Breaking Up with Google Play: Why Conversations Is Now Free

I think it bothers OP less that they take a 15% tax than the fact that google provides terrible support for their own play store. If they would take that tax and provide good feedback and speedy version reviews, nobody would ever complain - it is expected to pay something since the play store doesn't run on good thoughts and prayers. But because they're a monopoly (or a duopoly if you count apple, which is a different platform altogether) they can afford to act this way.

Customer support has gotten so terrible. Now that all big companies have terrible support, none of them are punished for it. You can still occasionally find people who give a shit in small business, but that is it. Google is probably one of the worst offenders of all. I don't know what the solution is, it seems like the only way to get any satisfaction on an issue at a big corp anymore is a social medial call-out like this one.

If you are here, thank you for Conversations, Daniel, it has been my go-to for years for communicating with friends and family.

I would love to be able to list our product in the Google Play store /s ... but after a year of trying we haven't been able to.

They introduced a phone verification step for the support phone number that you provide. But their apparent assumption is that app authors are individuals or tiny companies. They expect to be able to send a text to the support number, or have it answered instantly by a human to validate the number. Any kind of IVR means the number can't be validated.

I have been going back and forth with their support for a year. It takes months at a time for them to respond, to say "we fixed it try again" and I try again and the process is identical.

Is is annoyingly ironic because I am sure that Google themselves could not pass this process to get listed in the Play Store. Their advice of "just redirect your corporate number to someone's cellphone to get validated" is laugable.

> Fuck the gatekeepers.

And the rent seekers.

Google play went from being a cool place to upload hobbyist projects to a Real Business Platform.

You now need a business address and a bunch of other documents for apps that will probably lose money.

Google has also decided they really don’t like users installing apps outside the Play Store. Today it’s a bunch of scary warnings, soon it’s a convoluted process to enable all installs and eventually they probably just ban it all together.

Literally nothing about Android is worth while to me now. iPhones are more stable , easier to use and have vastly better end user support.

The App Store is also a living hell for developers. They will look for any excuse to deny you an account and later reject your app.

Dare I say programming isn’t as fun anymore. I guess I can still build WebGL games. Best not speak too loudly, Apple and Google might go after that next

I had a business account that got banned due to inactivity. I make apps and I often update them ota, long story short the account it took ages to verify via DUNS and the phone number requirements got nuked. Can’t even reopen it, had to create a new one with a new email, no human to speak to, a nightmare due to the same duns number being on both accounts. Plus the recent forced 14 days of app testing. It’s comically bad, when I compare it to iOS it almost feels intentionally antagonistic to devs. Android has always been challenging (fragmented phone os mainly) but now has gotten to the point of not even being worth spending time there, especially since iOS tends to convert dramatically better

I get excited every time I learn about another E2EE messaging app where the server can be self-hosted. But as I understand it, the server that triggers push notifications for any android app must be hard-coded into the app's binary. Are there any good architectural workarounds for this? I've read a little bit about VAPID[1] but I don't know if it is actually a viable approach and I don't think I've ever seen it promoted in an E2EE messaging app with a self-hosted server.

[1] (Disclosure: the AI gave me this link) https://unifiedpush.org/news/20250131_push_for_decentralized...

What I do not like about Android is how difficult it is to unlock the bootloader without ever connecting the device to Internet. Any device with flash memory should be re-programmable and it should be illegal to prevent user from doing this or adding measures (like locking components to CPU via cryptography or adding anti-reverse engineering measures) that make it difficult.

> I was in a toxic relationship with Google[/Apple/Amazon/X/Instagram/Facebook/TikTok], and the only reason I stayed was economic dependency.

That just about sums up Big Tech

Yeah that "there is no way to talk to a human at Google" is one of the reasons I never recommend a Google solution at current workplace... Or to family.

I recommend the book “sacred economics” regarding this play.

