Not really, unless paying users switch to alternative stores, which they don't just because I as a developer face friction in publishing to Google Play.
In fact, Google is making alternative stores even less convenient with their latest 'side-loading' hurdles.
Regulators need to wake up, issue record fines, mandate equal access and a 'Choose your app stores' screen on device setup.
Otherwise competitive third party stores and a fair market are going to remain a pipe dream.
They don't need record fines. They need to be liquidated and their entire c-suite and board of directors barred from serving in any executive management capacity of any business more complex than a sole proprietorship.
Hey I like this idea. What about proper taxation so businesses and the rich pay their fair share, workers on the board of a company and how about we enforce some antitrust laws.
I'd also love it if we also enforced existing regulations with teeth. Like of your data center doesn't have a permit for a gas turbine and you run them anyway instead of saying "oh well, you can run them until we settle in court" we toss the CEO in jail to think about their lapse in ethics
This apathy is somewhat absurd considering Lina Khan had been reviving moribund antitrust laws to aggressively push back against Big Tech/monopoly abuses. To the point that she was portrayed as a cartoonish villain by the SV billionaire class who vowed to get rid of her by donating to Trump.
They appreciate this sort of political nihilism where everyone seems to have collective amnesia about the current status quo vs. just a couple years ago and so lament "nothing ever changes, voting is pointless".
That's great actually. And its not apathy I'm feeling, its more like frustration wrapped around helplessness. So great I can support Lina Khan, but how successful will the billionaires be in casting her as a villain to enough people to get her voted out and replaced with another sycophant?
Provided the rapture doesn't come, so what? Provided infinite things. It adds or removes nothing.
And yet trivial little alternatives like idk maybe you ever heard of Steam did actually happen, or the entire Android ecosystem itself when there was already an immense Palm app ecosystem that was like desktop apps where you got apps all manner of ways from physical sd cards to web sites to various curated stores. Or idk Epic, over a single app. They are back on the traditional stores now only because they called everyone's bluff and were suceeding, so the old stores caved rather than be seen to lose to someone so much smaller and newer, even in a small way that was more appearance than material.
There is no such thing as unthinkable. It's all not only thinkable, it has all actually already happened before and multiple times.
If something seems unimaginable, that only says something about your imagination not the reality.
They don't own the OS. One of the most powerful forces in consumer software is the ability to set defaults. The vast majority of users will never change the default browser, launcher, or app store; most don't even know it's possible. Google's position of controlling Android allows it to be wildly more corrupt and incompetent than any competing app store and still remain the dominant one. If another store does manage to gain a strong foothold, there are any number of OS changes Google can make to hamstring and stifle the competition. The situation is extremely asymmetric.
I mean sure, but even if people have the ability to select a different app store, why are they going to do this? Even if you MAKE them do it, on device setup as was commented elsewhere, do we mandate Apple put the 3rd party stores above their own? Can Apple indicate which is theirs, or does this bias the answer the user gives?
And more importantly I didn't ask what the user is picking or not picking, I'm asking: why is there an app store out there that's better than the main one? Is a 3rd party app store going to spin up a CDN, a transactions system, handle the customer service involved there, etc. and then just... not do all the evil shit Google and Apple are doing now, which is why their app stores make so much money? You're asking businesses to enter a market with established competitors with solid and wildly profitable business models, and to just have them make less money for the principle of it. Which like, I agree with, but you're gonna have a SHORT list of investors if that's your pitch.
F-Droid exists, and it seems quite a few people here would tell you it's a superior 3rd-party app store, in the sense of "if an equivalent app exists on F-droid, I'd install that one first, before even looking at whether there's a similar app on the Play store"
They are hardly mythical, for one I could think of Steam and Epic Games.
Competition is what stops the exploitation.
Epic Games has always offered lower fees and their CEO has been advocating for small developers for years.
There is no reason why Google and Apple get to bundle their stores, and these other big names have to collect the scraps from users who care to look up alternative stores and go through scare screens.
There are very good reasons, starting with the fact that there was no good mobile app experience before Apple created one. And they created one that was half the cost of the terrible stores that existed before.
And they created the hardware and software to make all this possible.
The app store gatekeepers have so much power that it would be nice to see some legal requirements for operators of those stores put in place.
