their device is essentially a useless brick now.
Reminds me of the issue an HN poster had several months ago trying to cancel his Google Fi subscription. Google just does not have the company culture to handle things out of the norm or the interest in developing one. They and their customers live and die on the word of software, which for me is unacceptable. My mission-critical providers all have a person in the loop somewhere, a human being to whom I can give our name and support account password, who can just reach right in and fix an issue no matter what the algorithm or the database says. Computers are just too goddamn stupid sometimes.
Google doesn't do that. If they can't automate it they won't do it. That works fine for being a search engine. It doesn't work at all for being, for instance, a telephone service provider or an ISP.
Like many said, at some point it's your livelihood that is one the line, and Google taking actions without providing any details is downright malicious, and I expect someone to get their financial life ruined.
Sometimes, a deep-rooted issue is unfixable through technological or verbal mean, and litigation would be the only way to get your life back and I sure hope that Google will get hit at some point.
I think it´s funny with that much comments, none of them are really on the core issue here.
Just imagine if Tim Berners-Lee banded together with Mark Andreessen to create a closed and centralized platform, were they could centrally control everything.
Thats why i think the mobile phone plataforms are a real danger to a world were the information flows freely and were no government or company can control.
People are giving to much power to those companies, and when they do what a lot of people know they would do, they just wip, and try to contact his digital lord to just have mercy.
Dont neal, dont help them kill the spirit behind a world were people can access the things they want without any sort of centralized control.
Its beyond me how many people are so worried about government controlling their freedom, but are ok with companies doing it.
We do not need to accept this. The problem is in the app store model.. (they could create it, as long other could compete, but they could NEVER choose what you can access) and guess what, now our governments are too are weak to regulate them.
They can spy on us, know what we are doing, help shady government agencies, control what you see, listen, access and in the end shape what you think (Remember all the mess the simple 'like' Facebook algorithm did to the world.. its too dumb. It reminds me "Donnie Darko" with that shady coaching of "everything should be on the hate-or-love axis").
The despotic government of the future for me is a bunch of big tech companies who control information, and the lives of all of us united to have a world were they will be all powerful and always relevant.
People dont seem to know the dangers we are facing. This is very serious, and its a glimpse of the future. Think how much of what you understand as your right will be suddenly terminated by despotic tech companies who are too powerful to be controled or regulated.
It´s even worse, if you think we are in the dawn of the AI and what a very powerful player can do to keep the control.
You can think im exagerating, and i really hope im wrong, but its a real possibility, and we should not let this awful future be materialized because we did not see how this could be possible.
And to help you figure it out, if you travelled back in time to tell your 2010 self how the world would be in 2019, do you think he would believe it? We are living in idiocracy all over the world, and we use to laugh to those sort of movies. (Dr. Strangelove will soon look a lot like a documentary of the modern days)
Monopolies and walled gardens are wonderful, not. Anti consumer and anti competitive at every level. Google is like a black hole, there’s no escaping it.
Can we just get a proper Linux phone already? I could whip up a (rough) GUI for a WiFi phone in no time and all the software I want to use is already there - or could be developed relatively easily. Hell, Ubuntu's Gnome is almost a tablet OS anyway at this point, has relatively good drivers, stability, etc.
The WiPhone is so unbelievably close to what I want [1] (+). I really wish it had a web browser though (which would likely require a beefier processor). I think the Pi compute module is asking to become a mobile device with the possibility of a good upgrade path too [2] (++).
(+) Still waiting to ship it seems although I think they are acting in good faith.
(++) The idea of using the DDR2 laptop RAM connector is genius IMO. They can also borrow the DDR3 and DDR4 connectors when the time comes for more pins.
Thanks for the links! The Purism phone is a lot more than I would want to pay, but I imagine the trade-off there is for the polished experience. Part of the fun for me would be the hack-ability.
The Pine phone on the other hand looks great (at ~$150), hopefully they do a better job than what they did with their netbooks (I believe they had issues with the keyboards and the displays had dead pixels). There's even talk about porting Ubuntu phone, which is awesome! My guess is that it's still a long way off though, if the project doesn't die in the meantime (as a lot of these open source projects do).
Just checked that out, seems like they have sold out at the moment though. I guess they do a smaller production run so that they can guarantee their stock sells out.
Whilst good for developers and probably bad for Microsoft (reduces app numbers), I haven't seen any automated, recompiled clones on the Windows App Store, likely due to the native compilation. Despite being .NET apps it's not just a case of running ILSpy or something to get the source.
