Normally I would have blame Google for it. But the whole post doesn't rhyme with me for some reason. The tone, the lack of information about themselves. I had to google it and found 6AceGames [1], all of their games are gambling games. Email address, Facebook and Twitter registered in May 2021. Lots of other small things.
The post says 15 developers, their website 65+. The reviews are written in the same broken English as their website.
Their flagship game, “Tonk”, is nowhere to be found in the Apple App Store, but there are two other games with a very similar logo, published by other India-based companies. The same on Play store, where a bunch of identical looking games, with different publisher names, share similar logos [1].
But what would scammers gain for complaining about Google? It isn't like they can pressure Google to reinstate their account in that case, worst case for Google they would have to make a public statement saying these people are scammers. I mean, yeah as long as Google doesn't answer they can get some minimal public support, but what would they gain from that?
>But what would scammers gain for complaining about Google?
Well, it is probably more what do they have to lose? Plenty of internet hate mobs have formed backing a cause that later came out to be misleading, if not outright fraudulent. Even assuming they are scammers, it is quite possible they think they are in the right (there are cultures that have... different views about business ethics), but they could also just be rolling the dice.
No Michael,
First of all you may find my english broken, Because it is not my first language.
Thanks for reading our story
We're not scammers. Whom we're scamming google? Users? How we're scamming?
It's my fault i should have added the background info of ours in the medium post. But i've never written any post of anything so i was inexperienced,
But let me clear something about us,
We're india based gaming company. All our games are just simulations it is not real gambling. If it was real gambling then google wouldn't have allowed us to publish it on play store for 2 years.
now this will arise some more questions in your mind,
>>Why do we mentions address of UK on our tweeter handle?
1. According to google policy we have to provide a physical address if we want to use in-app-purchases. This physical address is visible publicly on our games pages.
Reason providing our uk address is we have a representative living there who can reply to any type of physical communications such as letters on behalf of us. He also can reply to various other stuffs like GDPR and different other policies. For ex. You can send a latter to the given address to get in touch with us!
First of all, You may find my english broken but it is not my first language. We're india based startup.
Thanks reading our story. Let me answer some of your doubts.
the numbers are not right on website. We've team of only 15 devs.
Our games are not on app store because it is developed for android only in java.
You may find identical games with similar logos because of copy cats. Once they know that your games are doing good they'll start copying.
Tonk is a traditional card game popular in united states , we just made it more fun bringing it in mobile phones. So other devs also can make tonk games. It is not our pattern or anything like that.
this will arise a new question in you mind:
>>Why do we mentions address of UK on our tweeter handle?
1. According to google policy we have to provide a physical address if we want to use in-app-purchases. This physical address is visible publicly on our games pages.
Reason providing our uk address is we have a representative living there who can reply to any type of physical communications such as letters on behalf of us. He also can reply to various other stuffs like GDPR and different other policies. For ex. You can send a later to the given address to get in touch with us!
OP is being opaque and probably exaggerating, And yet I still suspect that the underlying claim is true - Google likely did kill the project by killing their dev account.
This is still a fundamental problem with having only two global centralized app stores.
Nobody is arguing whether Google killed their account.
We're saying they trip tons of shady heuristics, and we're skeptical there wasn't a solid reason. Particularly when the majority of games were free -- there's tons of very shady monetization strategies out there, particularly for games involving gambling.
Plus, for example, a twitter account that either started May 9, or was scrubbed. For a company with claimed millions of users.
Bundle ids against a domain -- sixace.com -- which they don't appear to own.
No company information that I can find on the internet or LinkedIn.
Fake testimonials on their website with stolen images from the internet.
No company information in the UK company database for either 6ace or sixace, despite a claimed address of "61,hallwicks road,Luton,Bedfordshire,London-LU2 9BG".
> No company information in the UK company database for either 6ace or sixace, despite a claimed address of "61,hallwicks road,Luton,Bedfordshire,London-LU2 9BG".
To be fair it is common for a UK company to have a generic name and for various activities run under it to trade under different names.
Usually however when the company is legitimate the footer of the website will say "Brand Name is a trading name for Actual Company Name Limited" where the company name will be registered at Companies House.
Not the case here, cannot see any info on the actual company, couldn't actually find a mention of that address anywhere on the site either where did you get it from?
That's a residential address for a random house in Luton. Not uncommon for a small company to be registered to a residential property, but the address doesn't seem to be in Companies House records.
Anyway I do agree this is sending off all sorts of red flags for me too, I think the post is telling a very one sided story and Google in this specific case has legitimate reason to ban that dodgy developer account.
Thanks. Since no company is registered under that address I'd bet there simply is no company and the guy is just a sole trader under the name Six Ace Games. No official registration needed for that, you just have to report the income to HMRC (taxman) and that's it.
First of all sorry for my bad emglish. It is not my first language so.
It's my bad i should have mentioned more stuff to our medium post so that it won't leave users with any confusions. Please pardon me as this was my first post. I've never had written anything before.
You might got some questions like
Q: Who are we?
A: We are simply a india based gaming startup. We had 8-10 games published on our playstore account.
Q:Why do we mentions address of UK on our tweeter handle?
A:. According to google policy we have to provide a physical address if we want to use in-app-purchases. This physical address is visible publicly on our games pages.
Reason providing our uk address is we have a representative living there who can reply to any type of physical communications such as letters on behalf of us. He also can reply to various other stuffs like GDPR and different other policies. For ex. You can send a latter to the given address to get in touch with us!
Q:How me monetized our games?
A: Through admob and in-app products. Nothing shady!
Q:Our games was providing gambling?
A: No, It's just simulations. You can't win money or bet money, Not at all!
Q: what about your domain 6acegames.com?
A: Yes, our domain 6acegames.com is new. The reason behind it is very silly you may find it funny but still let me tell you!, at first we have bought domain sixacegames.com(you can check reg. details) thinking it will help in seo and all because we didn't want to include a number "6" in our domain. But later after our games got popular user started searching for 6Acegames that's why we bought this domain as well in may 2021 just to build the presence on google search.
Q:Why no presence on linkedin?
A: Try searching "Whyphy Infotech". 6Acegames is just business name we use!
Q: What about social media?
A:we are not very active in social media. As you can see in our tweeter handle we have 0 followers. The reason is simple we never promoted it to our users. Although we have some followers on our instagram handle, but they follow us because we provide free perks occestionally to our audience.
I know someone who has some pretty famous android/ios apps that are making him quite a good chunk of money. He pushes strongly to hide his identity because he lives here in Mexico and being known for having money/success is a recipe to get mugged or kidnapped.
I know I would do the same if I was in his position.
First of all sorry for my bad english. It is not my first language so.
It's my bad i should have mentioned more stuff to our medium post so that it won't leave users with any confusions. Please pardon me as this was my first post. I've never had written anything before.
You might got some questions like
Q: Who are we?
A: We are simply a india based gaming startup. We had 8-10 games published on our playstore account.
Q:Why do we mentions address of UK on our tweeter handle?
A:. According to google policy we have to provide a physical address if we want to use in-app-purchases. This physical address is visible publicly on our games pages.
Reason providing our uk address is we have a representative living there who can reply to any type of physical communications such as letters on behalf of us. He also can reply to various other stuffs like GDPR and different other policies. For ex. You can send a latter to the given address to get in touch with us!
Q: what about your domain 6acegames.com?
A: Yes, our domain 6acegames.com is new. The reason behind it is very silly you may find it funny but still let me tell you!, at first we have bought domain sixacegames.com(you can check reg. details) thinking it will help in seo and all because we didn't want to include a number "6" in our domain. But later after our games got popular user started searching for 6Acegames that's why we bought this domain as well in may 2021 just to build the presence on google search.
Q: What about social media?
A:we are not very active in social media. As you can see in our tweeter handle we have 0 followers. The reason is simple we never promoted it to our users. Although we have some followers on our Instagram handle, but they follow us because we provide free perks occasionally to our audience.
Even if the company is sketchy, shouldn't they be told very clearly exactly why they were banned, so they can appeal it if it's wrong? Imagine how ridiculous it would be if you could lose a court case without having been allowed to see the evidence.
Not apologizing for Google but if you give out too many details of why you banned someone you give people a) leverage in a lawsuit, b) information on what you are what suspect triggers they are looking for, making it easier for people to avoid automated detectoin.
Maybe so, but then actual UX suffers as a result of developers crafting their way out of automated and manual detection. Every time they get killed, create another account, implement the obfuscation while still exploring users with shady monetization, make money until found again in months or years.
You only give people details if they're a good-faith actor. If a spam bot leaves garbage on my blog, I don't configure my spam filter to send them the exact words and phrases that get them detected.
I don't know anything about this company, but the other comments are giving the vibe that this company is similar in social status to a spam bot and Google's customer support is correct to cut them off with no explanation.
Mobile stores are different. If Google explains details, they will understand how google found out so they will develop better tactics to not be banned next time.
Then Google will just have to work harder. Banning legitimate customers over automation failures is not a thing that should be considered acceptable or legal.
The manager of the company (we can guess likely the CEO since it's a small startup) was infected by a trojan that stole passwords from his computer, but they're certain it didn't infect the network because they "wiped the hard drive." And it couldn't have got to user data because that's hosted in the cloud. Of course the fact the login details are likely on infected computers makes no difference at all...