If your app is rejected, there should be a real appeal process. Maybe developers should be able to demand arbitration for some non-trivial fee?
The first step of the appeal would be for the store to disclose to the arbitrator precisely what rule was violated and in what way. The arbitrator can uphold the rejection and you lose your fee or can force the app store to accept the submission and you are refunded.
Microsoft support used to work something like this. There was a fee to get them on the phone but if the problem turned out to be an actual bug, the fee was refunded.
More generally, I think there should be a legally-enforced right of due process online. Much of the rules of modern society are enforced by these companies, rather than governments, and we should have similar rights.
Don't get me wrong, I understand why it makes sense for a company to have the ability to block spammers, scammers, and malware without proving a case in a court of law, but I feel like there's a spectrum of importance, where the more potentially harmful the action is to the user, the more process is due to the impacted user to make sure the action is justified. Examples from least- to most-important:
- removing individual content that has little real-world importance: comments, social media posts, etc.
- banning accounts on platforms that generally have low real-world value (other than sentimental value) to the user: reddit, HN, non-monetized Youtube accounts, etc
- banning accounts on free platforms that have a very high cost to the user of being banned: Gmail (keys to the user's digital kingdom, the rest of the Google account), Facebook (real-name policy means that it's difficult to start over), high-notoriety accounts on other social media, etc.
- removing individual listings/etc on platforms where the user makes money: eBay, monetized Youtube videos, paid App/Play store apps, etc
- Banning accounts on platforms where the user makes money and the account itself has some intrinsic value (reputation, following, etc): eBay, monetized Youtube accounts, App store accounts, social media accounts for businesses, etc.
- Locking up or taking the user's money: locking the user out of a bank/brokerage/crypto/payment platform account; rescinding money (or other things with monetary value): bank account balances, payment platform balances, unpaid Youtube/other monetization earnings, loyalty/credit card points, etc.
- Banning accounts that are essential for the user to participate in society: bank account, cell phone plan, identity providers, etc.
Alongside that, I feel like if there's a clear revenue stream to the platform owner from the account, then the case for due process is even stronger -- if the platform is making hundreds or thousands of dollars because of my presence, surely they can have a competent, empowered human look at things when necessary.
> Anybody who's ever tried to get through their review process can attest that the article writer's experience is far from outside the norm.
This is an argumentum ad populum fallacy. "Everybody Knows" this kind of thing is true, ergo you should believe the example here without evidence.
It's also kinda ridiculous in context. I mean, no, there are no cases in the literature where Google has rejected an app due to misidentification with NFSW content and then sent screenshots of said content as part of the review. Even not in combination I don't think. Like, has either situation every been documented on its own? "Far from outside the norm" indeed.
> This is an argumentum ad populum fallacy. "Everybody Knows" this kind of thing is true, ergo you should believe the example here without evidence.
A much more charitable reading would be something like: Numerous people have all made this complaint, therefore the broader point is probably solid, even if this particular example might not be iron-clad evidence on it's own.
I've certainly heard enough similar stories that I don't have much trouble doubting this one, although I'd hardly consider any one story super-convincing on it's own
> This is an argumentum ad populum fallacy. "Everybody Knows" this kind of thing is true, ergo you should believe the example here without evidence.
Fair.
> It's also kinda ridiculous in context. I mean, no, there are no cases in the literature where Google...
Ok you lost me. What is "the literature"? Published scientific studies about Google's app review process? Obviously there aren't any of those. Blog posts? You (presumably) just read one, and if you take a minute to search, you'll find tons more. News articles? Perhaps harder to find, but definitely exist.
The whole nudes thing is just a funny outlier; don't fixate on that. Who cares what randomly chosen reason the Google overmind decided it didn't like you. The point is it feels like a dice roll and you have no recourse when you suddenly and randomly fail it.
You know, personal anecdotes and all that, but a company I used to work with was applying for their b2b app as well and we got a denied with a screenshot of a completely unrelated app as well, and that was at least 5 years ago. We ended up just replying "That's not our app" and I think it got stuck in limbo after that as I don't recall hearing anything about it afterwards and then I left the company.