Google seems to have missed the fact that they, unlike Apple, are not a monopoly. All it will take is for a few major players to start doing APK downloads OR someone to start an alternative, developer-friendly store with lower IAP margins, and they will quickly lose business.
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(You've asked an extraordinarily odd question. There's a context in which such a question might imply that the OP should look to God and religious texts for guidance rather than rely on their own reason, but I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that you're not suggesting that the bible/Koran/Baghavad Gita/whatever offers words on the matter of Google employees and their relationship with their employer that supersede human judgement.)
I'm more uncomfortable with the implication that Google employees need to apologise on behalf of their company and they're somehow complicit if they don't. Many people just want to do their 9-5 and leave.
i've noticed over the last several years that thousands of Google employees at least seem to feel complicit for the corporation's choices (e.g. giving a big cash payout to someone who was suspected of sexual harassment, trying to start project dragonfly, working with the US DOD, etc). these employees protest, walk out, demand change.
IMHO, these employees should also be critical of the poor customer service the OP documents. this sort of behavior hurts the public too. and Google seems committed to continuing it.
Once an app reaches a certain level of popularity, you begin to see "knock-off" apps, which are apps with a curiously similar name and icon (and screenshots and description), but which in fact don't do anything except blast the user with full-screen ads at every turn. It's literally just ads; they don't perform any actual function; they just exploit the SEO boost to serve ads to unsuspecting users.
I have tried "reporting" these apps numerous times (there are dozens of them), but Google has done nothing at all to remove these apps or suspend the accounts of these bottom-feeding "developers". The only conclusion is that the ad revenue benefits Google as well as the bottom-feeders, so Google drags its feet in taking any action. I would bet that if these apps were doing something malicious without a financial incentive for Google, then Google would take them down in a heartbeat.
After updating my app, they banned my app instead of the other clones and crapware. Citing "Repetitive and Duplicative Content". The clones were so bad to the point that they literally decompiled my app, loaded in their own assets and published it.
Appealing did nothing and I got the exact same response as the article. That was 2 years ago.
Going by this, I would assume that my app had better Ad revenue to Google, but comparing in relative-ness, they dont care about the 4-5 figure you make. Another person will take your place in no time.
Why not send a DMCA to Google?
I found out when I saw that competitors were copying my Store Listing Text word for word (ASO), and when I downloaded them, I noticed a peculiar bug their app had which was identical to mine. It was a programatic bug due to the way the function was implemented, seeing an identical bug that only fails on the same edge case is a big red flag, so I decompiled their app and saw that my work was copied.
I did send email to the developer at fault but did not get a reply or action.
Edit: Hmmm, assuming the app that you are talking about is freakin' Wikipedia, I'm assuming that if the Wikimedia can't get anyone from Google to pay attention that there is no hope for the rest of us.
Content ID? The one where regularly stories break of it misidentifying things?
> and I have never seen anything pornographic break through YouTube's filters)
I have. But to be fair, that was 2 or 3 years ago.
I usually read that a few seconds were claimed here or there. ContentID probably identified the part correctly, but people want to argue fair use.
And then there are the stories where it turns out the sample used was not cleared, etc.
You mean unintentionally, right? Because you only have to search for "full adult movie" to find a bunch.
If they were actually good at removing crapware from the store, then a bit of collateral damage would be understandable. Instead, it is still filled with crapware and even when reported they do nothing. And instead, they go for honest developers.
At this point Google is practically almost hostile to honest developers.
Also, it is strange that they value the revenue from these crapware apps more than their platform's reputation compared to ios App Store.
I don't agree. Honest developers should never be suspended such arbitrarily, not even as "collateral damage". Please remember that for an Android studio, being suspended from the Play Store means not only the end of the business, but also the end of the developer's career as an Android dev.
edit: spelling
Heck, some apps are so bad that they ruin the reputation of the entire niche (for example, a document scanner app). If the first few apps that a user downloads does not scan documents, he's naturally assuming that no apps can do it.
Reporting those apps never worked, so I stopped reporting them. Instead, we now focus on improving our apps and hoping for the best.
It seems like it might work.
Or, the golden goose is shoveling ads and obtaining data from all their users, but I’m not bullish on the value of that long term, especially if your users trend on the lower side of disposable income.
Globally, iOS is in decline, and Android is on the rise, and there's nothing that could change the tendency. The main driver for mobile growth is 3rd world, where Android is a king.
