Google does give a lot of love to developers. AFAIK, they have dedicated developer teams for developer relations; just look at the quality of their API documentations and support. This one looks like a operations issue. Perhaps they do not have a corresponding relations team focused on operations support.
That simply isn't true. They have support for some very specific areas which they consider of specific importance (e.g. Android), for the rest you're left to rot.
> Perhaps they do not have a corresponding relations team focused on operations support.
This has nothing to do with ops, it's a developer needing a raise in his apps requests quota.
The core areas can have the opposite problem almost. The Adwords API has moved pretty quickly but they are also quick to remove things. Most stuff built in early 2012 would have had to be updated for changed/ removed features by now.
I admit I haven't really traveled much on the less beaten paths. From the quality of what I have seen, I thought they must have policies for the minimum acceptable quality of all the public facing services to developers.
On the other hand, I am happy that even the big G cannot afford to cover all fronts. It means, there is still room for new players to grow and do well in those areas.
> look at the quality of their API documentations
twitch maybe it's a personality clash, but I can't stand Google's documentation style, it's not well explained or laid out.
I know they have one group dedicated to the Android Source and they constantly answer questions related to development on their Google Group and elsewhere (like twitter). AOSP related stuff mostly comes off as good will towards the community as it's mostly those of us modding the source for ourselves and others in the community that are asking the questions.
I have looked it the quality of Google API'S its horrible only partially complete and totally lacking in meaningful documentation.
If some one came to me saying my employer is saying I am a poor performer and trying to sack me and gave the Google apis's and its documentation as an example I would have sympathies with the employer.
I notice you're syncing tasks every minute. Perhaps a short-term workaround is to sync every 2 or every 5 minutes while you wait for the quota to increase?
This is exactly what you should do. Your users will understand -- that's why so many have supported you on the googlegroup. Charge $3/mo and you won't hear any complaints (and if you do, you can point to your googlegroup).
This is by far your easiest and clearest path to monetization, at least that I can see. And it seems you're long overdue for monetization.
Can you adjust the sync rate depending on the time of day where your users live? There are probably certain times of the day when people update their tasks less frequently.
I'm not sure if it works with the Google API's but usually e.g. with the GitHub API you can send the ETag in your GET request header and if nothing changed (304) it does not count to the quota. It wouldn't solve all the problems but could at least help to stay inside the quota.
I am already doing that, because of that only I am able to survive 2000 users. I want to expand and publicize my app and give users an excellent experience.
I know it sucks, but in the meantime have you considered slowing those sync tasks down if the user's "last activity" timestamp is older than a few minutes? You might even be able to make it sync faster for active users with the extra overhead afforded there.
Logins, refreshes, clicks, new things synced, etc... can all update the last activity timestamp.
I agree about the quality of documentation. If it wasnt for Stackoverflow it would have taken far more effort to develop a iOS quality app for android and this is for a product that they actually push!