[lm411]

The whole Google Play experience is awful.

Recent things I've had to do:

1) Re-submit an app after it was rejected and labelled a gambling app (it wasn't even close - a 15 second look by a real human would have seen that. This one was even appealed and the support was utterly useless. I ended up changing one word and re-submitting the app, approved no problem.

2) An existing app, in the Play store for years but a nice app - only about 500 installs. I had to submit a new version for no reason whatsoever... Except to keep the customers developer account active.

Those are just issues I've dealt with in the last month or two.

Every single time, Google Support is completely useless - including the appeals process, which is an absolute joke.

[umvi]

Not to mention if you made one app in college and then didn't keep up with the SDK updates, Google perma-closes the entire Play account such that the only way to publish a new app is by creating a brand new gmail account

[Dwedit]

Forcing people to keep up with SDK updates is a bad thing in itself. Let people target the earliest possible feature set and make the app run on as many phones as possible rather than showing scary messages to people due to targeting an older API.

[AussieWog93]

I think the problem is that older SDK versions allowed you to do things like scan local WiFi names to get location data, without requiring the location permission.

So bad actors would just target lower SDK versions and ignore the privacy improvements

[john01dav]

The newer Android version could simply give empty data (for example, location is 0,0 latitude longitude, there are no visible WiFi networks), when the permission is missing and an app on the old SDK version requests it.

Of course, they don't like this because then apps can't easily refuse to work if not allowed to spy.

[jpollock]

That can have some very extreme legal ramifications.

Consider - it's a voip dialing client which has a requirement to provide location for E911 support.

If the OS vendor starts providing invalid data, it's the OS vendor which ends up being liable for the person's death.

e.g. https://www.cnet.com/home/internet/texas-sues-vonage-over-91...

which is from 2005, but gives you an idea of the liability involved.

[pocksuppet]

Phone companies are required to make sure 911 works on their phones. Random people on the internet aren't required to make sure 911 works on random apps, even if they look like phones.

[eviks]

It can't have "extreme ramifications", Google's own phone couldn't call 911 for a while.

And you can manually force only the voip dialing apps instead of everyone

[lm411]

Yeah the SDK updates... For sure. Another pain in the ass.

[thayne]

Maybe it's better now, though I doubt it, but my experience publishing on the Apple app store years ago wasn't any better.

[fakwandi_priv]

So what was the word you changed?