> Apple continues to face challenges in terms of unit shipments—a trend that is unlikely to be fixed soon. Apple shipped 35.3 million iPhones in the second quarter, down 14.6 percent from 41.3 million units one year ago.
One company is in the business of selling devices and services, the other is in the business I’d giving them away to siphon data to support their ad business. Margins on advertisements are going down, and if people with disposable income aren’t on your platform, then the ads aren’t worth much either.
But I guess this is "just" the way it is when a namespace becomes too popular.
Stories like these are driving me away from Android and I'm considering a switch, but it would be pointless to switch to another ecosystem when it's plagued by the same issues.
if you have good SEO you do not have to pay google. Ironically.
so by allowing the copy cats, they kill the value of your good SEO and force your hand to pay for premium placement, generating revenue that wouldn't exist to them without the malicious clones.
The modern SaS enviroment is scam central taking advantage of the publics computer illiteracy. So color me skeptical.
I can't even begin to understand what you're talking about.
Android is open source! Oh wait— it's becoming more closed every release cycle, to the point that a pure AOSP experience is something only a determined geek would ever love. iOS and Android are now both blends of open and closed source, albeit in different ratios.
Google's app store is developer friendly! Oh wait— approvals are now slower than Apple, they're banning developers with no explanation, yet the store is still full of crapware and scams. At least Apple's policies seem to have a tangible trade-off.
Android gives customers hardware choices! Oh wait— the choice is between a cheap device that got its final software update five days after it shipped, a mid-tier device that might get updated next year, or a flagship which will probably get next year's major update and only security fixes thereafter.
Android gives customers software choices! Oh wait— what's the current messaging platform that Google is pushing this month? Do you, the human reading this paragraph, really care if there are eight hundred or eight thousand camera apps in your phone's app store?
But even those things you mention, they are all part of a scale, even if android becomes more closed-source it's still miles more open-source than iOS, even if it delays new app submissions it's still doesn't require a mac to develop for, has a choice of IDEs and a dozen other development friendly features that we often take for granted outside iOS development.
And it is ludicrous to suggest that android has the same hardware choice as iPhones just because apple now has mid-range level priced phones. Hardware choice means that some models have replaceable battery, physical keyboard, bendable screens, childproof, waterproof and many more options.
https://www.pcworld.com/article/2933052/apple-frees-casual-i...
Do you still have to re-sign the .ipa every 7 days to have it run on the device?
- Sign up for a free developer account, and
- Are willing to re-install the app every week
For development life cycles, sideloading is an unnecessary kludge.
The ability to sideload is more important than it's usage, both for your personal freedom and for keeping large companies in check.
However all of the points you mentioned are still true.
There is no open source in iOS and the entire platform has an anti open source culture. Android has a lot of open source apps available, including an app store meant just for open source (https://www.f-droid.org/).
If you don't like Google Play, at the very least you can distribute your app independently without jailbreaking the phone. It might take the users fiddling with their settings, but at least the option is legit.
Also on Android you can have actual Firefox (not allowed on iOS), with ads-blocking extensions and everything, as the default browser. And apps don't necessarily insist on opening up their own freaking web view, or if they do, most of the time there's an option for opting out.
And yes, you can find really good Android phones for cheap. Like the ones from Huawei. Which I stay away from, but for other reasons.
Apple's phones age well and I like to be environmental friendly, so I'll keep this iPhone 8+ I have until it breaks.
But my next phone is not going to be an iPhone, sorry.
People really have short memory and unfortunately have too much biais to even make a simple Google Search to get some informations. Trying to define this as "one is better than the others related to X" is childish at best.
https://developer.apple.com/opensource/
Warm vibes,
I'm glad that they ended up releasing it, but to show that as an example of open source from Apple ... indeed shows that people have short memories ;-)
You say "they couldn't collaborate" I say "Google really wanted to compete".
Remember that it was Google who decided to perform a fork because they had a different approach than Apple for how "multi-process" should be implemented. Google had an implementation that they didn't want to integrate into the Webkit branch - hence the Blink fork.[1]
Also Apple would have been happy if they could use the Google's implementation instead of using their own - they said that repeatedly [2]
You can also find more details of the story here. It looks more and more obvious that the decision to create a WebKit fork was more political than technical : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5490242
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/apr/05/blink-goo...
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5490661
All I'm saying is that Apple's WebKit is not a good example of OSS and if that's what you have to show for iOS, then it's a really sad state of affairs.
