alt Hacker NewsSo long Google, and thanks for all the nudes
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The app store gatekeepers have so much power that it would be nice to see some legal requirements for operators of those stores put in place.
If your app is rejected, there should be a real appeal process. Maybe developers should be able to demand arbitration for some non-trivial fee?
The first step of the appeal would be for the store to disclose to the arbitrator precisely what rule was violated and in what way. The arbitrator can uphold the rejection and you lose your fee or can force the app store to accept the submission and you are refunded.
Microsoft support used to work something like this. There was a fee to get them on the phone but if the problem turned out to be an actual bug, the fee was refunded.
> it was rejected. They attached a nsfw screenshot of some unidentified app.
I don’t doubt the author, at the same time this is a serious accusation with no details and little context.
This could have been presented in a more organized way, with timelines and redacted content.
Part of the problem is Google not being transparent, having more transparency could help.
I think I'm done with Android apps development. The following publishing requirements just closed the door for me as a hobby developer:
> Have at least 12 testers opted-in to your closed test.
> Run your closed test with at least 12 testers, for 14 days
The funny thing is this seems to apply to recently-created personal publisher accounts. I had a very old publisher account but because I was unable to move my account owner to another email address, I closed it and registered a new one. Little did I know what this would lead to later on.
>The plan is to equip them with some sms gateway software
MAXS (Modular Android XMPP Suite) could also work.
http://projectmaxs.org/homepage/
https://bitbucket.org/projectmaxs/maxs/src/master/
https://search.f-droid.org/?q=Maxs&lang=en
> Version 0.5.19 (2000506627) suggested Added on Jan 22, 2025
>This version requires Android 4.4 or newer.
(Hope the author is doing OK.)
Not only this but letting predatory apps like NearMe, and countless scam dating apps in the Play store has delegitimized Google for me.
Yea I’m on over a month now of an app sitting in review, a couple of years ago it was much quicker. Apple approved the same app within a week. I can only assume it’s because it’s easier to vibecode android apps so it’s being flooded?
The review process is broken. The stream of apps is enormous, the expense to review them deeply would be large, the cost of a false rejection is very low.
If Google cares about some of the long-standing problems, I wonder whether they know how to fix them. (Assign OKRs, which may be conflicting, or get quietly triaged/prioritized?)
Maybe they need personnel tasked solely to just go in, with the blessing of some high-up person, find any bad customer service or goodwill problem, bottom-up, figure out why it's happening, and work with the relevant teams to fix it, quickly. Then repeat.
To fit with ingrained cultural incentives for relevant teams, other managers and ICs might have to be convinced that their performance evaluations depend strongly on cooperating with this process.
Anyone can make a website and publish it but for some reason when it comes to apps there needs to be a store with a review process. Aren't apps, in a way, not just specialised browsers (not talking about webview apps here) that run in a sandbox? Why the need for all this "reviewing", does it make apps safer or better quality? Is it a device ecosystem permission / security problem? I.e. why do apps need stores and websites don't?
Sending unsolicited nudes is sexual harassment, someone at Google could go to jail
Agree. Tried to publish my app through Google, and still no luck. Link below.
I was able to share it on f-droid though, and I am starting to think that it may be good just to publish app only through it.
I'm really excited about Graphene OS partnering with Motorola and putting out true alternatives to Google's OS's.
We really need an open source and funded OS for phones like we have with Linux for desktops/servers.
Also, with AI 100x'ing developers productivity it might be a really interesting time for phone OS's.
The part where the author is aware that any missteps in "debugging" the review process can get their account permabanned is lovely. I'm sure I've read cases here before where a developer has lost all their emails and family photos because their policies.
> It seems pretty clear to me that counting on google is a bad idea.
A company that does not provide support to normal people and has a compulsive habit of closing services for absolutely no good reason? You don't say?
I wonder if that'll be the future. This is something AI can actually solve. Write replacements for a lot of apps, slop but efficient slop, and use that as a distraction-free phone.
Maybe that could even be extended to browser, OS, webpages (just have a bad AI rewrite every page you read, and in the future maybe every video you watch) ... everything people use. Everything you come into contact with.
Think about it: no ads, and no way for anyone to bring them to your devices!
I also recently acquired some free e-waste android 6 devices (like a galaxy note 4 pad and a moto 4 phone). Using some vibe coding I was able to setup a dockerized build system for java/kotlin apps and managed to make a number of custom applications for the devices like turning them into timelapse+mjpeg streaming cameras (or irc client, or ice thickness estimation from chirped sounds+dsp). Since they're ewaste I don't mind if they get destroyed or lost.
"Google is incompetent at review"... while the author is misspelling words constantly.
> I was hoping to publish my new game on the store and charge for it, but their review process is so broken, I think I'll stick to fdroid and itch.io.