I think I'm done with Android apps development. The following publishing requirements just closed the door for me as a hobby developer:
> Have at least 12 testers opted-in to your closed test.
> Run your closed test with at least 12 testers, for 14 days
The funny thing is this seems to apply to recently-created personal publisher accounts. I had a very old publisher account but because I was unable to move my account owner to another email address, I closed it and registered a new one. Little did I know what this would lead to later on.
I've written about this before on HN, but it's pretty clear that once the app stores courted the hobby developers and convinced them to publish their apps on the stores to get the marketplace flywheel started (remember all the discussion about the app stores competing based on the number of apps available in each?), that the focus wasn't going to be on hobbyist developers at all because they don't bring in the most cash. By imposing ever higher restrictions on app developers in the name of security, they are raising the bar to such a degree that typically only funded corporate customers will have an incentive to go through all the effort, since they can literally pay someone to do so.
In essence, while the app stores used to be about hobbyist software to some degree, they have become a place created by big companies for big companies, much like Walmart or Target. That would be fine if customers could choose when they visited Walmart or Target, but instead, we've created a regime where you must buy everything from Walmart or Target.
This has made mobile development a wasteland for hobbyist-built and community-built software. I know some people cheer this as the removal of amateurs and crappy software from the marketplaces, but I would counter with the observation that commercial software often doesn't have my best interests at heart, and I would, many times, prefer a piece of community-built or amateur software instead. This gets harder to procure with each passing day.
So, I think developers are generally better-served leaving mobile development and instead focusing on web development, which is not gated in the same ways. While you won't have the same reach that you would get through the app stores, you do have much more control over the platform on which you're developing.
I think it's fairly obvious that Google doesn't _want_ hobby developers in the play store at all. Their app development, publication, and review process seems quite intentionally designed to be penetrable only to those who are willing to make it (or already is) their full-time job.
There's just no money in it for them, and a lot of support burden. Hobbyist apps are either free, or a few bucks. For Google, the income is a rounding error compared to ad revenue for household-name apps or in-app purchases inside blockbuster mobile games.
(I will be first in line to buy the first working and affordable Linux smartphone.)
There is a lot of money in it for them, in creating and owning the ecosystem itself, which is required if want to make anything at all.
But they have just become shortsighted over time and, perhaps correctly, don't think they need to keep investing that way to get the payoff any more, they can just go 100% payoff now.
Because you are hobby developer. Thanks to this there are no so much junk in Play Store. When you open business account you don't need to do this closed test, you go straight to prod.
And for the testers requirement? Should every hobbyist developer be required to buy a dozen phones and set up one of those click farms that fraudsters use? Or are we fine with ending the era of hobbyist development?
Yea I’m on over a month now of an app sitting in review, a couple of years ago it was much quicker. Apple approved the same app within a week. I can only assume it’s because it’s easier to vibecode android apps so it’s being flooded?
I don't understand how Google aka the company that famously automates all the things can't "vibecode" a review tool to handle the increased submissions. I'm sure they already have which makes the delays puzzling. With all that compute, and all those brilliant engineers they should should be cranking out reviews, security audits and approving new apps/updated apps quicker than ever.
Google has had automated reviews for a decade now, I think there's just so much volume (I read somewhere in linkedin there's 1000 apps per hour submitted in playstore alone) that is choking the system.
That's an average of 24,000 apps per day.
With that amount of volume, it would be safe to assume that there's more reasons why google just won't accept an app even if it works fine or fits all the public guidelines.
Anyone can make a website and publish it but for some reason when it comes to apps there needs to be a store with a review process. Aren't apps, in a way, not just specialised browsers (not talking about webview apps here) that run in a sandbox? Why the need for all this "reviewing", does it make apps safer or better quality? Is it a device ecosystem permission / security problem? I.e. why do apps need stores and websites don't?
If you have no gatekeeping, then all of the bad actors come in and you end up with a tragedy of the commons.
Apple did this correctly, IMHO, when the App Store first came out by both:
- reviewing all apps
- having it take 30 days to get the feedback
The 30 days seemed draconian or bureaucratic but it forced builders to be 100% sure that there app was working and ready for consumption. It probably also acted as major friction for scammers etc who figured it wouldn't be worth it.