Yeah usually I am the first to grab my pitchforks against tech giants like Google but the devs are only telling a one sided story here and their business looks far from legit, and that team of amazing devs doesn't seem very competent either if they keep installing trojans.
Very sloppy for it to not even do a 301 redirect though. Even if you use one of those basic website builder services they will do that as standard.
Decided to run SSL Labs on the site out of curiosity[1] and they still have TLS 1.0 activated as well. That's just poor SSL config. A software company supposedly made up of talented coders should know way better.
> Email address, Facebook and Twitter registered in May 2021
Their Youtube is from August 2018, 2.5 years ago just like they claim in the post. Maybe they just got a new marketing person in May instead of it being a "smoking gun" of some conspiracy
Yes, I have the same feeling, something smells here, I'd expect them to be more humble once they got twitter account attention but replies look like incoherent blind swings.
Their actual website is https protected. The www one isn’t redirecting to it which I have seen at other places too, not exclusive to this developer. Dev is a game dev, not web or server dev so it’s understandable.
Hi there,
Thanks for reading our story. You may find my English broken because it is not my first language. We're an India based gaming company.
First of all, I'm sorry if you found my tont arrogant or malicious but I don't have a very strong hold on english so.
This will arise a new question in you mind:
>>Why do we mention the address of the UK on our twitter handle?
1. According to google policy we have to provide a physical address if we want to use in-app-purchases. This physical address is visible publicly on our games pages.
Reason providing our UK address is we have a representative living there who can reply to any type of physical communications such as letters on behalf of us. He also can reply to various other issues like GDPR and different other policies.
>>All our games are gambling games?
- No. This is not true. In our games you can't bet any type of real money or anything like that. It's just a simulation like other games. Yes you can buy various perks through in app purchases but it is not the gambling. If we've provided any type of gambling related stuff in our games then google wouldn't have let you survive for 3 years either!
>>Email and Social media registered in May 2021
Yes, our domain 6acegames.com is new. The reason behind it is silly. You may find it funny but still let me tell you!At first we bought domain sixacegames.com(you can check reg. details) thinking it will help in seo and all because we didn't want to include a number "6" in our domain. But later after our games got popular users started searching for 6Acegames that's why we bought this domain as well in may just to build the presence on google search.
>>And about social media,
we are not very active in social media. As you can see in our twitter handle we have 0 followers. The reason is simple: we never promoted it to our users. Although we have some followers on our instagram handle, they follow us because we provide free perks occasionally to our audience.
>>Lack of information.
I'm very unfamiliar with stuff like blogging and all, This is the first post I've ever written. If i forget mentioning something please let me know i'll include all the information to the post it self
Maybe, but a gambling app with localized listings for the top markets (India, US, Brazil, Indonesia, Russia, Mexico[0]) can get you to 1 million with very little effort.
This is a good example of how innovation, competition and small businesses are being stifled by the anticompetitive behavior of the mobile app distribution cartel.
Consider contacting your state's Attorney General office, and the US Attorney General office. Many states' AG offices have antitrust divisions[1].
The US Dept. of Justice also has an Antitrust Division[2], along with a page that details how and why[3] to get in touch with them:
> Information from the public is vital to the work of the Antitrust Division. Your e-mails, letters, and phone calls could be our first alert to a possible violation of antitrust laws and may provide the initial evidence needed to begin an investigation.
The FTC has the Bureau of Competition[4], as well.
> This is a good example of how innovation, competition and small businesses are being stifled by the anticompetitive behavior of the mobile app distribution cartel.
No, it's an example of how small businesses are foolishly making their business model dependent on a company that is known to be unreliable. What should be happening is that mobile app distributors should not be depending on Google at all; alternate mobile app stores should be out-competing them by providing better service to developers. If there is a "cartel" that is making that difficult, it's not the mobile app store gatekeepers, it's the mobile phone companies that are tilting the playing field sharply in favor of the Android phones they distribute, which are tied to Google Play Store, instead of allowing free and open competition in phone operating systems.
What else is a mobile game dev supposed to do? Ask customers to sideload? Tell people to use f-droid? If they do that they're restricting themselves to a tiny fraction of the possible audience and thereby removing any chance they have of being profitable.
Start a startup to make a mobile app store that out-competes Google. Somebody is going to have to do it sooner or later. Young devs with nothing to lose are the best people to try.
> I don't think that "just be better than the trillion dollar incumbent" is a reasonable starting point for any healthy market.
I'm not proposing this solution because I think it's easy. I'm proposing it because I think it's the only one that has any chance of actually fixing the problem long term. Government fiat won't fix it; it will make it worse, the same way government fiat in general makes problems worse, not better.
Government fiat generally makes problems worse because the government is a monopoly and a monopoly has little incentive to do things well because of a lack of consequences for getting it wrong, unlike a business in a competitive market which has to respond to competitive pressure or go bust.
But a monopoly/cartel isn't a competitive market and has the exact same problem.
And antitrust is minimally damaging as long as you restrict the targets to companies that have more than, say, 25% market share. In other words, as long as it places no constraints on upstarts and challengers.
Because at that point, blindly causing harm to the large incumbents is actually good even if it's hamfisted and incompetent, because then the market can fix any damage by transitioning to smaller suppliers not subject to antitrust rules, which is the thing that actually solves the problem. The worst thing they can do is fail to do enough damage to the incumbents to restore competition, which is the same thing that happens if they do nothing.
> Government fiat generally makes problems worse because the government is a monopoly
That's one problem, yes, but not the only one. Good government is a public good, and elementary economics tells us that public goods are underproduced. Or, to put it another way, concentrated special interests have a larger incentive and more concentrated resources to corrupt government, than dispersed individuals have to keep it from being corrupted.
Also, governments aren't quite monopolies as long as people have the right of exit--if you don't like your state's government, you can move to another state, and if you don't like your country's government, you can move to another country. Granted, the transaction costs for such moves are high (particularly for the latter), but many people still do it. That exerts at least some competitive pressure.
> a monopoly/cartel isn't a competitive market
It depends on why it's a monopoly. If it's a monopoly because of special privileges granted by the government (which most monopolies are and have been historically), then yes, it's not exposed to competitive pressure. But if it's a monopoly because it provides better quality and lower prices for its products than any competitors, then it is exposed to competitive pressure--and it's succeeding at dealing with it. That's not a monopoly; that's a win for the free market.
The real problem with a company like Google is that its users are not its customers, so the whole idea of "competitive pressure" in the usual economic sense doesn't even apply. Google has no incentive to provide products that benefit its users, other than the fact that it needs a critical mass of users to be attractive to its actual customers (advertisers and other companies to which it sells data and access to users' eyeballs). What's more, since Google's users do not pay for its products and services, Google has no idea how valuable those products actually are to users, since it has cut off the best source of feedback--what users will pay for.
> the market can fix any damage by transitioning to smaller suppliers not subject to antitrust rules, which is the thing that actually solves the problem
That only solves the problem if the problem is that the smaller suppliers can provide better quality and lower prices to customers. But that's not even the problem with Google; see above. Google's actual customers don't want smaller suppliers, because Google's value to them is precisely its size. Breaking up Google without changing the basic business model would just create huge incentives for its customers to game the system, getting pretty much the same things they are getting now, but just with more maneuvering under the table.
If the government is going to do something hamfisted at all, the obvious thing to do would be to outlaw the ad-supported business model altogether. Make Google, and Facebook, and every other such platform, charge users a fair price for the services they provide, and let users, in a free, competitive market, decide what services are worth their cost. But of course that would be politically insane, because the users themselves don't want to pay for those services; why should they, when they've been conditioned to have them for free for so long? Only weird outliers like me would actually applaud such a move; I'd be happy to pay Google some reasonable fee per month to use search and maps (which are the only Google apps I use) if in exchange my data was no longer sold to third parties. But it doesn't seem to me that most people would agree with that.
Another suggestion I've seen is for the government to force Google, and Facebook, and every other such platform, to open up the APIs for all their services, so anyone could write their own client. That would enable clients to be written that didn't show ads and didn't do all the other tracking that Google's and Facebook's own clients do. But if Google and Facebook are still stuck on the ad-supported business model, again, that just creates huge incentives for them to game the system, creating new hidden back channels for their actual customers to get the data they need while pretending to have a free, open, public API that any client can use. Clients can only hide so much; at the end of the day they still have to make requests to the API, and those requests contain the basic data that the platforms are selling.
> The worst thing they can do is fail to do enough damage to the incumbents to restore competition
No, that's nowhere near the worst case. The worst case is something like locking down the entire Internet, so, for example, a site like this one can no longer even exist.
> Good government is a public good, and elementary economics tells us that public goods are underproduced. Or, to put it another way, concentrated special interests have a larger incentive and more concentrated resources to corrupt government, than dispersed individuals have to keep it from being corrupted.
This is true, but is no reason to abandon the attempt to prevent this, because it's still a matter of degree. More to the point, large companies will engage in regulatory capture and try to use regulation to stifle competition regardless of whether individuals try to exert pressure on governments to preserve competition.
> Also, governments aren't quite monopolies as long as people have the right of exit--if you don't like your state's government, you can move to another state, and if you don't like your country's government, you can move to another country. Granted, the transaction costs for such moves are high (particularly for the latter), but many people still do it. That exerts at least some competitive pressure.
