This is the problem with these companies having so much power. I had my Amazon seller account banned over a decade ago for a single bad review. I believe it was a competitor, because I had already refunded the customer and the negativity/review just didn't make sense.
There was nobody to talk to and support just redirected me to an inbox that bounced.
At time time, it destroyed my business that I had been building on the platform for five years and it took me some time to rebuild (in a different industry and not on anyone's platform).
I finally got my account back a few months ago with no explanation.
Hmm, perhaps the law should be that any business selling to the public has to provide a way to get human led support/contact someone at the company? Not sure how it'd work for companies whose entire purpose is "ultra cheap product/service without any guarantees" (like many unmanaged hosting providers), but it'd certainly force Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc to actually support their customers in some way or another.
> Not sure how it'd work for companies whose entire purpose is "ultra cheap product/service without any guarantees" (like many unmanaged hosting providers)
Hopefully the same way the law works for a company that won't pay above minimum wage - completely destroyed in the legal system.
I'm sorry if your business plan doesn't conform with law. Perhaps you should focus on a business plan that does conform with the law.
We may also want to popularize the idea of not building you business with someone else's platform. If people were more skeptical of these firms in the last few decades they wouldn't have gotten off the ground in the first place.
It's hard to square this with the Amazon of today where sellers openly sell fake products or change the listing from one product to another and seem to face no consequences.
A few weeks ago, Google Play killed Cheogram (a XMPP communications suite). The details of the "Anti-Idle: Reborn" takedown are quite similar, and there has been some speculation among devs that Google has delegated too much of the app analysis legwork to AI.
Disclaimer: I have no relationship with Cheogram, other than being annoyed at Google Play disappearing a useful app for which I paid $5.
Problems like this show why publishing outside of Google Play is necessary. I wrote about why I think F-Droid is the best alternative app store to use.
Chicken and egg. People need to also host on F-Droid to pull more users to F-Droid. Eventually if enough momentum is built towards F-Droid, dropping Google Play wouldn't be too much of an issue. Granted this is a really long longshot, but Google Play could use some serious competition amd the more apps that host on multple app stores, the more likely that is to happen.
> In my experience, a shit game on steam will make 3 figures if you're lucky. A shit game on Switch will make four figures most of the time.
Is that a good metric? Ideally shit games _should_ make very little money. Don't we want to look at what decent games are making and how they're doing?
If a crap game makes money on the platform, a decent or good game is likely to make more.
If you're doing full time game development on your own (like the linked blog post), your metric is probably more along the lines of "which platform is most likely going to give me enough money to not reverse mortgage my home or sell a kidney."
Steam is a tough marketplace. Crappy games do really bad. Great games don't do much better. You can sink a 1~3 years in an objectively good game and make $10k. It's a terrifying market for someone doing fulltime game development.
My general advice is make smaller games (1-6 months of dev time) and target consoles unless you have a good reason to be on steam.
Trying to talk to a tech giant is like trying to talk to the borg. I don’t know when it became acceptable to just have no customer service or someone to talk to at all.
A long time ago I operated an email blacklist. Since then I don't just trust by default when people shout "they banned me for absolutely no reason, I swear!".
I am not saying anything about this case, I just notice people on HN always take these post as 100 percent true. When money is involved, people get caught and their revenue affected they are capable of spinning the wildest tales.
A while back, I operated the postfix mail servers for a B2B app. AFAIK the only way to get email from these servers was to work at a company using our product, add your email to the app, and explicitly opt into getting notification emails. And even then, the only emails they'd send were transactional emails; the marketing dept did their own unrelated thing. In spite of this, we semi-regularly found our servers blacklisted for allegedly sending spam. Since then I don't just trust by default when people add things to blacklists.
All this is to agree with the sibling comments; maybe your priors give you a particular default view, but it's not universally shared, and even so Google rather suffers from a long history of banning people in ways that sure look arbitrary and then refusing to say anything about it to anyone, which rather assists in the banned party looking sympathetic.
