To avoid this, I tried to close my Google Play Developer account. A decade ago I published a free app on it, which was online for half a year.

It was to no avail. They will not close the account.

I received only automated responses about bringing my old app into compliance with current policy, to then transfer it to another developer account.

Only then would Google graciously allow me to close my Developer account.

Meanwhile, private Google services charge me the wrong prices, because I have a Payments profile in another country. It is associated with a Merchant account, which is linked to the Google Play Developer account.

The support concluded that this can also not be closed, and that I should close my Developer account first.

It's hell.

What happens if you "accidentally" become persona non grata with both Google and Apple?

If you want to participate in the society, you will forever have to resort to shady tactics. Shady can be defined something as arbitrary as using GrapheneOS.

A temporary workaround like using alternatives like GrapheneOS for those affected will only delay the inevitable but it doesn't stop it at all.

One of my best friend has a Jolla phone.

He never had WhatsApp. He refuses to use google. Only till recently he started using signal. He has been using an old Nokia phone till he was forced to upgrade by his operator. He is European and here in Europe WhatsApp dominates. Despite all that and having a very social life, driven by work, he manages.

I recently ordered a Jolla phone. I don’t want to know about android. I might tolerate iOS. But shelling thousands of $ for a phone that is controlled by an external company…

I am looking out for messaging alternatives. I am at a point where I think linking your identity to a phone number is not right either.

Let’s say we should all wake the fuck up. This is not right. Having a phone with such spyware is a potential attack vector I don’t want to have on the most important device I own.

The blast radius is far worse than any "malware" Google could protect you from.

TFA is playing it up, but it is arguable that this is a real virus, except the shady hackers are Google.

> And you’ll never reach a human to sort it out.

Unless you blog about it angrily enough that you somehow make it to the HN front page and some insider sees it and solves the problem for you.

Getting my own domain and setting up email on it is one of the best things I've ever done.

All service providers above some scale should be obliged to create a transparent processes or be taken for external jusges.

Even better: all providers of services with more than 100K users or 10% of country internet users should be forced to provide API to export / import data in open format.

That happened to me, lost 16 years old gmail account, which is my main account for my digital life. It happened after I disabled some tracking, and Google was no longer able to recognize me, even though I had my phone number registered, it was not enough.

This almost happened to me 4-5 years ago. I don’t recall every detail but right around the time I was deep into a new job interview process, Google Pay decided it needed to verify my identity. It may have been triggered by one of my cards expiring but I don’t think I had ever used the service to actually pay for anything at that point and just had a card saved. Anyhow, I was almost immediately locked out of my primary email account as well and got delayed in sending documents to the potential employer and had to explain that I got locked out of gmail. Unfortunately, I didn’t learn my lesson and still use that gmail account as my primary email but I did at least open alternative accounts on other cloud providers.

I tried recently to create dev. account. I have not yet been successful. It is a painstaking process.

I had to submit my ID, my phone number, email.

Then to verify I had to give my address. They rejected my ID twice, so I had to submit driving licence.

I am several weeks in, and could not even produce a single app.

Their algorithm already rejected me, for no obvious reason.

This has been known for quite a while; when I published an Android app ~10 years ago I saw lots of people advising you to create a separate Google account to publish apps under, because a robot can just terminate your entire online identity for the crime of trying to contribute to Google's app ecosystem.

I left behind Android and as many Google services as I could in 2020 and so far I've only been more vindicated with that decision over time.

I've seen multiple stories of people buying phones from Fi, the phones never arriving, google refusing a refund, and on a chargeback, their entire google account gets shut down.

Have a friend lawyer that will send them a proper letter. They will take you seriously that way. And if you live in EU, use GPT... Actually, use Gemini (!) to craft another great response invoking a number of articles etc that they are in violation of.

Leadership at Google should face prison time for this sort of practice. We wouldn't accept it in the physical space, so why do we accept it cyber space?

This is why I don't mess with any of Google's AI offerings right now. Losing access to my Gmail (technically a google apps for our domain) account would be devastating. I think the risk that some google ai decides I'm abusing their ai and bans me is too high.

We experienced this with Anthropic, not the same blast radius obviously, but out of nowhere account was terminated. No support available. It was via someone’s 30+ year old classmate via LinkedIn the account got reinstated.

As a counterpoint to the right to the repair there should be a right to recover.

The vulnerability of your Google identity is terrifying.

I would strongly advise using your personal account to access the developer-side of the Play Store.

No, these services shouldn’t all be bundled under a single account…

That sounds liberating

You go self-hosted and try to stick to real small alternatives, subset of technical standards, etc.

I am not a US citizen, but a EU one (well, since we have seriously rogue and toxic EU states, I dunno how long it will last).

And guess what, the handling of the issue of technical interop for administration online services is done... at the top of the top of the political power: in my EU country, only the president and prime minister do define it. Yep, you read well, it is THAT MUCH important: parliament, no power over it, 'technical authorities' have actually no real power over anything, etc. It requires the same level of power than deciding to make more nukes.

Basically, in 2015/2016 our president/prime minister at that time literaly gave all the administration (and dependencies) online services to big tech (a technical document which is basically 'law' with a content 'opening the gate' for big tech). Well, I say 'they gave it', but they could have 'sold it'... we have a department in our DOJ to monitor past politicians who could have set up some public money channels in order to benefit from it, often indirectly, afterwards. The following president and prime ministers did change nothing... how deep the rabbit hole goes? Brain washing via hardcore lobbying? Corruption?

IRL, you had country administration related web sites, working more that fine with "any browsers", small and big, citizen made, small company made, now it is over, they were all broken for web apps which do work only with whatwg cartel web engines with their abomination of "computer language" requiring an even worse SDK. Same with file formats.

There is light though, if this document of technical 'law' is properly modified, the whole administration and dependencies have 3 years to restore simple web sites and support minimal and subset of file formats.

it's a nightmare.

Yep! One way, or another, we gotta' get people out of the system.

[dead]