By this definition nothing is really a monopoly. If there is only one grocery store within a 999 mile radius, you could say that it isn't a monopoly because you could go to one which is 1000 miles away. It's a monopoly in practice because the cost of patronizing the "competitor" is too large.
> The real problem with a company like Google is that its users are not its customers, so the whole idea of "competitive pressure" in the usual economic sense doesn't even apply.
Even if you accept the framing then in this context the users who aren't the customers are the "product." They're the suppliers. In exchange for eyeballs they get services. The company is still subject to competitive pressure because if someone else provides better services, they lose the eyeballs. In a competitive market, companies have to compete for supply as well.
> Breaking up Google without changing the basic business model would just create huge incentives for its customers to game the system, getting pretty much the same things they are getting now, but just with more maneuvering under the table.
The "spies on you for advertisers" problem isn't really an antitrust problem, because as you point out, a larger number of smaller companies could do the same thing.
But if there were a larger number of smaller companies, they would have to distinguish themselves. One way to do that is to charge for services instead of using ads, which people like you prefer, and then you could patronize that one. Others would provide the service for free with ads, or with ads but ads based only on the search terms without tracking you all over the internet. And then customers get to choose. Right now there are two search engines and they're both of the "spies on you everywhere you go" variety.
> Another suggestion I've seen is for the government to force Google, and Facebook, and every other such platform, to open up the APIs for all their services, so anyone could write their own client.
This is for services with network effects, like Facebook messenger. But services like that aren't the real problem. It's much easier to convince most of your friends to switch to another messenger than it is to get even one of them to switch to a phone platform which is neither Android nor iOS.
And the solution there isn't APIs, it's breaking up vertically integrated companies. If Google Maps, Android and the Play Store were all separate companies then it would be easier to compete with each of them because they would be less tightly coupled with each other. A competitor could replace one of them without having to replace all of them.
> No, that's nowhere near the worst case. The worst case is something like locking down the entire Internet, so, for example, a site like this one can no longer even exist.
Which is the point of constraining antitrust rules to companies with major market share. None of them would apply to a site like this because it's not big enough. And if there was strong competition then they wouldn't apply to anyone because there would be many independent sites, none of which exceeds the threshold.
Destroying independent sites and apps is the risk of doing nothing, because then two corporations get to decide winners and losers for everyone.
It goes without saying that good antitrust enforcement is better than mediocre antitrust enforcement. But mediocre is the more likely outcome, and that's still better than nothing.
> Or the ban against lead additives. Or against child labour.
Sometimes the government manages to mandate something that happens to be a good idea. But that does not mean that government mandates, overall, are a net benefit.
> Or any one of hundreds of massive benefits that government fiat has brought us.
If you really think there are "hundreds of massive benefits" brought to us by government fiat, I suggest a review of history. You will find many, many more cases of government fiat causing harm than of it doing good. In the extreme, government fiat killed hundreds of millions of people in the 20th century.
If you want more local, individualized information, try asking anyone who has had to deal with a government bureaucracy when it makes a bad individual decision (which happens all the time) about their experience. (My wife and I have had this experience multiple times with multiple government bureaucracies.) You will get a very different viewpoint on the "benefits" of government fiat.
> you're saying that U.S. antitrust legislation left us worse off, historically?
Yes. For example, look up what happened to Standard Oil and Alcoa Aluminum. Both of those companies were providing their products with better quality and at lower prices than the companies that existed after they were broken up by antitrust suits.
Is this a risk that you're willing to take? A handful of kids can (and frequently do) make awesome indy games. But how do you expect them to scale out a competitive software distribution platform, and who's going to pay for the marketing necessary to drive adoption among both developers and users?
How quickly does it have to scale? Google itself was a niche product for quite some time before it had to scale.
I'm not proposing that someone try to displace Google all at once. Google took a long time to get to the position it's in now. It will take a long time for it to be displaced, if it is. But you have to start somewhere.
Phone OSes are hard. Tizen was a big play for it and that ended up being a dud. Windows Phone was also another well-funded competitor that fell on its face.
Really, the problem is that phone manufacturers want to be where the apps are, and app developers barely keep it together making native apps for the two dominant OSes. Another competitor would need to make it really, really easy to make apps performant when ported over with minimal work, because the ugly truth is that no one is going to hire a full third team to develop for another OS that's just starting out.
> "Windows Phone was also another well-funded competitor that fell on its face."
Google had a hand in that, though, by intentionally blocking interoperability with YouTube and other Google services for WP. Even back then they were willing to play dirty to keep their monopoly.
> Another competitor would need to make it really, really easy to make apps performant when ported over with minimal work
But this is completely impossible, and Google helps make it that way. Their SafetyNet API lets apps verify that the device is running an official, unmodified Android build, and a lot of very popular apps will refuse to run otherwise.
SafetyNet makes it impossible to run most Android apps on Linux using a container-based solution like Anbox.
SafetyNet is also stifling innovation.
Linux/*BSD/macOS can run many Windows apps without emulation via WINE, and those innovations allowed Steam to create potentially billions of dollars in value by making many of their games cross-platform with Proton, and allowed them to create new products like the Steam Deck. SafetyNet precludes ever creating value like that with mobile apps.
Although they use emulation in WSL 2, Microsoft has done something similar with WSL and Linux apps, creating an untold amount of value for not only their platform, but for millions of developers, as well. SafetyNet prevents using something like WSL to run mobile apps on Windows.
For those reasons, you can't build an alternative OS and run many Android apps on them with a compatibility layer, despite apps without SafetyNet working pretty well using compatibility layers like Anbox.
There's no way to fake this? I just looked it up and it seems Magisk is able to fake these attestations somehow. I remember using it to get some mobile games to shut up about my rooted phone. How would rooted devices and custom ROMs work otherwise?
I hate it when these fucking companies use cryptography to control us. Cryptography should be empowering us...
Magisk can fake them for now, but only because Google still supports some pre-TrustZone phones. On newer phones, you can't fake TrustZone, and eventually older phones will just always fail SafetyNet.
That sucks. If this is what the future holds for Android, I think I'm just gonna switch to Apple already. There's no point to Android if Google insists on destroying everything that made it great.
Yeah, for now. Android is barely open source anymore, the old apps were replaced with proprietary Google stuff. The Play Store locks everybody into Google's proprietary ecosystem and it can't be legally distributed with custom Androids. Now there's this hardware attestation business that ensures we can't hack our devices and apps anymore. I bet one day we won't even be able to install unsigned apps anymore.
By "mobile phone companies" I didn't mean mobile phone manufacturers. I meant mobile phone providers like Verizon, T-Mobile, etc. They are the ones who have wormed themselves into the role of gatekeepers for phone purchases (with government help). If phone manufacturers' hands are tied with regard to what they can put on their phones or what app stores their phones can use, they're tied by the phone providers, not by users.
I have watched YouTube instructional videos, but I can’t see the appeal of watching a movie on a tiny phone screen. As to messaging apps, SMS and email work just fine but for anyone who cares I suspect they would simply jump to whatever messaging app did work.
> As to messaging apps, SMS and email work just fine but for anyone who cares I suspect they would simply jump to whatever messaging app did work.
Absolutely not. Telecommunications applications have extremely strong network effects. There is no jumping ship to whatever works, people will do whatever is necessary to join the network their social circles participate in. In my country it's virtually impossible to communicate without WhatsApp. People buy phones just to run WhatsApp. I've had Signal installed for years and I've not received a single message there, not even from technologically minded friends who really should know better.
WhatsApp only has 500m daily average users worldwide, while being installed on 2 billion phones. Do you expect it to maintain it’s #2 spot for 10 years? None of them have had a run that long.
Does it matter? The fact is pretty much everyone in my country uses WhatsApp. There is no getting away from it. It's so absurdly important ISPs have stopped metering WhatsApp traffic. A phone that doesn't run WhatsApp is a literal paperweight.
Mobile telephony is irrelevant: 98% of incoming calls are automated marketing/scam calls, the rest are people who couldn't call me on WhatsApp for some reason. It gets to the point I wish I could turn it off. SMS is irrelevant: it's mostly 2FA codes, companies using it as a notifications system and phishing.
It matters because the segment of population in your country that doesn’t care about WhatsApp is a nucleus of adoption for both the next messaging app and a phone without WhatsApp. Facebook is already hedging it’s bets by owning and promoting the next most popular messaging app.
So what? Those people are essentially ostracized. They don't matter, they never mattered. Also, I guarantee you they still care about WhatsApp, even if the only thing they do is seethe about how dominant it is. I hate Facebook and its data collection yet look at me talking about WhatsApp. I'm actually happy that the people of my country are using something so secure. At least it has end-to-end encryption just like Signal.
Try living in a country where nobody asks girls for their phone number anymore. They ask them for their WhatsApp. Phone numbers are just an old idiotic thing you need to put into your contacts database to get the person to show up in WhatsApp. The WhatsApp word itself has become part of the language as a synonym for message, just like the Google verb has become a synonym for search in the anglosphere. People even compressed it into "zap" to make it easier to say. "I gotta go but I'll send you a zap later." Want to order some food? You want the restaurant's WhatsApp. Those that don't have a WhatsApp contact are losing so much money it's not even funny because it's better than every single food app out there. First day in college? The very first thing you want to do is join your class's WhatsApp group, or make one if it doesn't exist. Actually, you'll want to make two: one with your professors and another without. If you don't do this, you'll be so hopelessly out of the loop you might as well quit. I had classmates who barely had money to buy a cheap phone being forced to do so because they couldn't keep up with classes otherwise. Their phones had literally a single app and that app was WhatsApp.