I feel like it's more like anti-GPL (because of some specific licensing terms conflicts), and there's nothing intrinsically anti-FOSS in there.
The discussion in the article is about developers. If you’re kicked off of Play by a robot, there’s nothing you can do.
> with ads-blocking extensions and everything, as the default browser.
Ad-blocking is easy and well-supported in Safari. Safari’s tracking prevention extends far beyond anything Firefox has even with the best extensions.
Also, having worked on an actual anti-ad-blocking platform I can tell you that Safari's content blockers are shit. They are the easiest to detect and circumvent and the reason for why many publishers still don't is because (1) they don't know it's possible, or (2) they are afraid of pissing visitors off, especially given growing GDPR concerns.
The most potent ad-blocker on the market is uBlock Origin. And Firefox on Android supports it, the only mobile browser that does. Soon to be the only desktop browser too, but that's another discussion.
Do you have any links so I can read further on this? I'd like to compare it to both Firefox's built-in tracking protection (and fingerprinting resistance) and the functionality provided by e.g. uBlock Origin.
Do the same in Safari.
Android - Firefox - Ghostery + uBlock: "Strong protection against Web tracking" 17.59 bits of identifying information
iOS - Safari - Stock: "Some protection against Web tracking" 17.59 bits of identifying information
iOS - Safari - AdBlockPlus: "Some protection against Web tracking" 17.59 bits of identifying information (Exact same as Stock? Blocks ads though)
Mac - Safari - Stock: "Some protection against Web tracking" 16.59 bits of identifying information.
Mac - Chrome - Ghostery + uBlock: "Strong protection against Web tracking" Doesn't seem to finish the fingerprinting stage.
Mac - Chrome - Stock: "No. You are not protected against tracking on the Web" 16.01 bits of identifying information.
Blocking JavaScript is the most potent form of fingerprinting resistance.
It's not comfortable to whitelist websites or pieces of functionality from websites, but at least you have the option. If on desktop Chrome, enjoy it while you still can, because Google just deprecated the underlying APIs ;-)
And this is my Safari (with the most popular content blocker active): https://www.dropbox.com/s/4n4hxbnumcyqegu/Screenshot%202019-...
So my Firefox has less bits of entropy than my Safari, although I do admit that my Firefox has a custom configuration (it isn't out of the box), but so does my Safari.
Also Firefox might have plenty to work on in regards to resisting fingerprinting techniques, however there are ongoing projects for that, for importing techniques already used in the Tor Browser:
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Security/Fingerprinting
And Firefox does protect against entities known to practice fingerprinting, which you can't say about Safari:
https://blog.mozilla.org/futurereleases/2019/04/09/protectio...
Xiaomi Redmi Note 4, released 2016, MTK-based cheap smartphone, current official stable ROM is V10.2.2.0.MBFCNXM released May 2019.
> Apple shipped 33.8 million new iPhones during 2Q19, which was down significantly from the same quarter one year ago. Regardless of the slightly lower market share and device selling prices, the iPhone installed base continued to grow. The numbers show that now 3rd placed Apple may soon drop into 4th, with Xiaomi only 1.5 million handsets behind Apple.
You dilute your argument by mentioning this point.
Google does give better hardware choices. I am using a $150 android-one phone (Xiaomi A3) which has a high end comparable back and front camera. And comes with 2 years guaranteed OS updates.
Compare with the cheapest latest iPhone (iPhone XR) which is 5 times more expensive at $750.
Stop imposing your world view on others. Android made smartphones accessible to many people across the globe. You won't mention that would you ? Won't fit your narrative.
I bought an iPhone 7 from Net10 about 5 months ago for $220 shipped. It requires a minimum $20 a month plan for 12 months before I can unlock it. About 2 years ago I got my mom an iPhone SE for $140 with similar plan/unlock. Both brand new.
They’re not everyday prices and not the newest model but it is possible to go iOS without breaking the bank.
My wife has been using the iphone 5s for years now, because the later models are too big for her to hold comfortably. It originally came out in 2013. It is still supported by Apple, and hers currently runs iOS 12.4, which came out last month. She is on her second 5s, because she dropped her first one in the lake trying to take a picture of our dog. I use it from time to time to help pull up music or navigation in the car and it runs just fine, it's a perfectly usable phone.
These days, you can get a "renewed" one for less than a hundred dollars, unlocked, straight from Amazon.