The iPhone 1 only allowed web bookmarks. They aren’t as capable as real apps in dozens of ways. The fact that lots of Apps are just glorified web site browsers doesn’t mean there aren’t plenty of apps that aren’t, and some that couldn’t be done with a web site at all.
The review process is broken. The stream of apps is enormous, the expense to review them deeply would be large, the cost of a false rejection is very low.
The expense to review them deeply used to be large, a few years ago. There should be a review process that consists of putting the source code in some escrow build environment and letting an LLM do a full audit. What would that be, a few bucks at-cost?
Okay, can you concoct some prompt-injection-like scenario where you can fool increasingly sophisticated agents about the presence of your malware? Sure, maybe. It's MILES ahead of where both major app stores are today, though, where you can find obvious scams that sailed through review just by looking at their description.
Apple releases numbers: 130,000 app reviews per week.
The human component to this doesn't need to do much more than verify it works, they say they churn through that with just 500 reviewers that must be costing just a few $10s of millions.
They could certainly do a better job, but maybe that means 2,500 reviewers? That'd cost them half-a-year of Roblox's commissions.
If Google needs 2x as many that's 5,000 people, their whole Roblox commission. There are more people working at their HQ, and this is a job they can distribute between cheaper countries.
And they could reasonably have different tiers/levels of review triggered by use. A fairly basic automatic review, until you get 10 installs. Then something more complex, up to 1000 installs, etc.
AI apps are flooding everything. No doubt they are using or planning to use AI to help manage the load.
And then of course all the apps will use some kind of AI, and because humans don’t care to wade through a trillion tip calculators or whatever, they’ll use AI to pick the app. And then have AI use the app for them through a voice assistant.
If Google cares about some of the long-standing problems, I wonder whether they know how to fix them. (Assign OKRs, which may be conflicting, or get quietly triaged/prioritized?)
Maybe they need personnel tasked solely to just go in, with the blessing of some high-up person, find any bad customer service or goodwill problem, bottom-up, figure out why it's happening, and work with the relevant teams to fix it, quickly. Then repeat.
To fit with ingrained cultural incentives for relevant teams, other managers and ICs might have to be convinced that their performance evaluations depend strongly on cooperating with this process.
The part where the author is aware that any missteps in "debugging" the review process can get their account permabanned is lovely. I'm sure I've read cases here before where a developer has lost all their emails and family photos because their policies.
I wonder if that'll be the future. This is something AI can actually solve. Write replacements for a lot of apps, slop but efficient slop, and use that as a distraction-free phone.
Maybe that could even be extended to browser, OS, webpages (just have a bad AI rewrite every page you read, and in the future maybe every video you watch) ... everything people use. Everything you come into contact with.
Think about it: no ads, and no way for anyone to bring them to your devices!
Not really, though? Google isn't a leader in AI on most fronts, especially not the coding front. And, the leading AI companies have little reason to protect Google's and Apple's mobile operating system monopolies.
And, even if we assume the investments in OpenAI and Anthropic Google and maybe Apple have made somehow makes them inclined to defend their monopolies, we still have a variety of other models that can also build apps. Sure, I like Claude and Opus 5.5 is the best model for most things, but I'm not going to be severely put out if I have to use Kimi or GLM or whatever. They're Good Enough. And, I know AI companies outside of the US don't have a vested interest in the ongoing success of Google and Apple and are unlikely to stand in the way of competitors.
But, antitrust is absolutely necessary to fix this problem.
only on the surface, plenty of places have moved out of the big tech ecosystem to models hosted at smaller providers or even self hosted. its not the majority of work but is growing.
I also recently acquired some free e-waste android 6 devices (like a galaxy note 4 pad and a moto 4 phone). Using some vibe coding I was able to setup a dockerized build system for java/kotlin apps and managed to make a number of custom applications for the devices like turning them into timelapse+mjpeg streaming cameras (or irc client, or ice thickness estimation from chirped sounds+dsp). Since they're ewaste I don't mind if they get destroyed or lost.
Are you an editor or involved with app review? I would rather read this honestly written, succinct blog post than a mountain of AI slop that half of the HN front page is.
> I was hoping to publish my new game on the store and charge for it, but their review process is so broken, I think I'll stick to fdroid and itch.io.