WhatsApp once refused to comply with a court order to decrypt user messages during a child abuse investigation. It was impossible to comply because they didn't have the end-to-end encryption keys to begin with. The judge got mad and blocked WhatsApp nation-wide at the ISP level as punishment. You would not believe the disruption and outrage this caused. I remember teaching at least 10 friends how to bypass the block with VPNs. Not only was it an ineffective and unpopular measure, it lasted only a couple days before a higher authority undid the judge's decision. In my country, judges are perceived as gods who can do literally anything they want, but WhatsApp is so important it put some much needed humility into them. The judge wasn't punishing WhatsApp, she was punishing every citizen of my country by denying them access to such a vital tool. WhatsApp is so important they replied to the fucking judge in english instead of portuguese. I still remember the judge's pissed off face when she talked about that during a media interview. The nerve, right?
It is similar in the UK as well regarding WhatsApp. Not quite to the extreme you describe, but WhatsApp has 100% replaced SMS. No one uses SMS. It is all WhatsApp. People don't talk about texting they say "I'll WhatsApp you." If you join a new social circle, whether it's personal or professional, the first thing is to be added to the WhatsApp group.
The only thing I'll say about the security aspect though is the on-by-default cloud backups make the E2EE a red herring. Even if you turn it off on your own phone, it is almost certain the person you are talking to has it on. And if you turn it off it nags you to turn it back on after each update, most users will just do it to make the nagging go away, and FB know that.
My family lives mostly in the UK. None of them use Whatsapp. They still use SMS for random messaging, and they use Telegram for coordinated messaging. They range in age from 30 to 78. WhatsApp might be dominant, but "No one uses SMS" is almost certainly an overstatement.
Some people, especially those who have more international contacts, will prefer to use Telegram over WhatsApp sure. It is rare to find anyone under the age of 60 who uses SMS as their primary method of communication in 2021 though. The number of SMS messages sent in the UK has dropped by over 100 billion in the past slightly-under-a-decade.[1]
The page you linked says there were 48.68 billion SMS in 2020. Averaged across the population, that's on the order of 800-900 messages per person per year. Even if the actual SMS usage demographics skews older (quite likely), it's still likely that most people send at least one text per day, maybe more.
Given that the original claim was that "no-one uses SMS anymore", I think that's still demonstrably false. Your milder claim - "rare to find anyone under 60 who uses SMS as their primary messaging system" - seems likely to be true.
You missed out some vital context from the source of that statistic:
> The number of outgoing SMS and MMS messages sent in the United Kingdom (UK) fell to 48.68 billion in 2020, from a peak of 150.83 billion in 2012.
> The fall in the number of SMS and MMS messages sent over mobile networks in the UK, coincides with a surge in popularity of apps such as WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger. Globally, WhatsApp added 1.3 billion monthly active users from April 2013 to December 2017, replacing the need for sending SMS messages for many users.
Trust me, yeah someone's grandparents who don't own smartphones might use SMS, but the vast majority of the population does not. The stats are right there.
Also note that number of SMS messages sent is not the same as number of people using SMS as a form of communication. Most texts are sent by bots either for legit things like 2FA codes or less legit things like phishing.
We’re talking 2 texts per person, someone is sending a lot and junk isn’t enough to hit those numbers. Also, 2 factor identification is still usage.
Now it might not on top by number of messages even if it’s close, but that’s a different question. If you’re going to pick one and only one service to use then texting makes you reachable by the widest possible audience demonstrating it’s still #1 by adoption.
Haiti here. WhatsApp took off because SMS was still not free and the providers were rent seeking. It was either send 10 sms or have 50mb for exchanging messages. People even got to learn how to share the binary when their Play store got outdated. Phone call is still used a lot because 3g networks reception varies and people still buy feature phones. But SMS is gone and a lot of people disabled notifications for it as it’s only used for ads by the provider (and it was a big issue with the government tried to run health campaigns there). The next one is telegram for movies and TV shows sharing (no theater here). So yeah, WhatsApp has a lot of appeal here and no one care about privacy.
Yeah. SMS is not free here either. Probably. I don't even know, nobody uses it anymore. I do remember friends describing "plans" that included some number of free messages or whatever. I also remember the mobile service providers absolutely seething about WhatsApp. They lobbied the government for protectionism against the app that was disrupting their shitty services. Hilarious and sad at the same time. Wish these legacy corporations would just get wiped off the face of this earth so that humanity can make some actual progress instead of keeping these parasites on life support.
> But SMS is gone and a lot of people disabled notifications for it as it’s only used for ads by the provider (and it was a big issue with the government tried to run health campaigns there).
My mobile carrier also thinks it's acceptable to send me ads via SMS. The very first time they did this, I disabled all SMS notifications forever. The government also tried to send me COVID-19 related messages but I only saw them years later when I randomly decided to clean up my SMS inbox.
They have only themselves to blame, really. If they wanted a clean communications channel, they should not have allowed companies to pollute it with an infinite amount of worthless noise. Nobody wants to be subjected to advertising.
The so what is dominance gets eroded at the margins. It’s not the 99% who matter it’s all about what a tiny majority who actually care do everyone that really wants to talk to them will install the app that lets them. Then those people are suddenly spending time on another platform and it snowballs.
What’s really interesting is you essentially need isolation to get a steady state dominance by any one platform, but nobody is actually isolated any more. New platforms win not by slowly growing 5 or 10% a year but by crazy exponential curves where 30% more people install in a single month.
Having said that I don’t mean to suggest WhatsApp is going to die in Brazil tomorrow. Their currently is no real need to move right now.
It doesn’t matter if it’s close to 100% that’s not enough. There’s a huge difference between a solution with and without a seed crystal and the gap is plenty large for the next platform to win and win surprisingly quickly.
But we aren’t really talking about today we are asking about what happens when a new phone shows up without it. You don’t need to sell to everyone on day one they just need to erode dominance fast enough that it doesn’t stop adoption.
> we are asking about what happens when a new phone shows up without it
Nobody buys it.
Do Linux phones have access to WhatsApp? If not, there is no point. It will be a perfectly good mobile computer but it will never actually replace the one in my pocket. And that's coming from a programmer who loves Linux. Imagine the utter disdain normal people would have for a phone that doesn't even run WhatsApp.
Whatsapp used to be openly hostile against efforts for providing native client applications even for platforms they never plan to support themselves. Going as far as effectively attacking open source project developers working the clients - for an example see: https://reviewjolla.blogspot.com/2014/10/got-banned-in-whats...
Some sort of undefined behavior or possibly some per build random key that triggers imposter warning if the third party app fails to send the correct key ?
In any case totally evil behavior from their side. Its already bad enough they run totally proprietary centralized service with no public API & ignore any non-mainstream mobile platforms. But when they start banning users of third party clients on those platforms and go after third party client developers with presumably legal treats - that's pure evil, no way around it.
A Linux phone could run WhatsApp if the Linux distro was implemented in such a way that it could run Android apps (remember Android is basically just a runtime on top of the Linux kernel) and since AOSP is FOSS this is very doable and legal.
How commercially successful it'd be is still a different story, but it could run WhatsApp.
WhatsApp has no motivation to use SafetyNet. For one thing plenty of their users use cheap Chinese phones that aren't actually Google certified (but come with the Play Store anyway) and they know this full well from their analytics.
For another, SafetyNet is used primarily for DRM on streaming services and for banking or other financial apps. Absolutely no messenger uses it that I am aware of (unless you count Snapchat as a "messenger" but that's literally it).
Every FB owned app runs fine on Android devices that fail SafetyNet. No reason to believe that'll change because where's the benefit for FB?
> As to messaging apps, SMS and email work just fine but for anyone who cares I suspect they would simply jump to whatever messaging app did work.
Messaging apps have a network effect. You can't just jump ship from one at will, or you get cut off from all of your friends who didn't jump along with you.
They aren’t sticky enough on their own to avoid people just installing the next one. I think I have used 10 of the things at various points but SMS and email are still massively more popular. Remember Yahoo messenger etc?
This is a very US centric view. In virtually all of Europe, for instance, WhatsApp is the go to messenger and no one uses SMS anymore.
In some countries - primarily Russia, but also in Europe e.g. Germany and increasingly the UK - Telegram is also popular, and Viber is popular in African countries, while WeChat is used extensively in China, and so on... people have to use the messenger everyone else is on.
I do use Signal to chat to close friends, and Telegram has become popular enough as a second to WhatsApp that I often use it too, but as others have said it's a strong network effect.
The only other messenger I can remember having the position WhatsApp has was BBM back in the day. But as soon as BlackBerries went out of fashion it was all WhatsApp and has been ever since.
In 2020 and the UK alone 50 billion SMS text messages where sent, that’s quite a bit for something nobody uses. It’s very true people send use other platforms to send a lot of messages, but they all lack the utter ubiquity of SMS.
> The number of outgoing SMS and MMS messages sent in the United Kingdom (UK) fell to 48.68 billion in 2020, from a peak of 150.83 billion in 2012. The fall in the number of SMS and MMS messages sent over mobile networks in the UK, coincides with a surge in popularity of apps such as WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger.