Android is the phone ecosystem where you actually need to spend a thousand dollars* on phone hardware, because all of the inexpensive android devices are cheaply made garbage that feel like they should come filled with candy. They are stuffed with manufacturer bloatware (if you're lucky, or malware if you're not), and are obsolete right out of the box. If you spend a hundred dollars on an android phone, I absolutely guarantee you that you will regret it.
I'm not exactly an apple partisan here, I work on android apps for a living, I've used android phones for years, I actually like the Android OS and I want it to thrive, but the current state of the overall android hardware and software ecosystem, outside of the very high end devices that most people frankly can't afford, is just dire.
*- I have a pixel 3 XL, I know a thing or two about spending a thousand dollars to get a usable android device.
Honest question, not trying to be a jerk, I genuinely want to know.
Keep in mind 5000 Rs is equivalent to around 80 USD.
OnePlus's latest models have become a bit pricier, going on $450, but you can still buy the oneplus 6 straight from them for a good price.
Is that correct?
Not sure what the situation is over there, but in my country I've got a $5 prepaid plan with unlimited minutes, 10 GB monthly bandwidth and I can stop paying at any time.
So I hope you don't go around pretending that the $20 you're paying per month isn't for that phone ;-)
Chances are the OP doesn't have the option of a 5$ plan with 10GB data - I certainly don't (that's closer to $20 here).
How is the 16gb storage holding up for her?
A $238 dollar smartphone is inaccessible to most people in India. A "well under $1000 dollar" iPhone much less so.
Dollar values don't really translate as well to other countries as much as we'd like. Translating the price to a month's wage can bring a lot of perspective.
> Xiaomi has now been India’s top smartphone seller for eight straight quarters. The Chinese electronics giant shipped 10.4 million handsets in the quarter that ended in June, commanding 28.3% of the market, research firm IDC reported Tuesday. Its closest rival, Samsung — which once held the top spot in India — shipped 9.3 million handsets in the nation during the same period, settling for a 25.3% market share.
It's an app that tells you what's happening at conventions. Hard to see the bad faith there, but I bet the conventions they've signed contracts with this week will be very unhappy.
The co-founder has taken to tweeting at his network to try to find a contact. Crazy to think a rogue algorithm might put 70 people out of work if he can't find someone quickly enough.
Now Android is a bit more open than Apple's App store since on can install third party apps outside Google Play, but I personally always got an answer from Apple, even if it took 3/4 weeks, every-time there was an issue with a deployed application.
Google? Unless you know somebody there or you are a big shot it's impossible to contact them, and they don't want to talk to you anyway. And one can only go so far with Twitter shaming...
Good luck to the OP, because he's going to wait a long time for an answer...
This is so often repeated but by this logic noone should write mobile apps.
We have two smartphone platforms that have basically full control over third party software. A company or individual that produces application layer software can hardly just come out with their own OS (and expect any amount of mass adoption). It's preposterous.
This goes even deeper than the issues with the Microsoft investigations of the 90s, but the only difference is a lack of monopoly-level marketshare. Which is hardly a sufficient excuse to permit this kind of behavior.
With mandated dispute resolution.
But they shouldn't. 99% of apps out there could just be a PWA, specially in the Android ecosystem that favours them.
PWAs offer something similar but not really the same, especially if you're charging for the app itself or doing IAPs.
Web apps are the way to go. Not mobile apps in a store.
Write your service as a web site, and have native apps for a better and more integrated user experience.
I see this as an extension of the way the web is supposed to degrade gracefully.
Unless you are a unicorn or a huckster writing mobile apps is no longer an attractive business.
We provide a hybrid app development platform for mobile and over the last nine years we've watched a steady exodus of developers from the app space.
The only folk who are still relatively unaffected are the business developers.
Exceptions apply (like having investors with enough clout to get Google's attention), but yes, that's exactly what a lot of us are saying.
Don't build apps (or at least don't make them central to your strategy).
As long as they have the monopoly, "developers start not to trust Google" will never be a problem as there is no other choice and Google sees no reason to change.
Tweet from Guidebook (they removed the official statement): https://twitter.com/guidebook/status/1162764546487939072
Tweet from co-founder: https://twitter.com/pklada/status/1162815530874445824
They terminated our adwords account saying that there was something wrong with the site it was advertising and giving a list of 12 extremely general things which might be the problem, none of which seemed to apply.
They also provided no way to respond or get in touch with anyone at all. Their advice was "fix whatever you think may have been the problem and try again".