> they banned me for absolutely no reason, I swear!
I tend not to believe the "no reason" part, but I still stand on their side when their privileges are revoked without human intervention and without a human customer support agent available by phone.
I tend to always assume that when people say absolutely no reason, they mean no reason provided. What makes it worse is that there is usually no way to know because they cannot even get to talk to someone. I understand that fraud detection people don't want to let their methods public but this became the norm for most/all companies.
> Since then I don't just trust by default when people shout "they banned me for absolutely no reason, I swear!".
Email shenanigans and the shenaniganiers will quickly erode any sense of faith in your common man. That said, it's easy to believe these stories after dealing with support at any number of big tech companies.
Microsoft will be selling games on Android next month, Epic will be next year. The solution is competition, and we can thank Tim Sweeney for finally making it happen on mobile.
I honestly can’t tell if the judges in these anti-trust cases intentionally screw up the penalties.
Instead of forcing Google to do a thing they already do (allow alternative app stores on android), they could have banned them from distributing apps that require Google Play Services (i.e., all apps must run well on the open source version of android, which must be permissively license, and manufacturers would incur no penalties for shipping other mobile operating systems).
That would instantly open the android ecosystem up to competition by making AOSP (and things like Lineage/Graphene) viable competitors.
When these topics reach the mainstream breaking point, I swear things invariably end up going the wrong way. Look at the current movement to "break up Google" into independent verticals that will still each have their own network effects. Effective anti-trust would be focusing on separating the markets for hosted services from that for client software, by forcing their debundling with open APIs and whatnot.
I think it has to do with the difference between top-down and bottom-up perspective. Top-down politicians/regulators/courts/whatnot end up looking at these things of how they can be contained and controlled (regardless of how they will continue wielding the leverage that allows them to dominate their specific market), whereas bottom up we look at what it would actually take to actually create some competition (despite such attempts inherently looking like baby steps at the start).
It's not the judge screwing up, it's you. You are showing incredible "tech nerd" bias by thinking Lineage or Graphene are "competitors" or that they could or will matter. They're nerd hobbies, they affect less than a hundredth of a percent of Android devices, and do not matter.
What the judge did ban is a bunch of things Google did you may not have even realized they were doing, like the terms in the MADA agreements all manufacturers like Samsung, LG, etc. were required to sign which prevented any competition and required Play Services. The judge also banned revenue sharing agreements with manufacturers and mobile carriers used to prevent companies from using different search engines or app stores.
Nobody, figuratively, will ever care about some custom ROMs. But the judge has broken all of the means Google was using to control device manufacturers.
Welcome to dystopia. Your lifeline ends due to some automatic flagging and you are banging your head against semi-automated processes and autogenerated "we are looking into it" replies and the only way forward is a public outcry via blog/HN. I hate this timeline very much.
Good luck with your appeal process!
Even Zuckerberg complains that every time they patch some of the Meta's apps on the App Store they need to wait days or weeks in order to get approved. If Facebook and Instagram are not important to Apple and most probably Google too then we can't be surprised that indie devs get cold feet.
A company not giving priority to some of their biggest customers/revenue generators/whatever is a sign that there's deeper rot within that company. See the recent fiasco with Mozilla mishandling the uBlock Origin/Lite dev for another example of this.
Suppose you're running a company, and you have two clients. One brings you $20,000 in profit a year, the other brings in $600,000 a year. Both of them have some sort of issue they need to resolve and report it to you at almost the exact same time. Let's say the smaller company reports it slightly earlier. But you only have enough manpower to solve the issues one at a time. Whose do you solve first?
The incredibly obvious answer to 99% of people is to solve it for the company that brings you 30 times more profit than the other. Any other answer is a sign of severe dysfunction and or insanity in the company.
Makes me think of ecology, and creatures (e.g., mites) that have high risk/high reward strategies. Sometimes you find a bubble of food and have lots of offspring! But mostly you die.