Not really, unless paying users switch to alternative stores, which they don't just because I as a developer face friction in publishing to Google Play.
In fact, Google is making alternative stores even less convenient with their latest 'side-loading' hurdles.
Regulators need to wake up, issue record fines, mandate equal access and a 'Choose your app stores' screen on device setup.
Otherwise competitive third party stores and a fair market are going to remain a pipe dream.
They don't need record fines. They need to be liquidated and their entire c-suite and board of directors barred from serving in any executive management capacity of any business more complex than a sole proprietorship.
Hey I like this idea. What about proper taxation so businesses and the rich pay their fair share, workers on the board of a company and how about we enforce some antitrust laws.
I'd also love it if we also enforced existing regulations with teeth. Like of your data center doesn't have a permit for a gas turbine and you run them anyway instead of saying "oh well, you can run them until we settle in court" we toss the CEO in jail to think about their lapse in ethics
How do we do this though? Like who do I vote for to make this a reality? Republicans? Hardly. Democrats? Also no.
AOC
This apathy is somewhat absurd considering Lina Khan had been reviving moribund antitrust laws to aggressively push back against Big Tech/monopoly abuses. To the point that she was portrayed as a cartoonish villain by the SV billionaire class who vowed to get rid of her by donating to Trump.
They appreciate this sort of political nihilism where everyone seems to have collective amnesia about the current status quo vs. just a couple years ago and so lament "nothing ever changes, voting is pointless".
That's great actually. And its not apathy I'm feeling, its more like frustration wrapped around helplessness. So great I can support Lina Khan, but how successful will the billionaires be in casting her as a villain to enough people to get her voted out and replaced with another sycophant?
Extremely, considering that's exactly what they did.
Of course they do, when you as a developer no longer offer an app they want in the old store.
Provided there is no competitor in the store they already use, and that you as the developer do not bankrupt and consequently offer your app nowhere.
Provided the rapture doesn't come, so what? Provided infinite things. It adds or removes nothing.
And yet trivial little alternatives like idk maybe you ever heard of Steam did actually happen, or the entire Android ecosystem itself when there was already an immense Palm app ecosystem that was like desktop apps where you got apps all manner of ways from physical sd cards to web sites to various curated stores. Or idk Epic, over a single app. They are back on the traditional stores now only because they called everyone's bluff and were suceeding, so the old stores caved rather than be seen to lose to someone so much smaller and newer, even in a small way that was more appearance than material.
There is no such thing as unthinkable. It's all not only thinkable, it has all actually already happened before and multiple times.
If something seems unimaginable, that only says something about your imagination not the reality.
You can imagine whatever you want, the reality is that ~95% of Android app transactions happen on the Google Play store.
This is very unlikely to change without regulatory intervention.
So what stops these other mythical app stores from being just as predatory and exploitative as the first-party ones?
They don't own the OS. One of the most powerful forces in consumer software is the ability to set defaults. The vast majority of users will never change the default browser, launcher, or app store; most don't even know it's possible. Google's position of controlling Android allows it to be wildly more corrupt and incompetent than any competing app store and still remain the dominant one. If another store does manage to gain a strong foothold, there are any number of OS changes Google can make to hamstring and stifle the competition. The situation is extremely asymmetric.
I mean sure, but even if people have the ability to select a different app store, why are they going to do this? Even if you MAKE them do it, on device setup as was commented elsewhere, do we mandate Apple put the 3rd party stores above their own? Can Apple indicate which is theirs, or does this bias the answer the user gives?
And more importantly I didn't ask what the user is picking or not picking, I'm asking: why is there an app store out there that's better than the main one? Is a 3rd party app store going to spin up a CDN, a transactions system, handle the customer service involved there, etc. and then just... not do all the evil shit Google and Apple are doing now, which is why their app stores make so much money? You're asking businesses to enter a market with established competitors with solid and wildly profitable business models, and to just have them make less money for the principle of it. Which like, I agree with, but you're gonna have a SHORT list of investors if that's your pitch.
F-Droid exists, and it seems quite a few people here would tell you it's a superior 3rd-party app store, in the sense of "if an equivalent app exists on F-droid, I'd install that one first, before even looking at whether there's a similar app on the Play store"
Lack of distribution probably.