This wasted a huge amount of time as we tried everything possible to fix the issue to no avail: they never said anything had been fixed and never sent more information.
Finally I got a contact at Google. They looked at our account, said it seemed to be a glitch, and reenabled it.
That's no way to do customer service and is one reason why I think Google should be broken up, if only so that each part is smaller and feels the need to be more accountable.
I don’t think it’s spiteful or childish to suggest breaking up a monopoly in these circumstances although I would say less drastic options should be tried first.
You've shown your hand here, in a way, by suggesting that Google is a monopoly in this instance. Android devices can install apps via other sources, like F-Droid or Amazon, or even just by side loading. There's no denying that out of the box, most Android devices are setup to favour Google's Play Store, just as Amazon's Kindle devices are setup to favour Amazon's own store. Does this make them a monopoly? If so, what do we make of iOS?
As far as units sold, iOS makes up about 14% of the market, Android makes up 85% and a majority of apps sold are via Googles App Store.
If it's really so easy to ship an alternative store on Android and Play Store isn't an artificial monopoly why are there no successful alternative stores? Is it because Google's is really the best possible store and thus a healthy, functioning market produces no competition?
Are people really choosing to be stuck giving Google 30% of all sales and recurring revenue because Play Store is that good? They wouldn't rather use one of these other stores to save 30%?
If you want to implement your own push notifications, you need some kind of persistent connection to your server. Before Oreo, this was simply possible with a background service.
But starting from Oreo, your background services are shut down after 2 or 3 minutes, as soon as the corresponding app is no longer in the foreground. Of course, you could try to use a foreground service (which must display a notification). But even then the user gets a constant warning displayed like "App xyz is running in the background" or "App xyz is using battery".
Many users are not developers. If they get such a warning, they think something is wrong with your app. This is just not a good user experience. You are virtually forced to use FCM. And that doesn't work without a Google account.
"App xyz is running in the background" or "App xyz is using battery" aren't normally shown when you foreground Notification is properly constructed. If you correctly set icon, text, notification channel and other properties, the notification bar should have only your notification and nothing else. At least it have always worked that way on devices I own.
I have to agree, it is a monopoly within the context of iOS devices. Apple works fairly hard to patch iOS in order to prevent the latest jailbreaks, thus removing a major avenue where a user would have the freedom to sideload the apps of their choosing.
In Google's case, while I don't think the Play Store is a monopoly, it is clearly a dominant player on many Android devices around the world.
For example, Microsoft never once had monopoly on operating systems...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_power
They don't just "flavour" Google's Play Store, they make it non-removable. Same for Google apps, services, search, accounts... At that point the so-called "openness" of Android is just marketing talk.
Build an iPhone app if you're so upset.
Unless you pay Google for some services, you are their product. Products don't complain. They sit in the super market waiting for a customer we to pick them up. We have discussed plenty that "if _it_ is free then you are the product", I am afraid in majority of Google's end users, this is true.
If Google were purely in a business of renting movies, it would have give you some customer service. But it isn't in that business, so it won't give you a damn.
While it's true his own activity isn't worth much, it's still a piece of a very lucrative pie. There are services already oriented specifically around user tracking.
I guess they're oing by the principle of individual behavior is unpredictable, but mass behavior is.
It feels like monopoly would be easier to prove: "There is no other competitor to provide an app on these devices and people depend on them for critical tasks". In a way, this mimics the breakup of Ma Bell. AT&T controlled all the phone service, and they also created all the hardware that ran all the phone service. Rather than divest their ownership of the hardware, AT&T proposed to break itself up, so "local operating companies" would own the last mile, supposedly creating competition.
Google could do the same thing by allowing device manufacturers (or whomever) to install their own Play Store, and users of devices could choose what Play Store to use.
EULA is not some magic shield against the actual court system, either.
The narrative is that they killed the business without a fair due process. Then they wouldn't listen to the "customer"'s complaint or questions for clarification. It is bad "customer" service.
Their market cap is about 800 billion...I don't think 3 trillion dollar companies exist yet
No, they don't, because Android developers and users are not Google's customers. Google gets no direct revenue from them so it has no incentive to provide the kind of customer service that would be expected for a paying customer. The only incentive they have is to provide whatever services will get them more revenue from their actual customers: ad purchasers.
To be sure, this is Google failing in a way that they should care about, and likely do care about, but failing none-the-less.