I can't remember where I read about this -- DHH, maybe -- but it's also the difference between going for a sustainable business or venture capital. VCs don't care if most of their investments die horribly as long as a few make them rich. But the people who work for those businesses might care.
Sometimes it's better for your own mental health to avoid these "opportunities".
Yeah, gotta love the modern conveniences of fobbing your customers off to automated hell. Reminds me of my experience buying something on eBay without creating an account, having a problem with the item and no way to contact the company other than creating an eBay account and reaching out to the seller. Well, that went well as I was instantly blocked, terminated and told to never return. All I did was contact the seller with my order number, as presented by eBay, through eBay. The customer service drone was very unhelpful. Hope the OP has better luck with Google.
I’m not saying it’s the author’s fault, but their metadata has many “yellow” flags… it looks like a copycat of a popular flash game, the author’s name is atypical, and they admitted to already have 2 strikes on Google Play Console. None of this is their fault, and it’s certainly a false positive. I know they’ve put in hundreds of hours of sweat on the code, but perhaps they could turn their focus to registering a corporation, getting trademark for “anti-idle”, and linking the DUNS to their app store accounts.
> it looks like a copycat of a popular flash game, the author’s name is atypical
That popular flash game is the game of this author.
> I am Tukkun, an indie game developer making games since 2008. My most significant work is a PC Flash game I made back in 2009 called Anti-Idle: The Game, uploaded to the website Kongregate.
> perhaps they could turn their focus to registering a corporation, getting trademark for “anti-idle”, and linking the DUNS to their app store accounts
Sorry, I have an honest question as it's not marked and I can't quite figure it out - is this sarcasm?
Or Google could use some of the US$ 50b of profit in a quarter to have better systems and human support for this kind of automated bullshit.
How many more hoops will people have to jump through because a company holding a very significant share of the market refuses to provide a basic level of support to people, people that are helping to enrich Google's own ecosystem by developing apps for their platform?
Because if it doesn't at some point the regulation hammer will come down on it, do you prefer your company to decide for itself how to approach customer support or do you prefer legislators to dictate how it should behave?
That's the risk it takes, without support it will build up many similar cases to this one, until at some point the levee breaks and some legislator wanting to champion this issue as a cause will come for it.
Or you can be short-sighted and see it as a waste, it's your choice.
Notwithstanding the morality of it, of course, but since you are speaking financially I think we both know you don't care about that angle.
This is the problem with these companies having so much power. I had my Amazon seller account banned over a decade ago for a single bad review. I believe it was a competitor, because I had already refunded the customer and the negativity/review just didn't make sense.
There was nobody to talk to and support just redirected me to an inbox that bounced.
At time time, it destroyed my business that I had been building on the platform for five years and it took me some time to rebuild (in a different industry and not on anyone's platform).
I finally got my account back a few months ago with no explanation.
This is the kind of thing where some level of regulation might actually improve things.
Hmm, perhaps the law should be that any business selling to the public has to provide a way to get human led support/contact someone at the company? Not sure how it'd work for companies whose entire purpose is "ultra cheap product/service without any guarantees" (like many unmanaged hosting providers), but it'd certainly force Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc to actually support their customers in some way or another.
> Not sure how it'd work for companies whose entire purpose is "ultra cheap product/service without any guarantees" (like many unmanaged hosting providers)
Hopefully the same way the law works for a company that won't pay above minimum wage - completely destroyed in the legal system.
I'm sorry if your business plan doesn't conform with law. Perhaps you should focus on a business plan that does conform with the law.
They should at least give companies a premium tier where human support is guaranteed.
I suspect they think they are less likely to be sued if they offer no explanation
We may also want to popularize the idea of not building you business with someone else's platform. If people were more skeptical of these firms in the last few decades they wouldn't have gotten off the ground in the first place.