Free to read online - https://charleseisenstein.org/books/sacred-economics/

I know this is a stupid question even before I ask it, but is there any chance at this point of seeing something out of the scope of Apple and Google for mobile?? Will the bank apps ever allow people out of these two players

I've abandoned my Google apps after all the requirements over the last year or so. It's too much of a hassle. Apple is friendlier. Also, it wasn't worth justifying 1% of the income and 99% grief compared to Apple.

App release reviews take at least 1 week now. They take 15% of revenue and I had to pay $25 to create an account. And I'm sure I spent more hours on setting up my business + bank account, dun's number, google account creation & verification, app listing configuration/verification and only then getting to the review stage. My first round took exactly 1 month from having a signed app release on my laptop ready to go to it showing publicly on the store.

Our app has 17,000+ users and has never paid a cent to Google :) With a little out of box thinking, you can avoid Google tax.

Unfortunately google is now a massive juggernaut that has 20+ layers before you can ship anything, and thats bled out to the users of their services. I wish we had better alternatives. In fact, I now just focus on shipping a PWA.

Btw thanks to the author. I got Conversations to work with Micro (https://micro.mu), the personal assistant I'm building. Its a nice XMPP client. Now just need to figure out how to do encryption for queries going into the model itself.

Conversations is pretty nice for self hosted xmpp. Wish there was an iOS client!

I've tried to publish an app in Play recently to get a taste of the experience. And I must say the taste was sour. Contrary to the experience of many I was able to reach a real human about my problem, but the human was less helpful that an AI pointed at the documentation. The AI was at least able to unrestand the issue, while the human simply talked past me.

That's the problem with all big billion dollar companies, they don't have enough people for support! You can't talk to a real human to explain your problem anymore :-( The only thing these CEOs, managers and noards care about are profits, they don't care about their users.

With accrescent.app you will be able to sell apps or distribute closed source apps in a privscy-focused way.

At least in Europe - these rouge corporations need to be reined in or just leave the market.

Google Play's app registration is so much more complicated now that Good Luck getting to production ever.

And even then the same thing on every update. If you're a small business and your livelihood depends on that then it's a nightmare to deal with.

And no, kicking them out won't be a problem. No sky is going to fall. Vacuum would be filled in very quickly.

> This effectively means I’m paying Google more than 1000 Euro per year for their services. 1000 Euro per year is 1.5x what I’m paying for my internet access. It’s roughly what I’m paying for my notebook per year if you assume I use it for three to four years. When my internet breaks, someone drives to my house and fixes it. When my notebook breaks, someone drives to my house and fixes it.

Couldn’t have said better. We all allowed it to come to this.

Receiving 1000 euros without having any real work or accountability is the epitome of free profit. No wonder these platform gatekeepers are fighting so hard to maintain it (at the cost of you, the consumer).

And yet people (in general) just dont care, because they don't truly feel the pain until it's too late - issues like privacy and such are like that.

It makes sense to leave, but it also seems like the overall sentiment would be more positive given the “it paid my rent for many years” part.

You should just be able to give them secure access to your git repo and they can get an LLM to do a code review.

I've used an Android phone for about 10 years now, and I have never once used Google Play.

Yes, Android is a rather Google-ified experience, but there is life outside of Google. Let's live it.

"Fortunately, I’m no longer economically dependent on Google Play Store revenue. Google doesn’t deserve me and my money anymore. I’m done. Fuck the gatekeepers."

+1.

It's called "Rent-seeking" when a powerful entity extracts wealth without providing any commensurate value.

Google wants you to believe the only way to get an app is through them. They have programmed society to believe this - despite the fact that you have never needed Google to download and run apps on your laptop. Apple also wants you to believe this, which is why they keep making it more impossible to run Mac apps without the Apple Store. They too want to extract your wealth and control you.

FOSS was created because people didn't have a way to cooperate and share the source code for their programs, to let users fix their own problems. Like the "right to repair" but for software. But Apple and Google wouldn't exist in the forms they do today without our FOSS. Our own software is being used to manipulate us, take our money, and take away our freedoms. Ironic.

