I think it bothers OP less that they take a 15% tax than the fact that google provides terrible support for their own play store. If they would take that tax and provide good feedback and speedy version reviews, nobody would ever complain - it is expected to pay something since the play store doesn't run on good thoughts and prayers.
But because they're a monopoly (or a duopoly if you count apple, which is a different platform altogether) they can afford to act this way.
> it bothers OP less that they take a 15% tax than the fact that google provides terrible support for their own play store.
The terrible support is really deeper than support. You literally stopped doing business here, because the lack of a feedback channel that allows Google to improve their business (i.e. realize they need a way to quickly correct stupid automated decisions) been Google's worst enemy and best friend. By ignoring support & feedback, the friction for internal decision making is low (no pesky customer demands, the product manager is king, management gets their way), but it leads to I think a lot of Google's products failing because they do not really understand their users, and the why behind the what they use.
I'm not sure being a monopoly alone explains Google's behavior here, but it could be as simple as that: who cares about one small customer... it's not like they have a viable alternative.
Yeah, I spend my free time making it accessible to bike in my area. Some of that is providing google with free street view data and other stuff. The amount of broken stuff and lack of support, when I'm literally giving them free work, is insane. I hate to do it, but the good outweighs the bad imo (I also provide it to open alternatives like OSM, Mapillary etc).
Like, their pipeline has been broken for months. No way to contact them. There is a support page for the api, but they close all issues as "the api is working". Well, sure, you accept the street view so the api is technically working, but haven't processed any for months.. It's probably a different team, but no way they would bother talking to each other..
Being a monopoly alone does not explain Google's behavior here. Google has a long history of not providing support.
The company's philosophy on the issue seems to be rooted in the hacker ethos of not giving repetitive work to humans if a machine could do it. When a machine can't do it, Google's thinking is to improve the machine. If the systems are good enough, nobody will need support.
The systems are not good enough, and that has been true for a long enough time that a reasonable company would have realized that a good support team is necessary until some far-future time.
> I'm not sure being a monopoly alone explains Google's behavior here, but it could be as simple as that: who cares about one small customer... it's not like they have a viable alternative.
The last line contradicts the first line. Being a monopoly means they don’t have to care. If Apple and Google were required to allow competing app stores as first-class citizens then they would have to provide better service or no one would use their stores and they’d lose out on all of the rents they’re collecting from app developers.
My favorite quip in response to asking for something to get improved inside of Google is, "no one ever asked for this", knowing full well the opportunity to ask was near zero and no one ever looked.
Google is a crazy town, data driven by cherry picked post-hoc rationalizations driven by perf. The user never enters the equation.
> the friction for internal decision making is low (no pesky customer demands, the product manager is king, management gets their way)
I'd like to support that this goes "both" ways for companies who destroy their customer service. Not only do they not know what their customers want/problems they're having, but they don't know what their customers wouldn't want/problems they're not having. Like you say, it "lowers the friction," so some dumb, destructive idea that somebody has gets implemented based on title and force of personality.
But that's a monopoly. Nothing they do is destructive, other than putting any more work in than is necessary. If the store went down for weeks at a time, they might have a problem. The problem would result from this personally irritating and inconveniencing a regulator/politician, judge, or major stockholder/owner.
Author here: Indeed, 15% is fine. They do provide some services. They provide the CDN for downloading the APK. They handle sales taxes in the various countries, which would be a PITA to handle yourself. Similar-ish services like Patreon charge a fee too. The 30% they charged a couple of years back was bad. But I could live with 15% if the support were anything other than zero.
The problem is that it ISN'T a fee for services as it should be. Their platform power means that they can levy a tax, and they don't feel the need to do anything on exchange for that.
Apple recently submitted in court filings that you'd have to pay ~8% for off-the-shelf solutions like Stripe or Paddle to be Merchant of Record anyway so 15% isn't really bad except for the high-earning apps, but Google should be doing something for that extra 7%.
Yeah this the thing that grinds my gears about Apple too. These fools will argue in court out of one side of their mouth that the cut is used to police the store etc and do reviews then out of the other side of their mouth they just don’t do it or give the most mediocre half assed attempts and collect the revenue. Which is it? You shouldn’t be able to charge people and not provide the service your charging them for
This is a pretty common sentiment. I make iOS exclusive apps because I know when facing any problem Google support will be non-existent. Apple takes ages to respond but has been known to be humanly possible so far.
If different words exists why insist in making "creative" use of the wrong word?
Your local monopoly of water provider charges a fee not a tax (although many collect taxes on behalf of the state that sanctions the monopoly)
Platform apps stores tend to be a monopoly (specially in iOS case) and that decreases incentive to provide a decent service/product to their customers who hate that fact - not because customer have no representation.
I never submitted an app to play store but knowing how Google handles app customers (or any customer of their services/products) its believable that app devs are shafted too. I personally wonder if there's any differentiated service level between an app that results in revenue for Google vs one that is 100% free. I'd be pissed if my 15% fee is not buying me priority over the latest adware filled flashlight app
And that's my problem with such business practises in general. Take an example of Claude. Not only, at this point, their models might be just marginally better than the open weight competition, they also also makes it entirely impossible for you to reach human support in case of an issue (and I am talking about real money related issues). You just can't do it. Yes, there's an email but that is also handled by the same bot.
I just don't understand how these companies can get away with that. These are the aspects of life that tells very clearly how most Govts are not chosen and ran for "the people" but the few, not the conspiratorial spirals. These are the smaller, but harsh Kafkaesque realities of life that says we lost this to the power of the "rich" - and it's an abstract power, it's not fixed, and if someone from the "masses" manages to become part of it they also reap the benefit but by the design of things that number has to be really small.
Okay, it deviated. The point is
> provides terrible support for their own play store.
Something like this is so abhorrent and yet is it normal and I didn't even start at how they can just charge 15 and 33% for of the incomes.
Of course people would complain, it's unrealistic to expect everyone to have the same expectation of what a fair fee is that somehow exactly matches the current fee (even if the service is great)
Customer support has gotten so terrible. Now that all big companies have terrible support, none of them are punished for it. You can still occasionally find people who give a shit in small business, but that is it. Google is probably one of the worst offenders of all. I don't know what the solution is, it seems like the only way to get any satisfaction on an issue at a big corp anymore is a social medial call-out like this one.
If you are here, thank you for Conversations, Daniel, it has been my go-to for years for communicating with friends and family.
