[gogopuppygogo]

Years ago, a family member of mine hired a college student to develop an informational application for their small business. This app offered reference guide type information for a niche. To set expectations, my family member paid sub $10k for the entire app to be developed when mobile apps were new.

After a few years it had attracted a few thousand users but needed updating and the developer was non-responsive. The family member of mine was non-technical and had allowed the developer to publish the app under their own developer account.

A saga begins that I won't bore everyone with the details but basically this family member didn't want to lose the thousands of users. They tried to get the developer to send them the app to maintain but the developer was non responsive. They tried to enforce their trademark on the app but Google would only delist it.

Now they had no listing at all for their company so they tried to start over. They tried to create a new app with the same name but Google's review process wouldn't let them because another app had already existed with that name. Armed with a trademark and people we knew who worked at Google we got exactly zero steps further after three months of trying to work with Google on the issue.

Eventually, we tracked down the mother of the developer who had ghosted on us and paid them to give us their developer account. Where we showed the trademark, had the app re-activated, and moved it to another Google account we controlled.

Basically, Google couldn't help us at all. It was a mess. Eventually we got things sorted but we had to go around Google.

Was this Google's fault? Heck no. The family member got unprofessional help from a student developer who ghosted on them but Google didn't make it easy to fix the issue. They made it impossible.

[bartvk]

So to recap: party Foo tries to take over the developer account of party Bar, using trademark law. Google makes this not possible.

How is this a problem?

[toast0]

Party Foo allows party Bar to release an app using Foo's trademark. Party Foo wishes to release their own app using their trademark, as they've rescinded the permission of party Bar. Google makes this not possible.

How is that not a problem? Yes, parties Foo and Bar probably used the wrong procedure when releasing the app, but can't fix that.

Google has no exception handling ability, and it's awful. You can't merge G suite organizations when there's a corporate merger. Clearly, you should have known five years ago, that you were going to be purchased by X. Same story, no exception handling.

[anonymousiam]

Google is not alone when it comes to poor exception handling. The case you cite (a corporate merger) is something they should absolutely support.

I recently had a problem with Dell/VMWare when we wanted to change the domain name associated with a VxRail cluster. After working with their support teams for months, they eventually threw up their arms and said; "It cannot be done unless you reset and do a fresh install."

[mekkkkkk]

That certainly sounds less than ideal. I have also had a few interactions of this nature with Google, and unless you have contacts in the company or have some sort of partnership, it's very hard to get any form of manual intervention.

That being said, Apple is also known for being incredibly draconian when it comes to account management. I don't think you would have been in a better position on iOS.

I think understaffed, off-shored and with a lack of permissions is just the baseline when it comes to this sort of tech support.

[valuearb]

The fault was thinking you could pay less than $10k and get competent professional development devices for your app. That’s less than a month of a professional developers time. I had to pay half that just to get the interior of my house painted, and it took two people less than a week.

And without a maintenance agreement the developer isn’t going to help you, they have their own life to live. You think they are going to take vacation days from their next job to figure out that old code? As usual the problem is the client.

Full disclosure: I write this as a contract developer who had to take over an active app on the store when the client fired the previous developers, and tried to update it themselves. I have to update 140,000 lines of code with zero comments or documentation, and the previous devs aren’t accessible. In my case the clients screwed themselves, but got lucky cause I’m very very good.

[murkle]

So it's not possible to steal accounts - sounds like a good thing to me