> They aren’t sticky enough on their own to avoid people just installing the next one. I think I have used 10 of the things at various points but SMS and email are still massively more popular.
That works in a different way. Today you have WhatsApp and Signal. 95% of your friends are on WhatsApp and 5% are on Signal. Now let's say Signal starts taking over. In five years it's the other way around. This is possible because you can install them both on the same device during the transition.
If you buy a kind of phone that can run Signal but not WhatsApp at the time when 95% of your friends are still on WhatsApp, that doesn't work. You're not going to buy that phone right now because your friends haven't moved yet and won't for another five years.
First you have to spend five years getting everyone to switch messaging apps, and even then you can only switch platforms if the next messaging app to become popular runs on the new platform, which it generally doesn't, because nobody writes apps for platforms nobody uses and nobody uses platforms with no apps.
The usual solution to this is something like wine that allows you to run the old platform's apps on the new platform. But Google prevents that by encouraging third party apps to have dependencies on SafetyNet or some other Google services or code that the new platform can't easily implement as a result of excessive complexity or legal restrictions.
Your assuming the market is homogeneous with you. Someone buys their kids phone X because they don’t care. Now their kids friends are forced to use a different app to talk to those kids. Even tiny fraction of the market can force huge numbers of people to install and use a different messaging app.
The effect is like crystallization even if 99.99999% of a mixture is in state X only a tiny seed is needed because it’s a one way conversion. People have a reason to install app Y, and no real need to use app X over app Y but they do have a reason to use app Y over app X.
You don't get any crystallization when the people with the old phones can run both apps. The one kid gets the new phone, he convinces five of his closest friends to install that app, then those five people have both apps installed and use the other one to talk to the other billion people on the old app, none of which have any reason to switch.
Meanwhile the first kid could only convince five out of twenty friends to install the new app, and also couldn't run some other apps the new platform doesn't have, and then complains to the parents to return that phone and get a different one.
You say that like there isn’t any other popular apps for people to be switching to. Facebook messenger almost as popular for example and it isn’t like this would only happen to 1 family on the planet.
Further people often switch clients even when they have friends on the old platform simply because it’s the new thing. That’s how all the current major messaging platforms took off, none of them are very old.
You're still not addressing the underlying problem.
People switch to new messengers sometimes, true. But the next one isn't going to be yours unless you have a surplus of luck in addition to skill. The next one is with high probability going to be someone else's.
The real problem is that when it happens, you need the new one to support the new platform. Which it doesn't have any incentive to do when nobody uses the new platform. Convincing the next one to be on your platform is the same problem as convincing the existing one. The transition has nothing to do with it.
I am not saying winning is easy there’s probably hundreds of thousands of messaging apps written. I am saying winning isn’t worth nearly as much as people think.
Consider even just adding advertisements is enough to eventually lose the top spot because there is so much competition.
Considering actual adoption numbers I think I might be representing of most people in this. How many people do you know that actually watch Netflix on their phone?
I watch TV/movies almost exclusively on the phone. Not because it’s the best experience, but simply because it’s the only device that is on my person at all times. So it has been years since I thought in terms of going to a screen to watch something.
Which is still quite rare when you look at peoples cellphone network usage.
In 2020 the average cellphone user in North America only consumed 11.8 GB per month and the median is much lower. That really isn’t enough to be regularly be watching videos.
Not rare at all if you sit on a train and glance around you. I see people watching movies/TV on phones and tablets constantly out in public. Very common.
It's partly the reason I got a Fold 3. Very good for on the move media consumption.
As for data use, aside from the points already brought up - ability to download for later from Netflix, certain services not counting towards data usage on some plans, etc - Netflix and other streaming services will also know you are on a mobile network and provide a more compressed stream at a lower resolution (720p with lower encoding settings being common) to reduce data usage and buffering.
People on a train aren’t a representative sample, nor is every video on a cellphone Netflix. Tablets are of course another story people regularly watch movies on those because the screen isn’t tiny.
Which gets back to the basic point people don’t watch a lot of video on cellphones and Netflix is usage is even lower.
Netflix allows you to download and cache videos for later viewing, and some carriers don't count streaming videos on certain platforms against their users' data usage.
maybe if there was any other option. It's not like everyone on Android has a million distribution options. It's the most popular OS in the world and there is essentially one company that makes its own rules controlling what gets onto phones.
Might be similar to the last time this came up (i'm looking for it now, edit: found it[0]) where the developer worked with a sizable development-for-hire firm that were themselves associated with many other dev accounts, some of which ended up being suspended for ToS violations (possibly by this firm, possibly by the customer without the firm's knowledge). The anti-ban-evasion technology Google runs then effectively poisoned this firm's Play developer profile so that anyone working with them would be suspended for the potential ban evasion, eventually.
Note that, for this specific case, it might not be a firm but one of the developers themselves that has a poisoned account thanks to past dealings that violated ToS. I imagine the system only banning by associate if the $25 developer account itself ever uploads an app so that it doesn't ban associated Google accounts for non-play-developer purposes.
Ad fraud = ban, it’s not much more complicated than that.
It’s trivial to make a new developer account and release similar products, so as an App Store you can do things like looking for similarities between new apps and banned apps to root out simple “change of ownership” schemes like this.
Google can’t afford to take this lightly, games with fraudulent ad clicks can generate (i.e. steal) millions of dollars in ad spend from businesses who think they are getting legitimate impressions.
"It's not much more complicated than that" is the language of the oppressor. It's the view of the indifferent technocrat who would flatten the world into software, and is willing to steamroll over any human bits that stick out. Google's algorithmic reinterpretation of justice is a perversion of justice. The simplicity of its approach signs its abdication of its moral and legal responsibilities.
OP's story isn't remotely okay. Fraud is a complicated issue. Here's what's uncomplicated: OP are not frauds. Here's what uncomplicated: Google reneged on a (very one-sided) contract, and destroyed a business. Here's a really simple one: Google is an abusive monopoly.
Oppression can also be using locks to oppress robbers trying to get into your house. You can’t equate all oppression to unjust/anti-human-rights oppression.
I mean it's the language Google would use. It has a connotation akin to Stockholm syndrome: to accept the argumentative premise of the adversary who is taking advantage of you.
From what I gather, OP is an anonymous voice on the internet. He might as well be Indian, Russian, Bulgarian, etc. pretending to be a US developer. That might have led to the ban.
In a non-nuanced scenario, yes, because chances are the higher-ups are willfully ignorant on what sort of deals their marketing is doing, and will use the person as a scapegoat if they’re found out.
That would be reasonable if an employee committed ad fraud for the company in question, but not just because they've previously done so for a past employer.
Ad fraud = ban from everything a huge company offers? Seems a tad much when the company literally reaches into your pocket by owning your smartphone and/or livelihood.
Bans should be limited in time and scale.
This really must be regulated, Google and co should not be able to lock you out of your digital identity.
Do you have any example of situations where Google have "locked [anyone] out of [their] digital identity" for ad fraud?
As far as I can tell, this blog post is only mentioning the company's Android developer account being disabled. It in fact shows evidence that other access to the account is still available (e.g. screenshots from the account security checkup tool, which wouldn't be accessible if the whole account was disabled). This does seem limited in scale.
(Disclaimer: I work at Google, but not on anything related to this.)
"Guilt by association" is a bad way to run companies - especially when you don't even know who and how someone is guilty. They also do not apply rules fairly. Bigger companies like Facebook, Uber etc get to have more of a "human" connection to sort out issues while the small developer doesn't even get told what exactly they did wrong.
I don’t think malicious apps are making their money through Play Store purchases. Probably ads and data, and maybe by taking user credit cards directly.
> "Guilt by association" is a bad way to run companies
It's frighteningly common in big tech. Amazon is known for banning people for life because someone else with the same address returned too many items. Pick your roommates carefully I guess.
Google didn't give a reason in this case. Have you heard of a big company getting terminated like this without being given a reason? So as far as I know the rules are unfair.
One has to wonder how far this guilt by association goes. If my personal Google account is banned for one reason or another today, does that mean all the companies I have worked for in the past are also at risk of being banned? Could an app that I haven't had anything to do with for years get removed?
For any of the startup sized companies, this is totally a risk. I presume they wouldn't ban e.g. Twilio's account because one of their former or current employees got themselves personally banned, but there's certainly been accounts of it happening on HN to smaller companies where they hire a banned dev, and then the company's own accounts get banned (and on at least one occasion, their devs personal accounts too).
1) As you know this is super common and there is no recourse. Abandon Google, read something by Kafka, have some whisky.. life isn't over.
2) Take your IP and rearchitect your games for web or other platforms. Despite losing your user reviews and published applications, you clearly have something of value that was trending up. DO NOT let Google smite your startup by simply banning you. Android phones are not the only place where your IP can continue to thrive.
3) If you don't want to rearchitect, Consider selling your IP to another mobile developer. IP with a track record of positive reviews/downloads/cash flow is pure gold. There are websites where you can list your business and IP such as EmpireFlippers and Flippa.
4) Lastly.. having a team who is competent, you enjoy working together, and has success under your belt is also gold. What else can you do with this team to take the world by storm? I envy your position; I have not a team nor 1M+ users anywhere. Good luck friend.