Some eight years ago I worked on a Chrome extension with monetization support. I could not get payment working using Google APIs, no matter what I tried it errored with obscure undocumented error messages. Finally I reached out to their customer support and got swift overly friendly response. Several messages later, I still got these overly friendly elaborated messages, but the issue did not proceed anywhere. I kept explaining my problem and they assured me that they are working on it. Eventually I got bounced to their Android support (my problem concerned Chrome store), which made me think either they were taking a piss or used this tactique on purpose. I eventually abandoned the whole idea.
Nowadays I would attribute their response to chatbots considering how elaborated and friendly, but yet totally useless their messages were, but this was before LLMs
That's because you the user are not the customer of Google and such services. You are actually the product being sold to the customer, namely advertising companies, by Google.
The farmer take care of his pigs but only to the point they get slaughtered.
Google has captured what really is a public utility and should be either state-owned or heavily regulated.
(Long) distance communications, just like public roads, breathable air, potable drinking water and so on do not fit into a "free market economy" paradigm.
They simply don't fulfill the basic requirements that make the "market" idea work.
Specifically, a free market needs goods from different suppliers to be easily interchangeable. You cannot sensibly build multiple roads parallel to each other, or have multiple water pipes installed and you have only one airway to breath through.
This gotcha only works if you are a user of only their free services.
When Google charges me a monthly fee for storage, takes a percentage of my Play Store sales, or manufactures a Pixel that I purchase from their online store, I am absolutely their customer. I may also be providing data they will sell, but I am still paying them for goods or services and that makes me a customer.
The problem is that they continue treating their customers like livestock, and it seems they have little incentive to change.
With such a perversion of definitions why not call the stock holders the true customers? Services can have multiple classes of users. Some YouTube users can be content creators. Some users can watch Shorts. Some can watch long term videos. Some can pay to run ad campaigns. This idea that there is only one true kind of "customer" is not how people think of these services.
I remember that once my flight was cancelled and I figured out that if I buy a bus ticket "right now" I'd be able to reach my destination in a sensible time. I quickly bought the ticket... for the wrong day.
I called the bus company, a native speaker of my language immediately picked up, rescheduled the ticket, and told me to pay €2 extra to the bus driver.
I was shocked that customer support could be so simple.
BTW I spent 6 hours total spread along 12 months calling an Indian customer service before I got my money back for the cancelled flight.
Google play went from being a cool place to upload hobbyist projects to a Real Business Platform.
You now need a business address and a bunch of other documents for apps that will probably lose money.
Google has also decided they really don’t like users installing apps outside the Play Store. Today it’s a bunch of scary warnings, soon it’s a convoluted process to enable all installs and eventually they probably just ban it all together.
Literally nothing about Android is worth while to me now. iPhones are more stable , easier to use and have vastly better end user support.
The App Store is also a living hell for developers. They will look for any excuse to deny you an account and later reject your app.
Dare I say programming isn’t as fun anymore. I guess I can still build WebGL games. Best not speak too loudly, Apple and Google might go after that next
I would love to be able to list our product in the Google Play store /s ... but after a year of trying we haven't been able to.
They introduced a phone verification step for the support phone number that you provide. But their apparent assumption is that app authors are individuals or tiny companies. They expect to be able to send a text to the support number, or have it answered instantly by a human to validate the number. Any kind of IVR means the number can't be validated.
I have been going back and forth with their support for a year. It takes months at a time for them to respond, to say "we fixed it try again" and I try again and the process is identical.
Is is annoyingly ironic because I am sure that Google themselves could not pass this process to get listed in the Play Store. Their advice of "just redirect your corporate number to someone's cellphone to get validated" is laugable.
I had a business account that got banned due to inactivity. I make apps and I often update them ota, long story short the account it took ages to verify via DUNS and the phone number requirements got nuked. Can’t even reopen it, had to create a new one with a new email, no human to speak to, a nightmare due to the same duns number being on both accounts. Plus the recent forced 14 days of app testing. It’s comically bad, when I compare it to iOS it almost feels intentionally antagonistic to devs. Android has always been challenging (fragmented phone os mainly) but now has gotten to the point of not even being worth spending time there, especially since iOS tends to convert dramatically better
What I do not like about Android is how difficult it is to unlock the bootloader without ever connecting the device to Internet. Any device with flash memory should be re-programmable and it should be illegal to prevent user from doing this or adding measures (like locking components to CPU via cryptography or adding anti-reverse engineering measures) that make it difficult.
I get excited every time I learn about another E2EE messaging app where the server can be self-hosted. But as I understand it, the server that triggers push notifications for any android app must be hard-coded into the app's binary. Are there any good architectural workarounds for this? I've read a little bit about VAPID[1] but I don't know if it is actually a viable approach and I don't think I've ever seen it promoted in an E2EE messaging app with a self-hosted server.
Conversations is a XMPP client, it's essentially the same protocol that delivers reliable notifications to every Android, Nintendo switch, etc. Unless you have an Android distro that kills every background app indiscriminately, you will be fine with Conversations delivering messages and notifications to you.
Interestingly, the link you posted relates to Unified Push, which is a protocol that relies on a "distributor" app which acts as a proxy, receiving reliable notifications on behalf of other applications. And it happens that Conversations can be configured as a UP distributor, because of how good it is at that/how well the XMPP protocol lends itself to it.
Long way to say you should give XMPP a shot, it really works well!
It's possible for the app to poll the server for new messages. iOS also supports light background work that can poll server from time to time and trigger notification on the device, rather than using apple's push notification infra.
The trade off is that you gain some extra privacy with simpler architecture and accept that some notifications will be delayed as ios decides when to run the bg job for the app.
source: I develop e2e app with self-hostable server (145 lines of zero deps python for the whole server).
Yeah that "there is no way to talk to a human at Google" is one of the reasons I never recommend a Google solution at current workplace... Or to family.
I've abandoned my Google apps after all the requirements over the last year or so. It's too much of a hassle. Apple is friendlier. Also, it wasn't worth justifying 1% of the income and 99% grief compared to Apple.
I know this is a stupid question even before I ask it, but is there any chance at this point of seeing something out of the scope of Apple and Google for mobile?? Will the bank apps ever allow people out of these two players
We can’t even get some of the largest banks to do competent 2 factor, after all these years. The idea that they’re going to produce feature parity on peculiar platforms does seem like a big stretch.
