There was nobody to talk to and support just redirected me to an inbox that bounced.
At time time, it destroyed my business that I had been building on the platform for five years and it took me some time to rebuild (in a different industry and not on anyone's platform).
I finally got my account back a few months ago with no explanation.
Hopefully the same way the law works for a company that won't pay above minimum wage - completely destroyed in the legal system.
I'm sorry if your business plan doesn't conform with law. Perhaps you should focus on a business plan that does conform with the law.
I suspect they think they are less likely to be sued if they offer no explanation
Disclaimer: I have no relationship with Cheogram, other than being annoyed at Google Play disappearing a useful app for which I paid $5.
"If we tell people exactly how they broke the rules, they'll use that information to try to circumvent our rules next time."
Often this takes the form of not even codifying the rules internally (if the rules aren't written down then people can't accidentally or intentionally leak them). And both processes used humans in the loop. Put these two things together and it's a recipe for arbitrary application of the rules.
I'm actually surprised he got an actual name associated with the emails. Earlier when working on something else I noticed a post on reddit complaining about something I worked on. I reached out privately to help the person and they publicly thanked me without redacting my email address. I ended up getting death threats for a Google product completely unrelated. Not unlike https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2021/02/19/i-will-slaughter-you/
In my experience, a shit game on steam will make 3 figures if you're lucky. A shit game on Switch will make four figures most of the time.
Is that a good metric? Ideally shit games _should_ make very little money. Don't we want to look at what decent games are making and how they're doing?
If you're doing full time game development on your own (like the linked blog post), your metric is probably more along the lines of "which platform is most likely going to give me enough money to not reverse mortgage my home or sell a kidney."
Steam is a tough marketplace. Crappy games do really bad. Great games don't do much better. You can sink a 1~3 years in an objectively good game and make $10k. It's a terrifying market for someone doing fulltime game development.
My general advice is make smaller games (1-6 months of dev time) and target consoles unless you have a good reason to be on steam.
Please elaborate? It's the best we have as of today for PC gaming.
I am not saying anything about this case, I just notice people on HN always take these post as 100 percent true. When money is involved, people get caught and their revenue affected they are capable of spinning the wildest tales.
All this is to agree with the sibling comments; maybe your priors give you a particular default view, but it's not universally shared, and even so Google rather suffers from a long history of banning people in ways that sure look arbitrary and then refusing to say anything about it to anyone, which rather assists in the banned party looking sympathetic.
Either way, organizations that cannot communicate why they took certain actions are not to be trusted.
I tend not to believe the "no reason" part, but I still stand on their side when their privileges are revoked without human intervention and without a human customer support agent available by phone.
But like with email blacklists, false positives do happen, and are probably quite common. Mistakes happen and that's okay because all of this is a hard problem. For email this is usually not too hard to rectify this. For Google Play ... not so much.
Email shenanigans and the shenaniganiers will quickly erode any sense of faith in your common man. That said, it's easy to believe these stories after dealing with support at any number of big tech companies.
Curious how much you could share more details about what you discovered during that time?
Instead of forcing Google to do a thing they already do (allow alternative app stores on android), they could have banned them from distributing apps that require Google Play Services (i.e., all apps must run well on the open source version of android, which must be permissively license, and manufacturers would incur no penalties for shipping other mobile operating systems).
That would instantly open the android ecosystem up to competition by making AOSP (and things like Lineage/Graphene) viable competitors.
I think it has to do with the difference between top-down and bottom-up perspective. Top-down politicians/regulators/courts/whatnot end up looking at these things of how they can be contained and controlled (regardless of how they will continue wielding the leverage that allows them to dominate their specific market), whereas bottom up we look at what it would actually take to actually create some competition (despite such attempts inherently looking like baby steps at the start).
What the judge did ban is a bunch of things Google did you may not have even realized they were doing, like the terms in the MADA agreements all manufacturers like Samsung, LG, etc. were required to sign which prevented any competition and required Play Services. The judge also banned revenue sharing agreements with manufacturers and mobile carriers used to prevent companies from using different search engines or app stores.
Nobody, figuratively, will ever care about some custom ROMs. But the judge has broken all of the means Google was using to control device manufacturers.
2 reasons I can confidently disagree: 1. Unlike desktop platforms, most android devices cease receiving "official" updates long before the chipset stops receiving updates, thus maintaining them requires an alternative rom. While most people will just buy a new phone, the percent usually on the fence about something like switching from Windows to Linux are gonna be pushed harder into looking into alternatives. 2. Well over 1% of desktop users use Linux. Even if you debate the methods to get the current 4%, there's simply no debate on at least 1%.
The two combine to suggest that, on android, there's a very good change that more than 1% of android users are using some rom, and all roms help each other.
Don't screw up your otherwise valid argument by trying to "put tech nerds in their place" like that. These roms do matter, even if the judge 100% didn't "screw up". Everything else you said is both true and important, and probably matters more than what parent wanted, but it doesn't diminish the value of the roms, just suggests that parent was misguided.
Look, most Android devices are held by people who would be hard-pressed to tell you which model of phone they have, and almost certainly can't find the place to see what version of Android it is running.
Most people will use their tech until it breaks and then get something new and use it until it breaks, which is why automatic updates are pushed so aggressively now.
My personal opinion of roms is that because they do not offer freedom to the masses, it is elitist to focus on them. And insofar as choice in the ecosystem is, roms are actively harmful: They've wasted decades of volunteer developer-hours protecting Android's control of the ecosystem, when those developer-hours could've been invested in real mobile Linux or another option not encumbered by Google's proprietary stench.
Whoever they outsourced these app reviews to is just sabotaging Google Play.
What dumbbells are out here optimizing for that?
But you don't just leave a big customer hanging for days or weeks, because they might get annoyed with you and go to $competitor which will seriously impact you. No serious business treats their big customers that, and it's a sign of dysfunction if they do.
Suppose you're running a company, and you have two clients. One brings you $20,000 in profit a year, the other brings in $600,000 a year. Both of them have some sort of issue they need to resolve and report it to you at almost the exact same time. Let's say the smaller company reports it slightly earlier. But you only have enough manpower to solve the issues one at a time. Whose do you solve first?
The incredibly obvious answer to 99% of people is to solve it for the company that brings you 30 times more profit than the other. Any other answer is a sign of severe dysfunction and or insanity in the company.
I can't remember where I read about this -- DHH, maybe -- but it's also the difference between going for a sustainable business or venture capital. VCs don't care if most of their investments die horribly as long as a few make them rich. But the people who work for those businesses might care.
Sometimes it's better for your own mental health to avoid these "opportunities".
The end-game of capitalism is where companies start to recursively regulate their own markets. Perhaps government regulation wasn't so bad after all?
That popular flash game is the game of this author.
> I am Tukkun, an indie game developer making games since 2008. My most significant work is a PC Flash game I made back in 2009 called Anti-Idle: The Game, uploaded to the website Kongregate.
>the author’s name is atypical
I would like to know what you consider a "typical" name for the 2+ billion Android users.
Sorry, I have an honest question as it's not marked and I can't quite figure it out - is this sarcasm?
How many more hoops will people have to jump through because a company holding a very significant share of the market refuses to provide a basic level of support to people, people that are helping to enrich Google's own ecosystem by developing apps for their platform?
Seems like they have a winning strategy. You get what you pay for.
That's the risk it takes, without support it will build up many similar cases to this one, until at some point the levee breaks and some legislator wanting to champion this issue as a cause will come for it.
Or you can be short-sighted and see it as a waste, it's your choice.
Notwithstanding the morality of it, of course, but since you are speaking financially I think we both know you don't care about that angle.