It's hard to square this with the Amazon of today where sellers openly sell fake products or change the listing from one product to another and seem to face no consequences.
A few weeks ago, Google Play killed Cheogram (a XMPP communications suite). The details of the "Anti-Idle: Reborn" takedown are quite similar, and there has been some speculation among devs that Google has delegated too much of the app analysis legwork to AI.
Disclaimer: I have no relationship with Cheogram, other than being annoyed at Google Play disappearing a useful app for which I paid $5.
Problems like this show why publishing outside of Google Play is necessary. I wrote about why I think F-Droid is the best alternative app store to use.
https://rocket9labs.com/post/on-the-importance-of-f-droid/
what does it matter if F-Droid has 0.001% of the reach and audience of Google Play Store
Chicken and egg. People need to also host on F-Droid to pull more users to F-Droid. Eventually if enough momentum is built towards F-Droid, dropping Google Play wouldn't be too much of an issue. Granted this is a really long longshot, but Google Play could use some serious competition amd the more apps that host on multple app stores, the more likely that is to happen.
Game looks awesome....release it on Steam.
Steam is a mess. It looks like it would do well on the Switch and you'd make a lot more money on console.
Saying that the Nintendo/Switch developer experience is better then valve/steam... Needs citations to say it mildly.
I never said the developer experience was better. I said the money was better.
In my experience, a shit game on steam will make 3 figures if you're lucky. A shit game on Switch will make four figures most of the time.
> In my experience, a shit game on steam will make 3 figures if you're lucky. A shit game on Switch will make four figures most of the time.
Is that a good metric? Ideally shit games _should_ make very little money. Don't we want to look at what decent games are making and how they're doing?
If a crap game makes money on the platform, a decent or good game is likely to make more.
If you're doing full time game development on your own (like the linked blog post), your metric is probably more along the lines of "which platform is most likely going to give me enough money to not reverse mortgage my home or sell a kidney."
Steam is a tough marketplace. Crappy games do really bad. Great games don't do much better. You can sink a 1~3 years in an objectively good game and make $10k. It's a terrifying market for someone doing fulltime game development.
My general advice is make smaller games (1-6 months of dev time) and target consoles unless you have a good reason to be on steam.
>Steam is a mess.
Please elaborate? It's the best we have as of today for PC gaming.
Mobile shovelware devs hate it because it's a stark reminder that no adult finds value in their product.
I do love this statement
"Why is it so hard to scam people on this platform????"
Switch is absolutely the worst store I've ever used. There are no useful ways to browse the content and no ratings or reviews on anything.
Neither does Netflix, Apple TV etc. Many people believe reviews go against the curation paradigm and have their own problems (such as review bombing).
This kind of policy and publicity leads to drops in app quality. Seems quite risky to spend time and money on mobile app development.
Trying to talk to a tech giant is like trying to talk to the borg. I don’t know when it became acceptable to just have no customer service or someone to talk to at all.
> I don’t know when it became acceptable to just have no customer service or someone to talk to at all.
The word that makes anything acceptable is "cheap". We love to buy cheap and complain about quality. But hardly anyone buys quality, if any!
complaining costs $0
A long time ago I operated an email blacklist. Since then I don't just trust by default when people shout "they banned me for absolutely no reason, I swear!".
I am not saying anything about this case, I just notice people on HN always take these post as 100 percent true. When money is involved, people get caught and their revenue affected they are capable of spinning the wildest tales.
A while back, I operated the postfix mail servers for a B2B app. AFAIK the only way to get email from these servers was to work at a company using our product, add your email to the app, and explicitly opt into getting notification emails. And even then, the only emails they'd send were transactional emails; the marketing dept did their own unrelated thing. In spite of this, we semi-regularly found our servers blacklisted for allegedly sending spam. Since then I don't just trust by default when people add things to blacklists.