No, because it is near impossible to compete with "free" and totally impossible to compete with "free-and-you-can-use-ad-block."
The truth is that these corps are so entrenched because people love love love the ad model. I mean, they hate the ads, but they are so sold on access being free that introducing a cost would come off like charging money to walk in a public park. Totally confusing.
And frankly the other path wouldn't be all roses either. There would be a wealth divide in technology where poor people wouldn't be able to afford to use all the stuff available to them now for free.
If you are referring to banking apps, I just don't use banking apps that don't work on my degoogled phone thus granting them the low fraud risk they so strive for with forcing locked devices.
You're free to make one, and bank apps are often less locked down than you think - try them yourself instead of accepting possible FUD. Also your bank 100% has a checkbox on your account they can click to disable any phone hardware requirements on your account.
> your bank 100% has a checkbox on your account they can click to disable any phone hardware requirements
I was going to thank you. I still thank you if this is true.
How do you know about the bank checkbox?
My bank is huge and I’m skeptical they give a crap about me any more than Google. Their app certainly doesn’t look like it.
(I noticed your account has been posting a lot of what I consider to be “garbage comments” in this article, so I’d like some kind of claim to fact check.)
Motorola is planning to release phones with GrapheneOS. So far only expensive models have been confirmed, but I assume cheapos should follow.
Of course they're not doing this out of good heart. My theory is that China wants to have a popular smartphone that is completely independent from US companies. But hey, once upon a time Google were "the good guys" too, so enjoy the party while it lasts.
An interesting point is that it's important to have powerful China around because they're a capitalist competition to the US.
Isn't graphene completely dependent on what Google ships though? Ok they may be able to support Motorola devices longer than Googles releases facilitate supporting Google devices, but it's still ultimately android, which is still ultimately controlled by Google.
I'm not saying it isn't an improvement but this feels like choosing centos because you don't like the direction fedora is taking.
> An interesting point is that it's important to have powerful China around because they're a capitalist competition to the US.
Semi-capitalist at best. They're good for cloning things invented in the West, but the problem is that that is much cheaper than inventing, so things get commoditised and the places that can do expensive R&D have to find other ways to make money all the time.
App release reviews take at least 1 week now. They take 15% of revenue and I had to pay $25 to create an account. And I'm sure I spent more hours on setting up my business + bank account, dun's number, google account creation & verification, app listing configuration/verification and only then getting to the review stage. My first round took exactly 1 month from having a signed app release on my laptop ready to go to it showing publicly on the store.
Same here
My build was ready like for a month and all that was stopping me is the requirement for the 12 testers being active for 14 days. When I applied to both stores, I thought apple is gonna be a problem, but google is a bigger unmovable wall
Unfortunately google is now a massive juggernaut that has 20+ layers before you can ship anything, and thats bled out to the users of their services. I wish we had better alternatives. In fact, I now just focus on shipping a PWA.
Btw thanks to the author. I got Conversations to work with Micro (https://micro.mu), the personal assistant I'm building. Its a nice XMPP client. Now just need to figure out how to do encryption for queries going into the model itself.
I've tried to publish an app in Play recently to get a taste of the experience. And I must say the taste was sour. Contrary to the experience of many I was able to reach a real human about my problem, but the human was less helpful that an AI pointed at the documentation. The AI was at least able to unrestand the issue, while the human simply talked past me.
That's the problem with all big billion dollar companies, they don't have enough people for support! You can't talk to a real human to explain your problem anymore :-(
The only thing these CEOs, managers and noards care about are profits, they don't care about their users.
Very easy: offer them a long trial (numbers will show that your revenue is hurt, but don't care). Eventually the trail runs out, and they search how to renew or they ask support. The first result appears: your payment subscription page.
If a customer has used your product already for long time 20 days+, extra steps to set up payment one time, especially when you do not auto charge short trials, the customer is happy.
it's actually Google being parasitic on all the apps' infra. I paid for the app store infra when I bought my phone, and every time I open it and see ads, and with my tracking data for the NSA. They don't need to be allowed to quadruple dip.
> This effectively means I’m paying Google more than 1000 Euro per year for their services. 1000 Euro per year is 1.5x what I’m paying for my internet access. It’s roughly what I’m paying for my notebook per year if you assume I use it for three to four years. When my internet breaks, someone drives to my house and fixes it. When my notebook breaks, someone drives to my house and fixes it.
Couldn’t have said better. We all allowed it to come to this.
Receiving 1000 euros without having any real work or accountability is the epitome of free profit. No wonder these platform gatekeepers are fighting so hard to maintain it (at the cost of you, the consumer).
And yet people (in general) just dont care, because they don't truly feel the pain until it's too late - issues like privacy and such are like that.
It's the arrogance. "You wouldn't have made 10 euros if I didn't give you the storefront and the one click install". Unfortunately they are right about this too. Why would they then also provide customer support that costs them money. They have enough "happy" customers as it is. Literally millions of apps are there.
It's called "Rent-seeking" when a powerful entity extracts wealth without providing any commensurate value.
Google wants you to believe the only way to get an app is through them. They have programmed society to believe this - despite the fact that you have never needed Google to download and run apps on your laptop. Apple also wants you to believe this, which is why they keep making it more impossible to run Mac apps without the Apple Store. They too want to extract your wealth and control you.
FOSS was created because people didn't have a way to cooperate and share the source code for their programs, to let users fix their own problems. Like the "right to repair" but for software. But Apple and Google wouldn't exist in the forms they do today without our FOSS. Our own software is being used to manipulate us, take our money, and take away our freedoms. Ironic.
Maybe it's time for a new software license that does discriminate against the rent seekers. Not because we deserve money when someone uses our free software. But because our freedoms are being trampled by the companies who use our software.
I think we should define that new license, abandon the old projects using the old licenses, and start using new ones. We already did this for Rust tools, I think we can do it for new licenses too.
I think GPLv3 already does this, with its anti-tivoization requirements. People just need to switch to an up-to-date copyleft license rather than permissive licenses.
"Fortunately, I’m no longer economically dependent on Google Play Store revenue. Google doesn’t deserve me and my money anymore. I’m done. Fuck the gatekeepers."