What can I say... Oh yeah, that Google owes me a lot of money after terminating my adsense account for false reasons and added insult to injury by sending me a 50€ adword voucher to my _physical address_ like it solved anything?...
It was like 10/15 years ago, now everytime I have an opportunity to suggest businesses I work with not to use any of Google services, including GCP, I do exactly that.
I'd say, unless you signed an actual contract with Google, which agreeing to a bunch of random TOS really isn't, do not ever rely on Google services or SAAS, and certainly do not build your startup on any Google stack.
Why do you say "(and Facebook)"? Even if Facebook were this ban-happy, a lifetime ban from them is way, way less disruptive to most people's lives than a lifetime ban from Google is.
I realise this is an edge case, but if you don't have an FB account but you set one up to create a page for your business and set up ads for it etc, it'll likely get shut down very quickly by FB's algorithms. So basically if you are a non-FB user you cannot use FB ads.
I personally dislike FB. I don’t have a FB/Instagram/Whatsapp account and would hate creating one just to run ads.
Unfortunately I feel like 90%+ of my target audience uses Google for search and at least one of FBs properties. It’s hard not to want to advertise on those platforms.
Of course not. In app purchases might make sense for someone that has an app once they already have a pretty good audience, but the issue is how to build that audience in the first place.
I was wondering if the person I was replying to had any insights on that, given they were suggesting in app purchases as an alternative to Google/FB ads. Maybe they were suggesting in app purchases as an alternative to Google adsense? Which wouldn’t apply to my use case.
Google are horrendous (business partner), but at least you can publish and install .apk files without a store. Whether that's a sustainable business model is another thing entirely, but at least you can do it. Not even going to talk about Apple since that's just a more extreme example of the same problem.
From my POV, if you have a business and you rely entirely (or for the majority) of your income from these platforms, then your business is not sustainable and is not competitive. You're playing at a rigged game and you will most likely lose.
I stopped using 3rd party game engines for the same reason. I want to control my source and the potential income I get (if any). A lot of people won't agree with that. That's fine. Google and Apple's duopoly and their respective ecosystems are not good for the future of software. People have to take a stand at some point. These companies want to control every part of the tech stack (and our lives to extent), you should fight against that. We should all fight against that.
> You're playing at a rigged game and you will most likely lose.
Then the whole smartphone market is rigged. This is why I as a consumer will not buy a new smartphone anymore.
I went for a year or so without a smartphone at all. What I missed the most was maps, but you'd be surprised to learn how better off you are without social media pinging you 24/7.
I now use a second-hand smartphone without a Google account, and I use OsmAnd for maps.
Yes, it is rigged. I've had Android, WP (which I liked the most because of the tiles) and now I'm on iOS. I don't have social media on my phone. I use it for banking and maps mostly, but I also communicate with family through WhatsApp :/ I wish I could just get rid of it, but it's not possible for me to just use e-mail... At least not yet.
> As far as policy is concerned they have contacted us previously and we solved all of the issues to their satisfaction.
He admits they were in violation of policy previously and fixed it, but then repeatedly states they’ve never violated any policies. Curious what the original violations were for. While I know Google is notorious for things like this, it feels like they’re not telling the whole story.
Actually no, they didn't seem to admit any violations.
I've been in this game awhile, dealing with Google is a continuous stream of "we have a new policy and you now have 30 days to provide the URL of your official formal legal privacy policy." or whatever new policy they invent.
Usually its not terribly exciting or controversial. For example by next month ALL updated apps must target Android 11 aka API level 30 (AFAIK unless they've recently altered the date, etc). I'm not having a significant problem with that, but historically its been a pain occasionally.
AFAIK all in-app subscriptions have to support account hold and restore as of next month, as a policy example, I'm not in that game, but as I understand, its perfectly OK to not support that today; just make sure its all good by Nov 1st.
I see there's a new "data safety section" on the play app content page as of next April. I would casually interpret that as being similar but different from the privacy policy requirement in that the priv pol seems to cover all activities of a company whereas the app data safety section will lay out exactly what OS calls your app is making. Which begs the question of why the play store or the OS don't simply automate the whole thing seeing as they have a pretty good idea what the binaries are calling...
Anyway the play store list of requirements is in continuous flux and has been for years and probably will continue to change until it closes someday.
Just because they haven't announced the official deadline date probably sometime next year when you'll have to upload only Android 12 / API 31 as a minimum doesn't mean that just like clockwork "everyone" knows its coming in a year or two.
The legal contract says they only have to give 30 days warning; honestly they're almost always far more generous.
On one hand its continuous lifetime work for me until some random bot accidentally inevitably wipes me out; on the other hand its also not productive work and most of the changes Google demands don't really help anyone, not even GOOG. They're so random sometimes.
Yeah this part and the other comments about multiple malware infections makes me think this is an issue they caused with poor security practices.
Google support should still be better at this rather than banning with AI and never being flexible, but the developer is not exactly sounding blameless here.
The same thing can happen with Google Ads Accounts. I've seen a several ad agencies get totally destroyed when a client does something that violates the TOS and then you get the 'guilt by association' ban. Then this propagated out to all of their other client accounts because, well, guilt by association.
Rather than Google taking the time and effort to identify the single issue, it's FAR easier for them to just ban anything that touched those accounts. It is hands down my single biggest worry when working with Google. And why I immediately revoke access for anyone (including me) that does not need direct, active, access to any account. There is simply no way to talk to a real human and say, look, I've been working with you since you launched and this one account way over here that's 'new' did something you don't like and now I'm banned for life?
Would you consider password sharing the same account instead of inviting other people via email as a workaround? I'm thinking if it's only one account, the blast radius of 'guilt by association' is 0.
Or does Google associates even if you're logged in into multiple accounts in the same browser?
On the other hand,if all ad agencies were totally destroyed that would eliminate the incentive to collect our personal data and profile our browsing/purchasing information.
About 5 years ago I made a little app as a side project when I was learning to program. My play developer account was terminated without warning for breaking intellectual copyright rules.
I appealed and received an (automated?) response that my account would not be reinstated because I violated the publisher rules. The rule they said I broke? I integrated Spotify's API, which has a login page with the Spotify logo in it, and you're not allowed to use another company's logo inside your app.
Ridiculous, yes but it was more of a bummer than anything. This wasn't a startup, I didn't have investors or a lot at stake. I lost about $50 and a few hours time (and a Google Play Developer account).
The silliest thing was that if I could just get on the phone with a real human at a Google for five minutes they would have seen how ridiculous my ban was and the issue would have been resolved, no big deal. But alas, no human to be had, only an algorithm with too much power. I did some research on dev forums and found that several people had successfully sued Google and got their account back over wrongful terminations, (Didn't sound too expensive or difficult, most of the time Google didn't even show up in court) but according to the ToS you agree to, you have sue them in Mountain View if you bring legal action over anything.
I get why app stores ban publishers, I get why they don't just let everyone publish whatever they want. I bet for every false positive ban like mine, they ban 1000 Russian bot accounts spamming malware. We don't see the mountains of avoided malware, just the auto-banhammer going rogue from time to time. But if Apple and Google just had the slightest bit of customer support this would be much less of an issue.
To be clear, the root problem here is that Google gives their own app store an unfair advantage. Third-party app stores can't auto-update their apps, among other things, without the phone being rooted, which carries serious consequences for functionality (e.g., can't use the camera anymore on the Galaxy Z Fold 3, can't use Snapchat, Netflix, or Android Pay anymore on any phone, and on some phones you just can't root at all, period). If third-party app stores could fairly compete with the Play Store, then there'd be no issue at all with it having draconian and arbitrarily-enforced policies.
If you use Magisk you can just sideload Netflix from APK Mirror or Aurora Store and you're fine. Samsung stock ROMs specifically have extra Netflix DRM checks built in iirc, but if you're rooted disabling them should be easy, I'm sure there's open source scripts on xda that will do all this. Netflix is even fully functional on GrapheneOS despite it being a custom build which doesn't pass SafetyNet, although the bootloader is locked and it's not rooted, but still it fails SafetyNet and Netflix runs fine without any tricks.
Android Pay is easy to get working on a rooted phone you just need to slightly modify one single SQLite database. There are scripts to automate this on xda for certain, I used one before on my old Pixel.
Snapchat though is a lot more tricky yeah, they do their own checks outside of SafetyNet and it's a game of cat and mouse where whenever someone gets around one Snapchat adds five more. But then how many people still use Snapchat these days? Everyone I know just uses IG which works fine on a rooted phone.
> Android Pay is easy to get working on a rooted phone you just need to slightly modify one single SQLite database.
"You just need to slightly modify one single SQLite database" has got to be the most unintentionally amusing thing I've read all week. I'm happy to poke around in the internals of Android, but even most of my developer friends would see a process like that and go "nope, not worth the effort". Ordinary people do not know what SQLite is, or how to run scripts, so a barrier like that is a deal breaker for them.
You can run a script to do it for you, you don't even have to know what SQLite is, you just need to go on xda and run the script that makes Google Pay work.
Although I would argue that these concerns only apply to regular users who wouldn't bother rooting their phones in the first place. Most people who root their phones are willing to run scripts and know they need to be a bit hacky to make stuff work.
Users who are not willing to take that view shouldn't be rooting.
The only restriction they have for unrooted phones is lack of auto updates, a mild inconvenience at worst. You also have to hit "install" on a little pop up window when you install something. That's it.