All this is to agree with the sibling comments; maybe your priors give you a particular default view, but it's not universally shared, and even so Google rather suffers from a long history of banning people in ways that sure look arbitrary and then refusing to say anything about it to anyone, which rather assists in the banned party looking sympathetic.
I get that life experiences give you biases. Those of us who've been blamed for things we definitely didn't do might have the opposite bias.
Either way, organizations that cannot communicate why they took certain actions are not to be trusted.
> they banned me for absolutely no reason, I swear!
I tend not to believe the "no reason" part, but I still stand on their side when their privileges are revoked without human intervention and without a human customer support agent available by phone.
I tend to always assume that when people say absolutely no reason, they mean no reason provided. What makes it worse is that there is usually no way to know because they cannot even get to talk to someone. I understand that fraud detection people don't want to let their methods public but this became the norm for most/all companies.
> Since then I don't just trust by default when people shout "they banned me for absolutely no reason, I swear!".
Email shenanigans and the shenaniganiers will quickly erode any sense of faith in your common man. That said, it's easy to believe these stories after dealing with support at any number of big tech companies.
> operated an email blacklist. Since then I don't just trust
Curious how much you could share more details about what you discovered during that time?
Google will leave apps that have viruses, spyware, and malware. They’ll remove legitimate apps.
Whoever they outsourced these app reviews to is just sabotaging Google Play.
Microsoft will be selling games on Android next month, Epic will be next year. The solution is competition, and we can thank Tim Sweeney for finally making it happen on mobile.
I honestly can’t tell if the judges in these anti-trust cases intentionally screw up the penalties.
Instead of forcing Google to do a thing they already do (allow alternative app stores on android), they could have banned them from distributing apps that require Google Play Services (i.e., all apps must run well on the open source version of android, which must be permissively license, and manufacturers would incur no penalties for shipping other mobile operating systems).
That would instantly open the android ecosystem up to competition by making AOSP (and things like Lineage/Graphene) viable competitors.
When these topics reach the mainstream breaking point, I swear things invariably end up going the wrong way. Look at the current movement to "break up Google" into independent verticals that will still each have their own network effects. Effective anti-trust would be focusing on separating the markets for hosted services from that for client software, by forcing their debundling with open APIs and whatnot.
I think it has to do with the difference between top-down and bottom-up perspective. Top-down politicians/regulators/courts/whatnot end up looking at these things of how they can be contained and controlled (regardless of how they will continue wielding the leverage that allows them to dominate their specific market), whereas bottom up we look at what it would actually take to actually create some competition (despite such attempts inherently looking like baby steps at the start).
It's not the judge screwing up, it's you. You are showing incredible "tech nerd" bias by thinking Lineage or Graphene are "competitors" or that they could or will matter. They're nerd hobbies, they affect less than a hundredth of a percent of Android devices, and do not matter.
What the judge did ban is a bunch of things Google did you may not have even realized they were doing, like the terms in the MADA agreements all manufacturers like Samsung, LG, etc. were required to sign which prevented any competition and required Play Services. The judge also banned revenue sharing agreements with manufacturers and mobile carriers used to prevent companies from using different search engines or app stores.
Nobody, figuratively, will ever care about some custom ROMs. But the judge has broken all of the means Google was using to control device manufacturers.
You can already sell android games on itch.io
Welcome to dystopia. Your lifeline ends due to some automatic flagging and you are banging your head against semi-automated processes and autogenerated "we are looking into it" replies and the only way forward is a public outcry via blog/HN. I hate this timeline very much. Good luck with your appeal process!
Even Zuckerberg complains that every time they patch some of the Meta's apps on the App Store they need to wait days or weeks in order to get approved. If Facebook and Instagram are not important to Apple and most probably Google too then we can't be surprised that indie devs get cold feet.
I mean, that's good right? They aren't getting special treatment over anyone else.
A company not giving priority to some of their biggest customers/revenue generators/whatever is a sign that there's deeper rot within that company. See the recent fiasco with Mozilla mishandling the uBlock Origin/Lite dev for another example of this.