Sorry this is a bit of a long rant. To many people here this will be a very old hut but I've only recently realized that Apple and Google are basically extortion rackets and have made the online world way worse and enshittified than it should be. Why? They deliberately make it as hard as possible to sell true cross-platform apps. "Buy one license, install our software on all of your devices." That should sound reasonable, yet it's impossible as a business model. If you put an app on the Apple Store or on Google Play, you cannot have it unlocked by a license code. So you have to sell it on their platform. That means that if you want to sell one license for all platforms, you'd have to force your users to buy the license in one of those stores, then generate desktop license from that store purchase. That's not just nonsense, it still wouldn't work because the user can still not switch from iOS to Android and vice versa.
Okay, so sell mobile platforms separately but make desktop platforms with one license. That would still be nice and comparatively hassle-free for your customers. Not so fast, though! Desktop app stores also prohibit free apps with unlock mechanism. So you have to put unlockable versions on your website. However, app stores explicitly prohibit even just mentioning that the user doesn't have to buy an app if they have already bought it elsewhere. They strictly prohibit pointing the user elsewhere to check whether they could use it for free. Consequently, unless your users are extremely well educated about those platform quirks, many of them will erroneously buy your app twice.
But wait! There is an exception in Apple Store and Google Play Store. You're strictly prohibited from putting an app on there that needs to be unlocked by a license key, but you are allowed to ask the user to create an account or log into an existing account with a user name and email address. As long as users can also purchase the app on the respective store, that's allowed. So you can tie the app to an account and unlock it if the user already bought it for another platform. For some reason, unlocking an app with a code is strictly prohibited but unlocking it by providing your email and a password and then contacting a server is totally fine. That's why so many apps have those shitty login requirements. I wasn't really aware of that.
In a nutshell, apart from "freemium models" there are two major ways to sell cross-platform software that really is cross-platform. First, make the user pay individually for each platform, make them buy your app again and again with all the hassle that brings. Second, force them to login with an email and a user name with some direct contact to some centralized hub server.
IMHO, all of these options are strictly worse than just allowing your users to buy the app anywhere they like and unlock it for all other platforms.
All these stores, Apple Store, Google etc... must be
opened up. They constitute an illegal monopoly. Why does
the US government protect monopolies? This is against
the core tent of capitalism, aka more competition in
a free, open market, to have prices be as low as reasonable
possible for the customer. The USA shifted towards de-facto
monopolistic mafias. Financial kickbacks to the US government
must logically exist here - otherwise one can not explain
why the US government works for the interest of mega-corporations
only now.
To the author.
Go buy yourself some socks.Maybe a wallet, and go to the resturaunt that never fails you, or more generaly put in a concerted shameless effort to catch up, relax, fit the worst little personal bugs and recuring inconvieniences, essentialy put the same attention that you put into maintaining your product, into your self, remember to say fuck you google as you put the new
" toothbrush * " you got by the sink, that you have reminded yourself but failed to get for the last six months, because thats what we give up, when we are blamming ourselves for the rejections we get from nameless faceless functionaries, that doom loop of 'engagement' is the point behind the delays and mindless activity, and reversing it is almost magical.
* 'toothbrush', anything that is a constant tiny irritant going away can be absurdly triumphant
And they're annoying and often screw up the review process.
Google is always going to make money off any work they do. That's just business. They're not going to put more money towards better reviews without taking more money. And without the reviews, even as crappy as they are, a lot of really crappy software would be on the store. And a lot more would be actively malicious
And you were making like 7x as much as they were taking. Without them, you would even get noticed and you'd have made nothing.
We know this because almost nobody installs FDroid, and the other stores like Samsung make basically nothing for developers, even though they're preinstalled on so many devices.
It's not just business - it's basically a monopoly. Enough to extract rent while providing a minimal service.
Imagine if all streets were owned by two large companies who charged you enough to use them that you'd be paying as much in fees as you are in paying for gas. People would still use cars. The streets could be in horrible condition, the two companies would be making an insane amount of profit, but there would still be people out there saying that if it wasn't for those companies we wouldn't be getting anywhere and it's just business.
It's an absolutely fair argument and it just doesn't show great intelligence to go straight to namecalling rather than bringing up counter arguments.
I do believe that while Google and Apple are evil gatekeepers they also made it easier for non-tech people to install their own app without always calling their kids or neighbours. That's already a big win.
I think it bothers OP less that they take a 15% tax than the fact that google provides terrible support for their own play store. If they would take that tax and provide good feedback and speedy version reviews, nobody would ever complain - it is expected to pay something since the play store doesn't run on good thoughts and prayers. But because they're a monopoly (or a duopoly if you count apple, which is a different platform altogether) they can afford to act this way.
> it bothers OP less that they take a 15% tax than the fact that google provides terrible support for their own play store.
The terrible support is really deeper than support. You literally stopped doing business here, because the lack of a feedback channel that allows Google to improve their business (i.e. realize they need a way to quickly correct stupid automated decisions) been Google's worst enemy and best friend. By ignoring support & feedback, the friction for internal decision making is low (no pesky customer demands, the product manager is king, management gets their way), but it leads to I think a lot of Google's products failing because they do not really understand their users, and the why behind the what they use.
I'm not sure being a monopoly alone explains Google's behavior here, but it could be as simple as that: who cares about one small customer... it's not like they have a viable alternative.
Yeah, I spend my free time making it accessible to bike in my area. Some of that is providing google with free street view data and other stuff. The amount of broken stuff and lack of support, when I'm literally giving them free work, is insane. I hate to do it, but the good outweighs the bad imo (I also provide it to open alternatives like OSM, Mapillary etc).
Like, their pipeline has been broken for months. No way to contact them. There is a support page for the api, but they close all issues as "the api is working". Well, sure, you accept the street view so the api is technically working, but haven't processed any for months.. It's probably a different team, but no way they would bother talking to each other..
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Being a monopoly alone does not explain Google's behavior here. Google has a long history of not providing support.
The company's philosophy on the issue seems to be rooted in the hacker ethos of not giving repetitive work to humans if a machine could do it. When a machine can't do it, Google's thinking is to improve the machine. If the systems are good enough, nobody will need support.
The systems are not good enough, and that has been true for a long enough time that a reasonable company would have realized that a good support team is necessary until some far-future time.
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> I'm not sure being a monopoly alone explains Google's behavior here, but it could be as simple as that: who cares about one small customer... it's not like they have a viable alternative.
The last line contradicts the first line. Being a monopoly means they don’t have to care. If Apple and Google were required to allow competing app stores as first-class citizens then they would have to provide better service or no one would use their stores and they’d lose out on all of the rents they’re collecting from app developers.