Most regular users are capable of hitting an update notification manually.
Try getting a non-techie to set up Magisk on their phone though. And just doing it for them isn't a practical option unless you live with them, because then they won't know how to install the monthly OTA security updates anymore.
If you have a rooted phone you probably have Magisk, it's virtually the universal go to rooting app and the easiest method of rooting. You can even still get OTA's if your phone uses the A/B update system like basically every modern Android phone.
It is managed through a simple UI that automates most of this stuff for you, and it also has a library of third party extensions you can install as easy as apps from the Play Store that apply various system mods including the Google Pay hack.
Anyone who cannot work out how to use Magisk is unlikely to have a rooted phone in the first place. As I said, Magisk is the easiest and most common rooting method used these days because it is the most simple and convenient.
My Samsung phone came preinstalled with an unremovable third party app store. No root necessary. Maybe device manufacturers aren't considered third party?
Silent installation of applications without your confirmation or knowledge is a privileged permission reserved for preinstalled apps. So Samsung can provide a 3rd party store on their phones that can silently install applications on your phone while others can't.
This was changed in Android 12 (I think) where silent app installation is a grantable permission for other stores like F-Droid.
Those are preinstalled apps with system access just like the Play Store itself though. It is still true you cannot do auto updates with user installed app stores like F-Droid unless you root.
Personally I don't mind just hitting update all in F-Droid every now and then so it's no big deal to me, just saying it is functionality only apps with system permissions (meaning pre-installed only if the phone isn't rooted) are allowed to have.
If, as you said in another comment, this will change in Android 12 that's a cool development. I hadn't heard this previously.
The problem is not quite Google's behavior. It's legal for the same reason it's legal for you to not allow someone inside your house for bad reasons or no reasons at all.
The problem is that we've allowed digital marketplaces to achieve the kind of market power that would make a robber baron blush -- and we're not talking enough about how breaking up FAANG companies into multiple competing companies helps prevent the kinds of harms discussed in the blog above (as well as others).
I purchase software from no less than 5 different digital marketplaces on my computer, but I am all but prevented from downloading software on my phone that does not originate from the Play store. Monopolies are not good for markets.
I have F-Droid installed on all my Android phones. Admittedly it's something you must go out of your way to do, but you can put third party app stores on Android phones very easily, or just sideload apps individually if they have an official APK link (many do).
iPhones on the other hand, yeah very different story.
When I was a freelancer, I was warned by my legal help that taking a businesses site offline in response to non-payment was legally risky. There was a chance of being sued for disrupting their business.
I wonder if there are grounds for a (reasonable) legal suit here. Anyone in the know that can fill us in?
You're talking about self-help that isn't in a contract, right? The OP is talking about self-help developer account suspension that presumably is a right listed in the applicable TOS.
That's OK: then any settlement gets distributed to the ex-company's shareholders.
(Of course some entity needs to fund the lawsuit: if the company cannot, and the lawyers will not take it on contingency, then the shareholders would need to.)
Most people even when they think they're in the right won't take legal action. Even when they think they'll get a payout they won't take legal action. If they get threatened with legal action they'll automatically backdown.
I'm sure there are a multiude of reasons behind why this is. But I think part of it is on some level fight or flight. I am sure for a lot it's just not worth the hassle.
I'm hoping for the day someone does take them to court especially in the EU where they're less likely to put up with the corporate nonsense that the American courts seem to put up with.
I'm in the EU the cost to taking them to court here isn't that much. In fact, I'm in Germany where there are legal limits to how much a lawyer can charge so the cost is not a factor. Yet, I know people who back down and avoid legal fights even when they think they can win.
It is legal because of the contract between the developer and Google. In this case Google decided that the developer violated the contract's terms and terminated the account.
Also, there might have been a human review, and it was decided that termination is going to proceed, hence no basis for human to intervene.
In the US, there's something called a class action lawsuit.
"As of July 1, 2010, Quiznos was close to reaching a settlement over the multiyear class-action lawsuit that covers nearly 10,000 of its current and former franchisees. The case comprises four separate class-action lawsuits dating back to 2006 which consolidated in 2009 — involved allegations by attorneys for franchisees that Quiznos Franchise Co. LLC and other entities with ownership or control of the Quiznos chain had violated U.S. racketeering and corruption statutes."
This happens so many times and some people posted it on HN before. The most common reply is that you should not put all your eggs in someone else’s basket. I’m amused no one has posted that comment yet.
By the way, Google will most probably not restore the account, but I’d be interested to know whether it does because our startup is also similar to yours, and half of our eggs are in Google’s basket too. Please keep us (the community) updated.
IMO the fact that this is the best path is clear evidence that we need mobile app store reform. It's mind boggling to me that people still defend this status quo
Google didn't tell this company "you can't let this employee do anything with us". Google told them "since you hired this employee, none of you can ever do anything with us again, even if you fire him now".
In some parts of the world, that would be discriminatory against ex-convicts. If a person has been convicted and has served their penance, you are not allowed to use that fact in decisions concerning them.
Besides, why should we allow corporations to run their own private justice system?
"In some parts of the world" is an important part of that claim, and even if common, it may not be legal[1]. For instance, consider the requirements in the UK:
> Most convictions or cautions then become 'spent' after a specific amount of time. This might be after a few months or years, or straight away.
> You only need to tell a potential employer, university or college about a spent conviction or caution if all of the following apply:
> * they ask you to
> * they tell you that the role needs a standard or enhanced DBS check
> * it’s not removed ('filtered') from DBS certificates
> You can check if the employer, university or college is allowed to request the standard or enhanced DBS check. They can only do this for certain roles, for example if you’re working with children or in healthcare.
> It’s against the law for an employer, university or college to refuse you a role because you’ve got a spent conviction or caution, unless it makes you unsuitable for the role. For example, a driving conviction might make you unsuitable for a job as a driving instructor.
> Applicants do not have to tell you about criminal convictions that are spent. You must treat the applicant as if the conviction has not happened, and cannot refuse to employ the person because of their conviction.
Google isn't even telling you that that's what happened. Also as a developer who used to use ads until 5 years ago, I got a wrongful 1 month suspension claiming I was clicking my own ads even though I never did. It's obviously my words vs theirs but I know what my truth is. Yet Google claimed I was clicking my own ads and therefore gave me a 1 month suspension. That convinced me to stop using ads all together and since then, I have become even more reluctant to build Android apps. I just work on iOS apps instead. I hadn't built any android apps for past 5 years except last month when I finally built one because I was getting many user requests to have one.
I guess you missed all those stories of Apple doing the same thing to developers... even going as far as to shut down accounts when they want to use the features from their apps in the next version of iOS.
I have been making apps for both iOS and Android for past 10 years (I did take a 4 year break from Android though). While there's small bit of truth to your statement, I find dealing with Apple on pretty much every issue to be much better than dealing with Google. Maybe this is because of Apple charging the annual developer license fee.
With Apple, I always get to deal with an actual human when they reject an app or update and while their descriptions can be a bit vague, it seems to direct me in the right direction to fix the issue. With Google, it's a nightmare. For example, recently they banned DroidScript, one of the most popular IDE on Android accusing them of committing Ad Fraud, and the developer had to create a whole media storm to get them to re-instate the app after 25 days:
It s probaly because it has become impossible not to put your eggs in the same 2 baskets. How else are people going to make an app / how are they going to launch a startup without an app? (I know it s possible to go web only, but they 'll probably not be taken seriously by investors)
Very handwavy most of these stories seem to revolve around Google tying ad accounts and play store accounts, and having a VERY EXTREMELY heavy hand on ad accounts, which results in the banhammer smashing distantly related play store accounts.
The safest way to handle this is probably to not use both google play store and google ads. Going to be pretty hard to make an app without Play Store so I guess that means no using Google Ads. Too dangerous and Google will not support.
If you used, say, Facebook "audience network" ads, then no matter how angry Facebook gets, regardless if they're correct or not, at least your app would remain up.
Also if you're launching a startup you're probably not making much from ads and as using google ads is a HUGE existential risk for any app developer, you'd best not use ads. Its not like any end user ever used a startup's app because they like how well they implemented the ads.
The September intrusions detected sound pretty suspicious. I am sure there are plenty of bad actors trying to take over existing Google Developer accounts to use for spam/fraud, and it sounds like there was at least one compromised account and compromised device which could easily lead to other compromised accounts or persistent malware.
A way to think about this is to see Google (or Apple) as a De-Facto State which governs a very important "ecosystem" in which customers and other businesses rely almost exclusively on. Its very existence depends on businesses and people relaying for important aspects of their existence on them. This is how they stay big and relevant.
In this environment they must make decisions for the sake of their their own interests and sometimes to protect other users.
The problem is that like any non-democratic state there's no balance in power between the executive power (the company and its algorithms) and their stakeholders, so I would expect this to get worst and more damaging over time.
Is it possible that they put their actions under the inspection of another entity? Can we expect that every government and legislation put their own rules to govern Google and protect its users from them?
My guess, assuming the company is innocent and that this wasn't just a thinly veiled attempt by Google to purge the developers' gambling apps:
Google bans accounts by association. One of their accounts was logged into during a hack. They blocked the device, but the notification usually comes only after the login has already succeeded.
Assuming this wasn't the criminal's first hack, their device probably got flagged before by Google. If Google applied their logic to that device, they flagged this company's account (and probably all of these people's own Google accounts by association).