The reason is because their culture will not allow them to succeed in these types of human interactions. And there is no doubt that that culture is poisonous and will ultimately bite them hard, on Android, on Search, and I think most of all on YouTube.
IMO, this will eventually cost them billions of dollars, whether it is in lost revenue due to apps that are no longer on the store, end users switching to alternative products, or hostile legislation and fines.
It does - in Google Cloud. This reputation of automated customer service played a non-trivial part in the initial lukewarm response enterprise customers gave. The Eng teams at potential customers looked at the way Google treated their marketing teams and steered clear from Google's - sometimes superior - offerings.
It's possible that was misleading or they've improved since then, I don't know. Your claim that they do have quality support for corporate accounts is an interesting point on the other side though.
More than that, I suspect.
I, personally, will NOT allow my team to use any Google service, API, etc. for business purposes as it can be summarily revoked. Microsoft and Amazon can do this too, but it seems like the probability is much lower.
I imagine I am not alone.
It might, but that problem, if you think it's a problem, is not fixable by Google providing better service to developers, because better service to developers would prevent their current business model for apps from scaling, and without scaling it won't make them money.
> their culture will not allow them to succeed in these types of human interactions
Their culture might be the immediate cause, but I think the root cause is the economics of the business model they have chosen. The only way to fix that would be to choose a different business model, and the obvious alternate business model would be to sell their services like search, maps, gmail, play store, etc. directly to their users, making their users into customers. But I don't think that option is open to them at this point, and it might not be open to anyone without a huge disruption of the entire industry.
Yes, but that doesn't make developers their customers. It makes developers their business partners, and business partners in a hugely asymmetric relationship, since there are zillons of developers and would-be developers and only one of Google.
Basically, an individual developer is negligible to them because there are always more where that one came from. So they have no incentive to handle particular edge cases with particular developers; they just remove that developer and another one takes their place. Most developers don't throw edge cases at them, so this strategy works fine for them.
This could be something as simple as bytecode obfuscation, or something as complex as scraping every bit of personal information available through possibly-questionable means and sending to an insecure server. Copy protection schemes are notoriously user-hostile.
It might be more convenient for google to not say, but it's pretty disrespectful towards clients that choose their platform to make a living and might get caught as a false positive.
If the intent is clearly not malicious and no rules were broken, the reviewer should file a bug report to fix the virus scanner and reinstate the developer account. No further explanation required.
If rules were breached but it may have been done in good faith, issue a warning to the developer and explain in general terms how to fix the problem. Charge a review fee high enough to deter any abuse of the review system.
(this is sarcasm, but from talking to Googler friends over the years, I doubt it's far from the truth)
I mean, we only have the developer's word that they weren't shipping malware in these bytecode files, unless someone reverse engineers it (unlikely), or Google publicly explains the reason for the banning (which they never do).
I'll bet you 5 bucks it's this. Your "anti-piracy" is their "evading our malware analyzers".
From the Terms of Service: "The following are explicitly prohibited: Apps or SDKs that download executable code, such as dex files or native code, from a source other than Google Play."
Can't tell obviously if that's the violation, but at least it's a good bet.
Remember, two sides to every story.
I wrote back saying that this is a years-old app that I no longer even have the source code to. The reply was "we can't do anything. You need to figure it out. Or else".
After days of constant emailing, NOTHING HAPPENED. Finally I got a a notice my apps were deleted with a warning email.
Here's my fear. I have two more apps like this. I'm pretty sure they are going to go through the same procedure. Is my main developer account going to be banned ?
Suspended or removed?
It seems to be that someone else does some shady activity and then some AI at Google over-generalizes and bans legitimate accounts. And the emails are the same 3 form emails that say nothing.
I wonder if you can get decent support by walking into one of the Google campuses, or if you would get in trouble with security...
Apple have gotten better, and it seems Google have gotten worse.
I.e. 4 years good standing 3 strikes, 5 years good standing 4 strikes, etc
Disposition: "Will not fix."
I don’t agree with this, but I think it’s most likely the reasoning.
Do we need to ask everyone whether they have "particularized" knowledge for every comment they make?
I would bet a week's salary that google play is the same.
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/apple-ceo-tim-cook-threatene...
They make the rules, so the rules can include, "you can be removed at the discretion of google" at the end.
I'm really glad I don't depend on business with Google.
We'd have to either have Congress enact something (a long shot), or have individual states grant such protections to developers or companies based in the state. The most crucial state in this matter is likely Delaware, since many companies are incorporated there.