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My favorite quip in response to asking for something to get improved inside of Google is, "no one ever asked for this", knowing full well the opportunity to ask was near zero and no one ever looked.
Google is a crazy town, data driven by cherry picked post-hoc rationalizations driven by perf. The user never enters the equation.
> the friction for internal decision making is low (no pesky customer demands, the product manager is king, management gets their way)
I'd like to support that this goes "both" ways for companies who destroy their customer service. Not only do they not know what their customers want/problems they're having, but they don't know what their customers wouldn't want/problems they're not having. Like you say, it "lowers the friction," so some dumb, destructive idea that somebody has gets implemented based on title and force of personality.
But that's a monopoly. Nothing they do is destructive, other than putting any more work in than is necessary. If the store went down for weeks at a time, they might have a problem. The problem would result from this personally irritating and inconveniencing a regulator/politician, judge, or major stockholder/owner.
Author here: Indeed, 15% is fine. They do provide some services. They provide the CDN for downloading the APK. They handle sales taxes in the various countries, which would be a PITA to handle yourself. Similar-ish services like Patreon charge a fee too. The 30% they charged a couple of years back was bad. But I could live with 15% if the support were anything other than zero.
The problem is that it ISN'T a fee for services as it should be. Their platform power means that they can levy a tax, and they don't feel the need to do anything on exchange for that.
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Apple recently submitted in court filings that you'd have to pay ~8% for off-the-shelf solutions like Stripe or Paddle to be Merchant of Record anyway so 15% isn't really bad except for the high-earning apps, but Google should be doing something for that extra 7%.
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They also develop the OS and development platforms that the apps are built upon. The apps don’t exist on islands.
Yeah this the thing that grinds my gears about Apple too. These fools will argue in court out of one side of their mouth that the cut is used to police the store etc and do reviews then out of the other side of their mouth they just don’t do it or give the most mediocre half assed attempts and collect the revenue. Which is it? You shouldn’t be able to charge people and not provide the service your charging them for
This is a pretty common sentiment. I make iOS exclusive apps because I know when facing any problem Google support will be non-existent. Apple takes ages to respond but has been known to be humanly possible so far.
people hate taxation without representation. That's why this model has to be unsustainable, but the legislation has not caught up at all.
If different words exists why insist in making "creative" use of the wrong word?
Your local monopoly of water provider charges a fee not a tax (although many collect taxes on behalf of the state that sanctions the monopoly)
Platform apps stores tend to be a monopoly (specially in iOS case) and that decreases incentive to provide a decent service/product to their customers who hate that fact - not because customer have no representation.
I never submitted an app to play store but knowing how Google handles app customers (or any customer of their services/products) its believable that app devs are shafted too. I personally wonder if there's any differentiated service level between an app that results in revenue for Google vs one that is 100% free. I'd be pissed if my 15% fee is not buying me priority over the latest adware filled flashlight app
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This isn't taxation. It's just a silly name for a fee. Fees are what make things sustainable.
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And that's my problem with such business practises in general. Take an example of Claude. Not only, at this point, their models might be just marginally better than the open weight competition, they also also makes it entirely impossible for you to reach human support in case of an issue (and I am talking about real money related issues). You just can't do it. Yes, there's an email but that is also handled by the same bot.
I just don't understand how these companies can get away with that. These are the aspects of life that tells very clearly how most Govts are not chosen and ran for "the people" but the few, not the conspiratorial spirals. These are the smaller, but harsh Kafkaesque realities of life that says we lost this to the power of the "rich" - and it's an abstract power, it's not fixed, and if someone from the "masses" manages to become part of it they also reap the benefit but by the design of things that number has to be really small.
Okay, it deviated. The point is
> provides terrible support for their own play store.
Something like this is so abhorrent and yet is it normal and I didn't even start at how they can just charge 15 and 33% for of the incomes.
Of course people would complain, it's unrealistic to expect everyone to have the same expectation of what a fair fee is that somehow exactly matches the current fee (even if the service is great)
Customer support has gotten so terrible. Now that all big companies have terrible support, none of them are punished for it. You can still occasionally find people who give a shit in small business, but that is it. Google is probably one of the worst offenders of all. I don't know what the solution is, it seems like the only way to get any satisfaction on an issue at a big corp anymore is a social medial call-out like this one.
If you are here, thank you for Conversations, Daniel, it has been my go-to for years for communicating with friends and family.
Some eight years ago I worked on a Chrome extension with monetization support. I could not get payment working using Google APIs, no matter what I tried it errored with obscure undocumented error messages. Finally I reached out to their customer support and got swift overly friendly response. Several messages later, I still got these overly friendly elaborated messages, but the issue did not proceed anywhere. I kept explaining my problem and they assured me that they are working on it. Eventually I got bounced to their Android support (my problem concerned Chrome store), which made me think either they were taking a piss or used this tactique on purpose. I eventually abandoned the whole idea. Nowadays I would attribute their response to chatbots considering how elaborated and friendly, but yet totally useless their messages were, but this was before LLMs
That's because you the user are not the customer of Google and such services. You are actually the product being sold to the customer, namely advertising companies, by Google.
The farmer take care of his pigs but only to the point they get slaughtered.
Google has captured what really is a public utility and should be either state-owned or heavily regulated.
(Long) distance communications, just like public roads, breathable air, potable drinking water and so on do not fit into a "free market economy" paradigm.
They simply don't fulfill the basic requirements that make the "market" idea work.
Specifically, a free market needs goods from different suppliers to be easily interchangeable. You cannot sensibly build multiple roads parallel to each other, or have multiple water pipes installed and you have only one airway to breath through.
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This gotcha only works if you are a user of only their free services.
When Google charges me a monthly fee for storage, takes a percentage of my Play Store sales, or manufactures a Pixel that I purchase from their online store, I am absolutely their customer. I may also be providing data they will sell, but I am still paying them for goods or services and that makes me a customer.
The problem is that they continue treating their customers like livestock, and it seems they have little incentive to change.
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Except we read here stories of ad customers - their main buisness - here indicating they don't give a shit about them either.
They are just so big, they can afford not giving a shit at all.
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With such a perversion of definitions why not call the stock holders the true customers? Services can have multiple classes of users. Some YouTube users can be content creators. Some users can watch Shorts. Some can watch long term videos. Some can pay to run ad campaigns. This idea that there is only one true kind of "customer" is not how people think of these services.