The size of a paycheck has zero dictation of priority
What dumbbells are out here optimizing for that?
Are you serious?
Suppose you're running a company, and you have two clients. One brings you $20,000 in profit a year, the other brings in $600,000 a year. Both of them have some sort of issue they need to resolve and report it to you at almost the exact same time. Let's say the smaller company reports it slightly earlier. But you only have enough manpower to solve the issues one at a time. Whose do you solve first?
The incredibly obvious answer to 99% of people is to solve it for the company that brings you 30 times more profit than the other. Any other answer is a sign of severe dysfunction and or insanity in the company.
Makes me think of ecology, and creatures (e.g., mites) that have high risk/high reward strategies. Sometimes you find a bubble of food and have lots of offspring! But mostly you die.
I can't remember where I read about this -- DHH, maybe -- but it's also the difference between going for a sustainable business or venture capital. VCs don't care if most of their investments die horribly as long as a few make them rich. But the people who work for those businesses might care.
Sometimes it's better for your own mental health to avoid these "opportunities".
Yeah, gotta love the modern conveniences of fobbing your customers off to automated hell. Reminds me of my experience buying something on eBay without creating an account, having a problem with the item and no way to contact the company other than creating an eBay account and reaching out to the seller. Well, that went well as I was instantly blocked, terminated and told to never return. All I did was contact the seller with my order number, as presented by eBay, through eBay. The customer service drone was very unhelpful. Hope the OP has better luck with Google.
Part of me hopes a breakup of Google will fix this nonsense, another part of me worries it will only make things worse.
If it makes it worse, the break-up will help the pieces die and be replaced. Or at least make it more likely, absent the huge monopoly advantage.
> Welcome to dystopia
The end-game of capitalism is where companies start to recursively regulate their own markets. Perhaps government regulation wasn't so bad after all?
I’m not saying it’s the author’s fault, but their metadata has many “yellow” flags… it looks like a copycat of a popular flash game, the author’s name is atypical, and they admitted to already have 2 strikes on Google Play Console. None of this is their fault, and it’s certainly a false positive. I know they’ve put in hundreds of hours of sweat on the code, but perhaps they could turn their focus to registering a corporation, getting trademark for “anti-idle”, and linking the DUNS to their app store accounts.
> it looks like a copycat of a popular flash game, the author’s name is atypical
That popular flash game is the game of this author.
> I am Tukkun, an indie game developer making games since 2008. My most significant work is a PC Flash game I made back in 2009 called Anti-Idle: The Game, uploaded to the website Kongregate.
> I’m not saying it’s the author’s fault
>the author’s name is atypical
I would like to know what you consider a "typical" name for the 2+ billion Android users.
> perhaps they could turn their focus to registering a corporation, getting trademark for “anti-idle”, and linking the DUNS to their app store accounts
Sorry, I have an honest question as it's not marked and I can't quite figure it out - is this sarcasm?
Or Google could use some of the US$ 50b of profit in a quarter to have better systems and human support for this kind of automated bullshit.
How many more hoops will people have to jump through because a company holding a very significant share of the market refuses to provide a basic level of support to people, people that are helping to enrich Google's own ecosystem by developing apps for their platform?
> Alphabet net income for the quarter ending June 30, 2024 was $23.619B, a 28.59% increase year-over-year.
Seems like they have a winning strategy. You get what you pay for.
As a Google shareholder, why should my company waste money on support?
Because if it doesn't at some point the regulation hammer will come down on it, do you prefer your company to decide for itself how to approach customer support or do you prefer legislators to dictate how it should behave?
That's the risk it takes, without support it will build up many similar cases to this one, until at some point the levee breaks and some legislator wanting to champion this issue as a cause will come for it.
Or you can be short-sighted and see it as a waste, it's your choice.
Notwithstanding the morality of it, of course, but since you are speaking financially I think we both know you don't care about that angle.