The whole reset protection thing is a horrible system as well, I understand trying to stop theft but why didn't they make it so that when you reset it the device locks for a few days and keeps pinging back to the servers and if the original owner hasn't marked the device as lost/stolen within that time then it just unlocks.
Since this event I had a family member call me up asking how to get their phone out of reset protection mode because they forgot their account password. I had to tell them their device is essentially a useless brick now.
You must be new here...
Google doesn't do that. If they can't automate it they won't do it. That works fine for being a search engine. It doesn't work at all for being, for instance, a telephone service provider or an ISP.
Sometimes, a deep-rooted issue is unfixable through technological or verbal mean, and litigation would be the only way to get your life back and I sure hope that Google will get hit at some point.
Just imagine if Tim Berners-Lee banded together with Mark Andreessen to create a closed and centralized platform, were they could centrally control everything.
Thats why i think the mobile phone plataforms are a real danger to a world were the information flows freely and were no government or company can control.
People are giving to much power to those companies, and when they do what a lot of people know they would do, they just wip, and try to contact his digital lord to just have mercy.
Dont neal, dont help them kill the spirit behind a world were people can access the things they want without any sort of centralized control.
Its beyond me how many people are so worried about government controlling their freedom, but are ok with companies doing it.
We do not need to accept this. The problem is in the app store model.. (they could create it, as long other could compete, but they could NEVER choose what you can access) and guess what, now our governments are too are weak to regulate them.
They can spy on us, know what we are doing, help shady government agencies, control what you see, listen, access and in the end shape what you think (Remember all the mess the simple 'like' Facebook algorithm did to the world.. its too dumb. It reminds me "Donnie Darko" with that shady coaching of "everything should be on the hate-or-love axis").
The despotic government of the future for me is a bunch of big tech companies who control information, and the lives of all of us united to have a world were they will be all powerful and always relevant.
People dont seem to know the dangers we are facing. This is very serious, and its a glimpse of the future. Think how much of what you understand as your right will be suddenly terminated by despotic tech companies who are too powerful to be controled or regulated.
It´s even worse, if you think we are in the dawn of the AI and what a very powerful player can do to keep the control.
You can think im exagerating, and i really hope im wrong, but its a real possibility, and we should not let this awful future be materialized because we did not see how this could be possible.
And to help you figure it out, if you travelled back in time to tell your 2010 self how the world would be in 2019, do you think he would believe it? We are living in idiocracy all over the world, and we use to laugh to those sort of movies. (Dr. Strangelove will soon look a lot like a documentary of the modern days)
It's fun being on the Play Store while it works for you, but ultimately your access to it is conditional, and somewhat arbitrary.
At least you have the option though. Apple's platform is not like that.
The WiPhone is so unbelievably close to what I want [1] (+). I really wish it had a web browser though (which would likely require a beefier processor). I think the Pi compute module is asking to become a mobile device with the possibility of a good upgrade path too [2] (++).
(+) Still waiting to ship it seems although I think they are acting in good faith.
(++) The idea of using the DDR2 laptop RAM connector is genius IMO. They can also borrow the DDR3 and DDR4 connectors when the time comes for more pins.
[1] https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2103809433/wiphone-a-ph...
[2] https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/raspberry-pi-compute-module...
You may have to wait for it to come down in price
Pine Phone https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19592588
The Pine phone on the other hand looks great (at ~$150), hopefully they do a better job than what they did with their netbooks (I believe they had issues with the keyboards and the displays had dead pixels). There's even talk about porting Ubuntu phone, which is awesome! My guess is that it's still a long way off though, if the project doesn't die in the meantime (as a lot of these open source projects do).
1. quit your job
2. apologize to the global community of users and developers
3. give half your money to a charity
(You've asked an extraordinarily odd question. There's a context in which such a question might imply that the OP should look to God and religious texts for guidance rather than rely on their own reason, but I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that you're not suggesting that the bible/Koran/Baghavad Gita/whatever offers words on the matter of Google employees and their relationship with their employer that supersede human judgement.)
i've noticed over the last several years that thousands of Google employees at least seem to feel complicit for the corporation's choices (e.g. giving a big cash payout to someone who was suspected of sexual harassment, trying to start project dragonfly, working with the US DOD, etc). these employees protest, walk out, demand change.
IMHO, these employees should also be critical of the poor customer service the OP documents. this sort of behavior hurts the public too. and Google seems committed to continuing it.