I remember that once my flight was cancelled and I figured out that if I buy a bus ticket "right now" I'd be able to reach my destination in a sensible time. I quickly bought the ticket... for the wrong day.
I called the bus company, a native speaker of my language immediately picked up, rescheduled the ticket, and told me to pay €2 extra to the bus driver.
I was shocked that customer support could be so simple.
BTW I spent 6 hours total spread along 12 months calling an Indian customer service before I got my money back for the cancelled flight.
Google play went from being a cool place to upload hobbyist projects to a Real Business Platform.
You now need a business address and a bunch of other documents for apps that will probably lose money.
Google has also decided they really don’t like users installing apps outside the Play Store. Today it’s a bunch of scary warnings, soon it’s a convoluted process to enable all installs and eventually they probably just ban it all together.
Literally nothing about Android is worth while to me now. iPhones are more stable , easier to use and have vastly better end user support.
The App Store is also a living hell for developers. They will look for any excuse to deny you an account and later reject your app.
Dare I say programming isn’t as fun anymore. I guess I can still build WebGL games. Best not speak too loudly, Apple and Google might go after that next
I don't see how "android isn't worth it" when you go on to admit iOS is worse... App Store also a big pain and no usable workaround
Google is doing everything they can to slowly remove those work arounds.
https://keepandroidopen.org/
I listed my reasons for IOS. It’s ultimately just a much better user experience. You just have to give up on writing your own code to run on it.
The world is rarely black and white. Both can be true.
Android jumped the shark when the default launcher introduced a search bar that couldn't be removed.
I would love to be able to list our product in the Google Play store /s ... but after a year of trying we haven't been able to.
They introduced a phone verification step for the support phone number that you provide. But their apparent assumption is that app authors are individuals or tiny companies. They expect to be able to send a text to the support number, or have it answered instantly by a human to validate the number. Any kind of IVR means the number can't be validated.
I have been going back and forth with their support for a year. It takes months at a time for them to respond, to say "we fixed it try again" and I try again and the process is identical.
Is is annoyingly ironic because I am sure that Google themselves could not pass this process to get listed in the Play Store. Their advice of "just redirect your corporate number to someone's cellphone to get validated" is laugable.
yeah buy a burner, and validate, and throw out the burner
I had a business account that got banned due to inactivity. I make apps and I often update them ota, long story short the account it took ages to verify via DUNS and the phone number requirements got nuked. Can’t even reopen it, had to create a new one with a new email, no human to speak to, a nightmare due to the same duns number being on both accounts. Plus the recent forced 14 days of app testing. It’s comically bad, when I compare it to iOS it almost feels intentionally antagonistic to devs. Android has always been challenging (fragmented phone os mainly) but now has gotten to the point of not even being worth spending time there, especially since iOS tends to convert dramatically better
What I do not like about Android is how difficult it is to unlock the bootloader without ever connecting the device to Internet. Any device with flash memory should be re-programmable and it should be illegal to prevent user from doing this or adding measures (like locking components to CPU via cryptography or adding anti-reverse engineering measures) that make it difficult.
I get excited every time I learn about another E2EE messaging app where the server can be self-hosted. But as I understand it, the server that triggers push notifications for any android app must be hard-coded into the app's binary. Are there any good architectural workarounds for this? I've read a little bit about VAPID[1] but I don't know if it is actually a viable approach and I don't think I've ever seen it promoted in an E2EE messaging app with a self-hosted server.
[1] (Disclosure: the AI gave me this link) https://unifiedpush.org/news/20250131_push_for_decentralized...
Conversations is a XMPP client, it's essentially the same protocol that delivers reliable notifications to every Android, Nintendo switch, etc. Unless you have an Android distro that kills every background app indiscriminately, you will be fine with Conversations delivering messages and notifications to you.
Interestingly, the link you posted relates to Unified Push, which is a protocol that relies on a "distributor" app which acts as a proxy, receiving reliable notifications on behalf of other applications. And it happens that Conversations can be configured as a UP distributor, because of how good it is at that/how well the XMPP protocol lends itself to it.
Long way to say you should give XMPP a shot, it really works well!
It's possible for the app to poll the server for new messages. iOS also supports light background work that can poll server from time to time and trigger notification on the device, rather than using apple's push notification infra.
The trade off is that you gain some extra privacy with simpler architecture and accept that some notifications will be delayed as ios decides when to run the bg job for the app.
source: I develop e2e app with self-hostable server (145 lines of zero deps python for the whole server).
How do you trigger that in iOS? iOS can decide not to trigger it all from what I have read - https://mertbulan.com/dont-rely-on-bgapprefreshtask-for-your...
Even Android is not predicatable from my testing or I'm doing something wrong
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What's your app? I'd love to try it out!
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> I was in a toxic relationship with Google[/Apple/Amazon/X/Instagram/Facebook/TikTok], and the only reason I stayed was economic dependency.
That just about sums up Big Tech
Yeah that "there is no way to talk to a human at Google" is one of the reasons I never recommend a Google solution at current workplace... Or to family.
I recommend the book “sacred economics” regarding this play.
Free to read online - https://charleseisenstein.org/books/sacred-economics/
I've abandoned my Google apps after all the requirements over the last year or so. It's too much of a hassle. Apple is friendlier. Also, it wasn't worth justifying 1% of the income and 99% grief compared to Apple.
I know this is a stupid question even before I ask it, but is there any chance at this point of seeing something out of the scope of Apple and Google for mobile?? Will the bank apps ever allow people out of these two players
Why would you ever use a bank app? It's just going to end up storing financial information on your mobile which will then get stolen.
We can’t even get some of the largest banks to do competent 2 factor, after all these years. The idea that they’re going to produce feature parity on peculiar platforms does seem like a big stretch.
No, because it is near impossible to compete with "free" and totally impossible to compete with "free-and-you-can-use-ad-block."
The truth is that these corps are so entrenched because people love love love the ad model. I mean, they hate the ads, but they are so sold on access being free that introducing a cost would come off like charging money to walk in a public park. Totally confusing.
And frankly the other path wouldn't be all roses either. There would be a wealth divide in technology where poor people wouldn't be able to afford to use all the stuff available to them now for free.
If you are referring to banking apps, I just don't use banking apps that don't work on my degoogled phone thus granting them the low fraud risk they so strive for with forcing locked devices.