Google won't comment on this so I suppose we'll never know for sure. However, when the next company that the people behind this startup joins also gets banned, I'd consider the viral properties of Google bans proven and these developers could be considered "tainted" by our tech overlords.
Little bit confused as I thought being open Android App Store instead of closed iOS App Store was supposed to mean this is totally not a problem?
That’s the gist in the anti-Apple anti-walled-garden threads common during the Epic tussle; though some less popular comments have sounded skeptical, referencing stories like this.
From this thread, sounds like Android gets you 15% of the consumer wallet share for app spend compared to iOS 85% wallet share of app spend, but still has enough distribution curation woes to “destroy our startup”?
What’s the attraction then? Or is this melodramatic?
15% of the consumers is, I'm guessing, based on US marketshare?
The company in the OP here is not American, and outside of the US, Android has the majority of the smartphone marketshare in most of the world.
Despite what Americans often think this is not only true for "poor countries" either. In the UK it is pretty much 50/50 between iOS and Android. Most people have either an iPhone or Samsung. Usually the flagship models.
So there's very good reasons to target Android and it is very possible OP's company is simply in a country where Android smartphones dominate the market, not iPhones.
But yes regarding the Epic thing, you can indeed submit your apps to third party app stores including ones that come preinstalled on the major brands. Samsung Galaxy Store for example.
Note that share of handsets carried by consumers is very different from total and share of wallet spent on platform in U.K. too.
Put another way, when iOS was carried by 20% of consumers, it accounted for 80% of mobile app spend. As a paid app dev, the second number is important. As an ad-ware app dev, the first number matters more. For advertising conversions… it depends.
Google owes me money too. They screwed me back in the early years of this century by billing me for ad "hits" that were clearly bogus and I've never used their services since.
I still use their search engine but I always use duckduckgo first and I won't click on any of the advertised links the offer. Never.
If anyone hasn't figured out by now that Google is a predator who'll screw them out of everything they can, including their startup ideas, they will sooner or later.
This is par for the course with Google. Many Adsense accounts have been terminated for similarly vague policy violations. I am sure they catch a lot of bad actors, but they also catch a lot of folks who have no clue what they have done wrong, in many cases losing a large part of their income. Google does send warning emails, but they are so vague as to be useless in figuring out the violation.
For their Android apps they can launch on third party app stores besides F-Droid, for example Amazon Appstore, Samsung Galaxy Store, Huawei App Gallery, and I'm sure there's plenty of others... most users are likely to be on Samsung phones or one of the Chinese brands so getting your app on those stores should cover a lot of the customer base already.
For customers using other phones just tell them download Amazon Appstore and provide an APK download on the site for the lazy ones (but put a note saying using an app store is best to get updates etc.)
While it does damage business to not be in the Play Store, thankfully Android is flexible enough it's not a total killer if you get into other app stores customers are likely to trust, and they are likely to trust the app stores that are preinstalled on their phones.
It's also smart to not only be on one platform. Of course if their dev account got canned by Apple they really wouldn't have any alternatives, but it'd be very bad luck for them to genuinely have done nothing wrong but still have both Google and Apple ban them.
That's a really fair point - I had forgotten about the various manufacturer stores as I've never used them.
Come to think of it, distributing an raw APK isn't even that unreasonable (though more difficult to get exposure) - AFAIK this is how most gambling/bookie apps are distributed.
I haven’t read all of the comments, but I would like to add this note of caution to all startup founders: if your startup innovation, technology or business model is largely based on someone else’s capability and that capability alone, then you have designed a single point of failure into your business and a high degree of risk to your future business viability. Using capabilities like Google or Amazon have to offer is a great way to prototype your solution and to get initial customer feedback. But you can’t depend upon these services always being available. For example, just look at the number of products and interfaces that Google has changed or canceled in the past 15 years. So if you do decide to take this approach, just go into it knowing the risk you are taking.
I've talked to too many people who staunchly state that "it's a private company" when it comes to not caring about censorship in one sentence, but decry actions like this in the next, to really think there is an adequately beneficial solution to these types of problems.
As a mobile apps developer, this is extremely concerning to me. Google has a big crisis of trust. I no longer feel safe to even have personal apps connected to my real Google account - what if the Developer Account gets banned and my main email, Google Drive and all my life along with it? There were instances of people's entire Google accounts gone. That is catastrophic.
I now believe it is my duty to detract anyone from using Google Play-serviced Android devices. With the way Google treats their developers they should pay the price of shrinking market share.
I hope a change comes and Google starts being a more customer focused company. But they are notorious for providing bad customer support, and I just can't count on it.
It must be said that, to the extent Google destroyed their startup, it also created it by launching an app store. This developer built their apps on top of Google's ecosystem, in a world where these kinds of executions have happened before, many times, to many frustrated developers.
It is true that developers cannot make their own operating system and marketplace to compete with Google's, but it's also true that they do not need to get into the business of selling games on Google's Play Store in the first place. Equally true is the fact that Google is known to be an unfair, capricious, uncommunicative, and disinterested landlord.
Based on the author withholding some key details, my take is they know more than they say on why the account was terminated. The whole post was written assuming (correctly) that Google is too big to respond publicly and tell their side of the story, which would undoubtedly garner some support.
It's this type of behavior that caused me to drop google for everything except search long ago. You are not the customer, you are the product or in many cases a vessel for the product which is ads and nothing more.
After reading all these stories it feels like Google has a policy of "sunsetting" a certain amount of projects per year. When the company is out of them, it's gonna be yours
Huge kudos to Google for stopping a shady studio that can hardly secure its own network from releasing possibly security compromised apps to Android users!
They could but Google's AI would likely pick it up instantly and they actually would have broken the ban evasion rule at that point so they wouldn't have a leg to stand on when accusing Google of being unfair.
I have a feeling these things are caused by jealous Google engineers. Once they see an app or company being successful they will find ways to mess up the business. Either through their store account or their Google rankings. We’ve seen these stories too many times.
Disclaimer: I work for Google, not involved with app moderation.
I am pretty sure most engineers don't have access to do such things. And certain that doing something like that is an effective way to terminate ones career.
I'm also pretty sure no lawyers at Google want anyone to get manually involved with search rankings. If anyone did that it would open a massive can of worms, one the smart lawyers knows should never be opened.
Obviously, I cannot say for certain if what you’re saying is correct or incorrect. However, if you’ve read HN for any length of time, you would have seen that Google clearly manipulates search results to control competition or to punish certain companies.
Furthermore, no company would be asinine enough to allow bots, AI, or ML make decisions without a way to undo those changes. This tells me that Google employees are doing these things or your contractors are.
> Furthermore, no company would be asinine enough to allow bots, AI, or ML make decisions without a way to undo those changes.
Sadly this is actually the norm across all these big tech platforms these days. Algorithm bans an account, humans might give it a look later if a big enough fuss is kicked up about it, else there is no appeals.
Of course there is a button a human can press to undo these things, but the trouble is getting a human to bother looking at it in the first place.
Google, Facebook, Twitter, Discord all do the same thing.
First of all sorry for my bad English. It is not my first language so. Thanks for the open discussion and your support!
It's my bad i should have mentioned more stuff to our medium post so that it won't leave readers with any confusions. Please pardon me as this was my first post. I've never had written anything before.
You might got some questions like
Q: Who are we?
A: We are simply a india based gaming startup. We had 8-10 games published on our plays store account.
Q:Why do we mentions address of UK on our tweeter handle?
A:. According to google policy we have to provide a physical address if we want to use in-app-purchases. This physical address is visible publicly on our games pages.
Reason providing our uk address is we have a representative living there who can reply to any type of physical communications such as letters on behalf of us. He also can reply to various other stuffs like GDPR and different other policies. For ex. You can send a latter to the given address to get in touch with us!Please note that google asks for communication address not the business registered address to show it publicly. Our business registration address already submitted to them but it's not just public.
Q: Where can i find your games incase i want to see them?
A: You can find it on apk pure. You can search "tonk" you'be able to see our account "6Ace Games", also we had added the link in our medium post in bottom. Please check!
Q:How me monetized our games?
A: Through admob and in-app products. Nothing shady!
Q: Does the games targeting children?
A: No not at all, all our games are rated 18+ adult category
Q:Our games was providing gambling?
A: No, It's just simulations. You can't win money or bet money, Not at all!
Q: what about your domain 6acegames.com?
A: Yes, our domain 6acegames.com is new. The reason behind it is very silly you may find it funny but still let me tell you!, at first we have bought domain sixacegames.com(you can check reg. details) thinking it will help in seo and all because we didn't want to include a number "6" in our domain. But later after our games got popular user started searching for 6Acegames that's why we bought this domain as well in may 2021 just to build the presence on google search.
Q:Why no presence on LinkedIn?
A: Try searching "Whyphy Infotech". 6Acegames is just business name we use!
Q: What about social media?
A:we are not very active in social media. As you can see in our tweeter handle we have 0 followers. The reason is simple we never promoted it to our users. Although we have some followers on our Instagram handle, but they follow us because we provide free perks occasionally to our audience.
This is one reason why I was hoping web apps would be more popular then jail-apps... I'm still hoping for an open future but I'm not holding my breath... why even block linux native apps on android?
[1] http://www.6acegames.com/#contact-section