But Google has agreed to distribute app stores (in America anyway) for a modest $5000 fee + $5000/year fee + transaction fees.
They are hardly mythical, for one I could think of Steam and Epic Games.
Competition is what stops the exploitation.
Epic Games has always offered lower fees and their CEO has been advocating for small developers for years.
There is no reason why Google and Apple get to bundle their stores, and these other big names have to collect the scraps from users who care to look up alternative stores and go through scare screens.
There are very good reasons, starting with the fact that there was no good mobile app experience before Apple created one. And they created one that was half the cost of the terrible stores that existed before.
And they created the hardware and software to make all this possible.
None of that explains why the owner of an Apple device can't install alternative app stores, nor the bundling of their own app store.
Apple never claimed to be an open ecosystem that allowed users to install anything they liked without interference.
Actually, from 2007 (first iPhone) to 2008 (the App Store), they kind of did.
Apple made it perfectly clear that iDevices would be a walled garden when they released the SDK for third party applications.
That’s retconning at its best - there was no support for 3rd party apps then, just websites.
No amount of "they did it first", "they did it better" entitles them to monopolistic behavior.
The app store gatekeepers have so much power that it would be nice to see some legal requirements for operators of those stores put in place.
If your app is rejected, there should be a real appeal process. Maybe developers should be able to demand arbitration for some non-trivial fee?
The first step of the appeal would be for the store to disclose to the arbitrator precisely what rule was violated and in what way. The arbitrator can uphold the rejection and you lose your fee or can force the app store to accept the submission and you are refunded.
Microsoft support used to work something like this. There was a fee to get them on the phone but if the problem turned out to be an actual bug, the fee was refunded.
More generally, I think there should be a legally-enforced right of due process online. Much of the rules of modern society are enforced by these companies, rather than governments, and we should have similar rights.
Don't get me wrong, I understand why it makes sense for a company to have the ability to block spammers, scammers, and malware without proving a case in a court of law, but I feel like there's a spectrum of importance, where the more potentially harmful the action is to the user, the more process is due to the impacted user to make sure the action is justified. Examples from least- to most-important:
Alongside that, I feel like if there's a clear revenue stream to the platform owner from the account, then the case for due process is even stronger -- if the platform is making hundreds or thousands of dollars because of my presence, surely they can have a competent, empowered human look at things when necessary.> it was rejected. They attached a nsfw screenshot of some unidentified app.
I don’t doubt the author, at the same time this is a serious accusation with no details and little context.
This could have been presented in a more organized way, with timelines and redacted content.
Part of the problem is Google not being transparent, having more transparency could help.
Anybody who's ever tried to get through their review process can attest that the article writer's experience is far from outside the norm.
Although I must admit I've never gotten nudes from them. Up your game, Google.
> Anybody who's ever tried to get through their review process can attest that the article writer's experience is far from outside the norm.
This is an argumentum ad populum fallacy. "Everybody Knows" this kind of thing is true, ergo you should believe the example here without evidence.
It's also kinda ridiculous in context. I mean, no, there are no cases in the literature where Google has rejected an app due to misidentification with NFSW content and then sent screenshots of said content as part of the review. Even not in combination I don't think. Like, has either situation every been documented on its own? "Far from outside the norm" indeed.
> This is an argumentum ad populum fallacy. "Everybody Knows" this kind of thing is true, ergo you should believe the example here without evidence.
A much more charitable reading would be something like: Numerous people have all made this complaint, therefore the broader point is probably solid, even if this particular example might not be iron-clad evidence on it's own.
I've certainly heard enough similar stories that I don't have much trouble doubting this one, although I'd hardly consider any one story super-convincing on it's own
> This is an argumentum ad populum fallacy. "Everybody Knows" this kind of thing is true, ergo you should believe the example here without evidence.
Fair.
> It's also kinda ridiculous in context. I mean, no, there are no cases in the literature where Google...
Ok you lost me. What is "the literature"? Published scientific studies about Google's app review process? Obviously there aren't any of those. Blog posts? You (presumably) just read one, and if you take a minute to search, you'll find tons more. News articles? Perhaps harder to find, but definitely exist.