Maybe it's time for a new software license that does discriminate against the rent seekers. Not because we deserve money when someone uses our free software. But because our freedoms are being trampled by the companies who use our software.

I think we should define that new license, abandon the old projects using the old licenses, and start using new ones. We already did this for Rust tools, I think we can do it for new licenses too.

All these stores, Apple Store, Google etc... must be opened up. They constitute an illegal monopoly. Why does the US government protect monopolies? This is against the core tent of capitalism, aka more competition in a free, open market, to have prices be as low as reasonable possible for the customer. The USA shifted towards de-facto monopolistic mafias. Financial kickbacks to the US government must logically exist here - otherwise one can not explain why the US government works for the interest of mega-corporations only now.

Open ALL stores.

Sorry this is a bit of a long rant. To many people here this will be a very old hut but I've only recently realized that Apple and Google are basically extortion rackets and have made the online world way worse and enshittified than it should be. Why? They deliberately make it as hard as possible to sell true cross-platform apps. "Buy one license, install our software on all of your devices." That should sound reasonable, yet it's impossible as a business model. If you put an app on the Apple Store or on Google Play, you cannot have it unlocked by a license code. So you have to sell it on their platform. That means that if you want to sell one license for all platforms, you'd have to force your users to buy the license in one of those stores, then generate desktop license from that store purchase. That's not just nonsense, it still wouldn't work because the user can still not switch from iOS to Android and vice versa.

Okay, so sell mobile platforms separately but make desktop platforms with one license. That would still be nice and comparatively hassle-free for your customers. Not so fast, though! Desktop app stores also prohibit free apps with unlock mechanism. So you have to put unlockable versions on your website. However, app stores explicitly prohibit even just mentioning that the user doesn't have to buy an app if they have already bought it elsewhere. They strictly prohibit pointing the user elsewhere to check whether they could use it for free. Consequently, unless your users are extremely well educated about those platform quirks, many of them will erroneously buy your app twice.

But wait! There is an exception in Apple Store and Google Play Store. You're strictly prohibited from putting an app on there that needs to be unlocked by a license key, but you are allowed to ask the user to create an account or log into an existing account with a user name and email address. As long as users can also purchase the app on the respective store, that's allowed. So you can tie the app to an account and unlock it if the user already bought it for another platform. For some reason, unlocking an app with a code is strictly prohibited but unlocking it by providing your email and a password and then contacting a server is totally fine. That's why so many apps have those shitty login requirements. I wasn't really aware of that.

In a nutshell, apart from "freemium models" there are two major ways to sell cross-platform software that really is cross-platform. First, make the user pay individually for each platform, make them buy your app again and again with all the hassle that brings. Second, force them to login with an email and a user name with some direct contact to some centralized hub server.

IMHO, all of these options are strictly worse than just allowing your users to buy the app anywhere they like and unlock it for all other platforms.

To the author. Go buy yourself some socks.Maybe a wallet, and go to the resturaunt that never fails you, or more generaly put in a concerted shameless effort to catch up, relax, fit the worst little personal bugs and recuring inconvieniences, essentialy put the same attention that you put into maintaining your product, into your self, remember to say fuck you google as you put the new " toothbrush * " you got by the sink, that you have reminded yourself but failed to get for the last six months, because thats what we give up, when we are blamming ourselves for the rejections we get from nameless faceless functionaries, that doom loop of 'engagement' is the point behind the delays and mindless activity, and reversing it is almost magical.

* 'toothbrush', anything that is a constant tiny irritant going away can be absurdly triumphant

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15% is a lot. I'm not trying to say it isn't.

And they're annoying and often screw up the review process.

Google is always going to make money off any work they do. That's just business. They're not going to put more money towards better reviews without taking more money. And without the reviews, even as crappy as they are, a lot of really crappy software would be on the store. And a lot more would be actively malicious

And you were making like 7x as much as they were taking. Without them, you would even get noticed and you'd have made nothing.

We know this because almost nobody installs FDroid, and the other stores like Samsung make basically nothing for developers, even though they're preinstalled on so many devices.