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You're free to make one, and bank apps are often less locked down than you think - try them yourself instead of accepting possible FUD. Also your bank 100% has a checkbox on your account they can click to disable any phone hardware requirements on your account.
> your bank 100% has a checkbox on your account they can click to disable any phone hardware requirements
I was going to thank you. I still thank you if this is true.
How do you know about the bank checkbox?
My bank is huge and I’m skeptical they give a crap about me any more than Google. Their app certainly doesn’t look like it.
(I noticed your account has been posting a lot of what I consider to be “garbage comments” in this article, so I’d like some kind of claim to fact check.)
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Motorola is planning to release phones with GrapheneOS. So far only expensive models have been confirmed, but I assume cheapos should follow.
Of course they're not doing this out of good heart. My theory is that China wants to have a popular smartphone that is completely independent from US companies. But hey, once upon a time Google were "the good guys" too, so enjoy the party while it lasts.
An interesting point is that it's important to have powerful China around because they're a capitalist competition to the US.
Isn't graphene completely dependent on what Google ships though? Ok they may be able to support Motorola devices longer than Googles releases facilitate supporting Google devices, but it's still ultimately android, which is still ultimately controlled by Google.
I'm not saying it isn't an improvement but this feels like choosing centos because you don't like the direction fedora is taking.
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> An interesting point is that it's important to have powerful China around because they're a capitalist competition to the US.
Semi-capitalist at best. They're good for cloning things invented in the West, but the problem is that that is much cheaper than inventing, so things get commoditised and the places that can do expensive R&D have to find other ways to make money all the time.
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App release reviews take at least 1 week now. They take 15% of revenue and I had to pay $25 to create an account. And I'm sure I spent more hours on setting up my business + bank account, dun's number, google account creation & verification, app listing configuration/verification and only then getting to the review stage. My first round took exactly 1 month from having a signed app release on my laptop ready to go to it showing publicly on the store.
Same here My build was ready like for a month and all that was stopping me is the requirement for the 12 testers being active for 14 days. When I applied to both stores, I thought apple is gonna be a problem, but google is a bigger unmovable wall
maybe for a brand new app submission.
my apps take maybe 1-2 days max. usually hours.
Unfortunately google is now a massive juggernaut that has 20+ layers before you can ship anything, and thats bled out to the users of their services. I wish we had better alternatives. In fact, I now just focus on shipping a PWA.
Btw thanks to the author. I got Conversations to work with Micro (https://micro.mu), the personal assistant I'm building. Its a nice XMPP client. Now just need to figure out how to do encryption for queries going into the model itself.
With accrescent.app you will be able to sell apps or distribute closed source apps in a privscy-focused way.
I've tried to publish an app in Play recently to get a taste of the experience. And I must say the taste was sour. Contrary to the experience of many I was able to reach a real human about my problem, but the human was less helpful that an AI pointed at the documentation. The AI was at least able to unrestand the issue, while the human simply talked past me.
That's the problem with all big billion dollar companies, they don't have enough people for support! You can't talk to a real human to explain your problem anymore :-( The only thing these CEOs, managers and noards care about are profits, they don't care about their users.
Our app has 17,000+ users and has never paid a cent to Google :) With a little out of box thinking, you can avoid Google tax.
How do you do it?
Very easy: offer them a long trial (numbers will show that your revenue is hurt, but don't care). Eventually the trail runs out, and they search how to renew or they ask support. The first result appears: your payment subscription page.
If a customer has used your product already for long time 20 days+, extra steps to set up payment one time, especially when you do not auto charge short trials, the customer is happy.
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They push the user to their website where subscriptions are.
It's not a tax. It's you being parasitic on someone else's infra.
it's actually Google being parasitic on all the apps' infra. I paid for the app store infra when I bought my phone, and every time I open it and see ads, and with my tracking data for the NSA. They don't need to be allowed to quadruple dip.
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Given what google search/AI/data tracking is, there should be no shame in using their infra for free. Hell,it should all be free by default.
Good thing the companies that participate in the current AI craze would never ever behave in any way parasitic.
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At least in Europe - these rouge corporations need to be reined in or just leave the market.
Google Play's app registration is so much more complicated now that Good Luck getting to production ever.
And even then the same thing on every update. If you're a small business and your livelihood depends on that then it's a nightmare to deal with.
And no, kicking them out won't be a problem. No sky is going to fall. Vacuum would be filled in very quickly.
You should just be able to give them secure access to your git repo and they can get an LLM to do a code review.
Conversations is pretty nice for self hosted xmpp. Wish there was an iOS client!
Monal is decent on iOS.
> This effectively means I’m paying Google more than 1000 Euro per year for their services. 1000 Euro per year is 1.5x what I’m paying for my internet access. It’s roughly what I’m paying for my notebook per year if you assume I use it for three to four years. When my internet breaks, someone drives to my house and fixes it. When my notebook breaks, someone drives to my house and fixes it.
Couldn’t have said better. We all allowed it to come to this.
Receiving 1000 euros without having any real work or accountability is the epitome of free profit. No wonder these platform gatekeepers are fighting so hard to maintain it (at the cost of you, the consumer).
And yet people (in general) just dont care, because they don't truly feel the pain until it's too late - issues like privacy and such are like that.
It's the arrogance. "You wouldn't have made 10 euros if I didn't give you the storefront and the one click install". Unfortunately they are right about this too. Why would they then also provide customer support that costs them money. They have enough "happy" customers as it is. Literally millions of apps are there.
so why doesn't this happen on the PC?
The fact is, google engineered their app store to be monopoly, following apple's model (which is also engineered - they had more foresight about it).
There are no good artificial monopolies, and natural monopolies should be regulated to prevent undue influence (and unwarranted profit).
It makes sense to leave, but it also seems like the overall sentiment would be more positive given the “it paid my rent for many years” part.
You rarely leave with a positive sentiment when you felt trapped and abused in the relationship.
> For years I’ve felt like I was in a toxic relationship with Google, and the only reason I stayed was economic dependency.
Slavery: one party makes you pick cotton or you aren't allowed to eat or sleep.
Not slavery: one party makes you supply widgets or you aren't allowed to eat or sleep. Another party gives you widgets for picking cotton.
We should all be happy to participate in the not slavery society, right? We should all feel great because we aren't slaves.