The whole nudes thing is just a funny outlier; don't fixate on that. Who cares what randomly chosen reason the Google overmind decided it didn't like you. The point is it feels like a dice roll and you have no recourse when you suddenly and randomly fail it.
You know, personal anecdotes and all that, but a company I used to work with was applying for their b2b app as well and we got a denied with a screenshot of a completely unrelated app as well, and that was at least 5 years ago. We ended up just replying "That's not our app" and I think it got stuck in limbo after that as I don't recall hearing anything about it afterwards and then I left the company.
Is this supposed to be some hypocrisy gotcha? It's a guy's personal blog
He's jotting down his thoughts, not trying to be a review process to distribute software on the most used operating system on the planet
They don't have access to the content anymore, as mentioned a bit later in the article.
I think I'm done with Android apps development. The following publishing requirements just closed the door for me as a hobby developer:
> Have at least 12 testers opted-in to your closed test.
> Run your closed test with at least 12 testers, for 14 days
The funny thing is this seems to apply to recently-created personal publisher accounts. I had a very old publisher account but because I was unable to move my account owner to another email address, I closed it and registered a new one. Little did I know what this would lead to later on.
I've written about this before on HN, but it's pretty clear that once the app stores courted the hobby developers and convinced them to publish their apps on the stores to get the marketplace flywheel started (remember all the discussion about the app stores competing based on the number of apps available in each?), that the focus wasn't going to be on hobbyist developers at all because they don't bring in the most cash. By imposing ever higher restrictions on app developers in the name of security, they are raising the bar to such a degree that typically only funded corporate customers will have an incentive to go through all the effort, since they can literally pay someone to do so.
In essence, while the app stores used to be about hobbyist software to some degree, they have become a place created by big companies for big companies, much like Walmart or Target. That would be fine if customers could choose when they visited Walmart or Target, but instead, we've created a regime where you must buy everything from Walmart or Target.
This has made mobile development a wasteland for hobbyist-built and community-built software. I know some people cheer this as the removal of amateurs and crappy software from the marketplaces, but I would counter with the observation that commercial software often doesn't have my best interests at heart, and I would, many times, prefer a piece of community-built or amateur software instead. This gets harder to procure with each passing day.
So, I think developers are generally better-served leaving mobile development and instead focusing on web development, which is not gated in the same ways. While you won't have the same reach that you would get through the app stores, you do have much more control over the platform on which you're developing.
I think it's fairly obvious that Google doesn't _want_ hobby developers in the play store at all. Their app development, publication, and review process seems quite intentionally designed to be penetrable only to those who are willing to make it (or already is) their full-time job.
There's just no money in it for them, and a lot of support burden. Hobbyist apps are either free, or a few bucks. For Google, the income is a rounding error compared to ad revenue for household-name apps or in-app purchases inside blockbuster mobile games.
(I will be first in line to buy the first working and affordable Linux smartphone.)
There is a lot of money in it for them, in creating and owning the ecosystem itself, which is required if want to make anything at all.
But they have just become shortsighted over time and, perhaps correctly, don't think they need to keep investing that way to get the payoff any more, they can just go 100% payoff now.
Because you are hobby developer. Thanks to this there are no so much junk in Play Store. When you open business account you don't need to do this closed test, you go straight to prod.
Open a corporation and register as an organization. Easier way to get through.
I also had my old dev account that I used during school permanently disabled.
And for the testers requirement? Should every hobbyist developer be required to buy a dozen phones and set up one of those click farms that fraudsters use? Or are we fine with ending the era of hobbyist development?
https://cheq.ai/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/clickfarm6-1920w....
>The plan is to equip them with some sms gateway software
MAXS (Modular Android XMPP Suite) could also work.
http://projectmaxs.org/homepage/
https://bitbucket.org/projectmaxs/maxs/src/master/
https://search.f-droid.org/?q=Maxs&lang=en
> Version 0.5.19 (2000506627) suggested Added on Jan 22, 2025
>This version requires Android 4.4 or newer.
(Hope the author is doing OK.)
Yea I’m on over a month now of an app sitting in review, a couple of years ago it was much quicker. Apple approved the same app within a week. I can only assume it’s because it’s easier to vibecode android apps so it’s being flooded?
