[jpwagner]

Sure Google is a private company. Sure this means they have no formal responsibility to this developer. Programmatically, he seems to deserve to be sanctioned: he violated their policies for several weeks with several different apps.

I emailed Google back and asked them to tell me exactly what I need to change to be compliant with the rules. Is it the icon? The name? The disclaimer? What? Google refused to give me any additional information.

But if his story is true, he makes good faith efforts to be compliant. What, if any, is the social responsibility a company has that owns half the market of mobile development platforms to people that could potentially make a living using their platform? Monopolies/duopolies throw a wrench in the invisible hand, and I'm not sure there's a clear answer.

[krschultz]

A good faith effort would be reading the terms & conditions. He obviously didn't, because they are quite clear about not being able to put other companies' names in your app name.

If the article was about someone that had this happen, and they read the conditions and didn't see anything that they had violated, and then asked Google - that would be a different story. This guy just can't be bothered to put the effort in himself.

[msandford]

Yeah because I'm sure the T&C is only a page or two long, not like say 50k words.

https://play.google.com/intl/en_us/about/play-terms.html

The idea that you should have to scrutinize that entire document to determine what you did wrong is crazy.

Ostensibly someone on the Google side of things determined what he did that was not OK right? I mean they don't just ban people for the hell of it right? He had to do something SPECIFICALLY wrong, and that might correspond to some portion of the T&C. Is it so unreasonable to ask WHAT section you're violating?

I get that everyone on HN thinks the guy is a douche and deserves what he got. But to refuse to even say what? That's douchey too.

[krschultz]

It's not crazy. Guess what, sometimes publishing an app is more than just writing code. I've had to dig through them before too. Compared to what the iOS team has to deal with I consider it a pretty lightweight process.

If you just want to hack around with some code, then post the APK somewhere and tell your friends to download it. If you want to publish an app in an app store, that is a fundamentally different thing. It's not even engineering. This is what product managers and legal teams deal with at companies. If you are a solo app publisher, you still have to deal with it. You don't get to opt out of these costs just because it's not fun.

Those aren't even the right T&C. These are the developer ones, and they're even shorter.

https://play.google.com/about/developer-distribution-agreeme...

https://play.google.com/about/developer-content-policy.html

If you stick both into word, that's only 16 pages of stuff to read. Don't claim to be an engineer if you can't wade through 16 pages of specs. And the relevant part for this discussion is on page 1, the 4th bullet point after "Hate Speech", "Violence & Bullying", and "Sexually Explicit Material". It's not exactly buried.

[msandford]

If I sue someone for something I don't get to just say "your honor, look at the law and this contract, they're clearly violating it!" and blammo get a judgement against them. I have to enumerate my claims as to what they did wrong. I have to CITE things.

Should we hold Google to the same standard that we hold the criminal justice system? No obviously not.

But if it's so obvious what portion of the T&C he's breaking surely a hyperlink to that portion of the document should take only a second to generate. And if it's not obvious and requires some nuanced thought then perhaps a paragraph explaining would be warranted. And some links.

But to suggest that Google explaining itself would prove some kind of undue burden on Google for their actions is ridiculous! They've already hired people to police this kind of stuff. To suggest that Google couldn't have these human reviewers take a second to explain their decisions (at a fairly lost cost) boggles the mind.

[krschultz]

"The suspension email stated that I was trying to impersonate another company, and that this was forbidden."

Impersonation or Deceptive Behavior: Don't pretend to be someone else, and don't represent that your app is authorized by or produced by another company or organization. .. Apps must not have names or icons that appear confusingly similar to existing products

I don't know how Google can be any more clear about that. By the authors own admission, the email used the exact same words as the T&C he violated. If I had to bet, there was a link in there to page. You're arguing here without actually reviewing the underlying documents.

[msandford]

"Apps must not have names or icons that appear confusingly similar to existing products"

Okay so then a single extra sentence stating "The icon and name you have chosen are unacceptable because you are not X, Y or Z and constitute impersonation in our opinion" would have cleared up all the problems.

But that didn't happen did it? Nope!

[jpwagner]

That is not a satisfactory response.

From the OP:

I emailed Google back and asked them to tell me exactly what I need to change to be compliant with the rules. Is it the icon? The name? The disclaimer? What?

Repeating the T&C verbiage alone is not good enough.

[kunai]

Even if his story is true there's a lot of fallacious arguments and lack of reasoning in his claims. It's the type of "I-can-do-anything" mentality that was his pitfall.

Just because he might think that using somebody else's trademark to create a revenue stream for yourself is doing them a favor, doesn't mean anybody else has to. I don't have pity for his point-of-view, but I do think that it was unnecessary and irrelevant to suspend his Google Wallet account.

Still, it doesn't matter what I think: Google reserves the right to do whatever they want.