I've used an Android phone for about 10 years now, and I have never once used Google Play.
Yes, Android is a rather Google-ified experience, but there is life outside of Google. Let's live it.
It's called "Rent-seeking" when a powerful entity extracts wealth without providing any commensurate value.
Google wants you to believe the only way to get an app is through them. They have programmed society to believe this - despite the fact that you have never needed Google to download and run apps on your laptop. Apple also wants you to believe this, which is why they keep making it more impossible to run Mac apps without the Apple Store. They too want to extract your wealth and control you.
FOSS was created because people didn't have a way to cooperate and share the source code for their programs, to let users fix their own problems. Like the "right to repair" but for software. But Apple and Google wouldn't exist in the forms they do today without our FOSS. Our own software is being used to manipulate us, take our money, and take away our freedoms. Ironic.
Maybe it's time for a new software license that does discriminate against the rent seekers. Not because we deserve money when someone uses our free software. But because our freedoms are being trampled by the companies who use our software.
I think we should define that new license, abandon the old projects using the old licenses, and start using new ones. We already did this for Rust tools, I think we can do it for new licenses too.
I think GPLv3 already does this, with its anti-tivoization requirements. People just need to switch to an up-to-date copyleft license rather than permissive licenses.
https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#Tivoization
"Fortunately, I’m no longer economically dependent on Google Play Store revenue. Google doesn’t deserve me and my money anymore. I’m done. Fuck the gatekeepers."
+1.
Sorry this is a bit of a long rant. To many people here this will be a very old hut but I've only recently realized that Apple and Google are basically extortion rackets and have made the online world way worse and enshittified than it should be. Why? They deliberately make it as hard as possible to sell true cross-platform apps. "Buy one license, install our software on all of your devices." That should sound reasonable, yet it's impossible as a business model. If you put an app on the Apple Store or on Google Play, you cannot have it unlocked by a license code. So you have to sell it on their platform. That means that if you want to sell one license for all platforms, you'd have to force your users to buy the license in one of those stores, then generate desktop license from that store purchase. That's not just nonsense, it still wouldn't work because the user can still not switch from iOS to Android and vice versa.
Okay, so sell mobile platforms separately but make desktop platforms with one license. That would still be nice and comparatively hassle-free for your customers. Not so fast, though! Desktop app stores also prohibit free apps with unlock mechanism. So you have to put unlockable versions on your website. However, app stores explicitly prohibit even just mentioning that the user doesn't have to buy an app if they have already bought it elsewhere. They strictly prohibit pointing the user elsewhere to check whether they could use it for free. Consequently, unless your users are extremely well educated about those platform quirks, many of them will erroneously buy your app twice.
But wait! There is an exception in Apple Store and Google Play Store. You're strictly prohibited from putting an app on there that needs to be unlocked by a license key, but you are allowed to ask the user to create an account or log into an existing account with a user name and email address. As long as users can also purchase the app on the respective store, that's allowed. So you can tie the app to an account and unlock it if the user already bought it for another platform. For some reason, unlocking an app with a code is strictly prohibited but unlocking it by providing your email and a password and then contacting a server is totally fine. That's why so many apps have those shitty login requirements. I wasn't really aware of that.
In a nutshell, apart from "freemium models" there are two major ways to sell cross-platform software that really is cross-platform. First, make the user pay individually for each platform, make them buy your app again and again with all the hassle that brings. Second, force them to login with an email and a user name with some direct contact to some centralized hub server.
IMHO, all of these options are strictly worse than just allowing your users to buy the app anywhere they like and unlock it for all other platforms.
All these stores, Apple Store, Google etc... must be opened up. They constitute an illegal monopoly. Why does the US government protect monopolies? This is against the core tent of capitalism, aka more competition in a free, open market, to have prices be as low as reasonable possible for the customer. The USA shifted towards de-facto monopolistic mafias. Financial kickbacks to the US government must logically exist here - otherwise one can not explain why the US government works for the interest of mega-corporations only now.
Open ALL stores.
To the author. Go buy yourself some socks.Maybe a wallet, and go to the resturaunt that never fails you, or more generaly put in a concerted shameless effort to catch up, relax, fit the worst little personal bugs and recuring inconvieniences, essentialy put the same attention that you put into maintaining your product, into your self, remember to say fuck you google as you put the new " toothbrush * " you got by the sink, that you have reminded yourself but failed to get for the last six months, because thats what we give up, when we are blamming ourselves for the rejections we get from nameless faceless functionaries, that doom loop of 'engagement' is the point behind the delays and mindless activity, and reversing it is almost magical.
* 'toothbrush', anything that is a constant tiny irritant going away can be absurdly triumphant
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Quer és o meu número bro?
15% is a lot. I'm not trying to say it isn't.
And they're annoying and often screw up the review process.
Google is always going to make money off any work they do. That's just business. They're not going to put more money towards better reviews without taking more money. And without the reviews, even as crappy as they are, a lot of really crappy software would be on the store. And a lot more would be actively malicious
And you were making like 7x as much as they were taking. Without them, you would even get noticed and you'd have made nothing.
We know this because almost nobody installs FDroid, and the other stores like Samsung make basically nothing for developers, even though they're preinstalled on so many devices.
The app store is full of crappy and malicious software though. Why pay them for something they aren't doing anyway?
so how much do you think they should take?
what is "fair" in your opinion?
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It's not just business - it's basically a monopoly. Enough to extract rent while providing a minimal service.
Imagine if all streets were owned by two large companies who charged you enough to use them that you'd be paying as much in fees as you are in paying for gas. People would still use cars. The streets could be in horrible condition, the two companies would be making an insane amount of profit, but there would still be people out there saying that if it wasn't for those companies we wouldn't be getting anywhere and it's just business.
It's literally not. And your analogy is bad, because it describes inelastic demand, and not the platform effect.
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> And you were making like 7x as much as they were taking. Without them, you would even get noticed and you'd have made nothing.
Jesus Christ you can always count on HN for the most sycophantic, bootlicking comments sucking up to big tech imaginable.
It's an absolutely fair argument and it just doesn't show great intelligence to go straight to namecalling rather than bringing up counter arguments.
I do believe that while Google and Apple are evil gatekeepers they also made it easier for non-tech people to install their own app without always calling their kids or neighbours. That's already a big win.
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There’s Huawei App Gallery but it is to the West a product of a commie so it needed to be suppressed and snuffed.