I don't understand how Google aka the company that famously automates all the things can't "vibecode" a review tool to handle the increased submissions. I'm sure they already have which makes the delays puzzling. With all that compute, and all those brilliant engineers they should should be cranking out reviews, security audits and approving new apps/updated apps quicker than ever.
Google has had automated reviews for a decade now, I think there's just so much volume (I read somewhere in linkedin there's 1000 apps per hour submitted in playstore alone) that is choking the system.
That's an average of 24,000 apps per day.
With that amount of volume, it would be safe to assume that there's more reasons why google just won't accept an app even if it works fine or fits all the public guidelines.
Not only this but letting predatory apps like NearMe, and countless scam dating apps in the Play store has delegitimized Google for me.
Anyone can make a website and publish it but for some reason when it comes to apps there needs to be a store with a review process. Aren't apps, in a way, not just specialised browsers (not talking about webview apps here) that run in a sandbox? Why the need for all this "reviewing", does it make apps safer or better quality? Is it a device ecosystem permission / security problem? I.e. why do apps need stores and websites don't?
If they didn't review every app, someone might sneak in a paid app without giving Apple and Google their 30% cut.
If you have no gatekeeping, then all of the bad actors come in and you end up with a tragedy of the commons.
Apple did this correctly, IMHO, when the App Store first came out by both:
- reviewing all apps
- having it take 30 days to get the feedback
The 30 days seemed draconian or bureaucratic but it forced builders to be 100% sure that there app was working and ready for consumption. It probably also acted as major friction for scammers etc who figured it wouldn't be worth it.
The iPhone 1 only allowed web bookmarks. They aren’t as capable as real apps in dozens of ways. The fact that lots of Apps are just glorified web site browsers doesn’t mean there aren’t plenty of apps that aren’t, and some that couldn’t be done with a web site at all.
The review process is broken. The stream of apps is enormous, the expense to review them deeply would be large, the cost of a false rejection is very low.
The expense to review them deeply used to be large, a few years ago. There should be a review process that consists of putting the source code in some escrow build environment and letting an LLM do a full audit. What would that be, a few bucks at-cost?
Okay, can you concoct some prompt-injection-like scenario where you can fool increasingly sophisticated agents about the presence of your malware? Sure, maybe. It's MILES ahead of where both major app stores are today, though, where you can find obvious scams that sailed through review just by looking at their description.
Why would it be large? Or problematically so.
Apple releases numbers: 130,000 app reviews per week.
The human component to this doesn't need to do much more than verify it works, they say they churn through that with just 500 reviewers that must be costing just a few $10s of millions.
They could certainly do a better job, but maybe that means 2,500 reviewers? That'd cost them half-a-year of Roblox's commissions.
If Google needs 2x as many that's 5,000 people, their whole Roblox commission. There are more people working at their HQ, and this is a job they can distribute between cheaper countries.
And they could reasonably have different tiers/levels of review triggered by use. A fairly basic automatic review, until you get 10 installs. Then something more complex, up to 1000 installs, etc.
AI apps are flooding everything. No doubt they are using or planning to use AI to help manage the load.
And then of course all the apps will use some kind of AI, and because humans don’t care to wade through a trillion tip calculators or whatever, they’ll use AI to pick the app. And then have AI use the app for them through a voice assistant.
>>the cost of a false rejection is very low.<<
maybe in the short term, and if thier app store is a loss leader.
They have 2x the number of apps as Apple.
Millions and millions.
The cost of false rejections is generally quite low.
Exact same philosophy they use for hiring.
If only they would charge developers exorbitant fees that could fund such work...
Of course I understand that they are not going to spend money on improving their review process for our benefit until regulators force them to.
If Google cares about some of the long-standing problems, I wonder whether they know how to fix them. (Assign OKRs, which may be conflicting, or get quietly triaged/prioritized?)
Maybe they need personnel tasked solely to just go in, with the blessing of some high-up person, find any bad customer service or goodwill problem, bottom-up, figure out why it's happening, and work with the relevant teams to fix it, quickly. Then repeat.
To fit with ingrained cultural incentives for relevant teams, other managers and ICs might have to be convinced that their performance evaluations depend strongly on cooperating with this process.
Of course Google could do this, but they don't want to. Their only goal is to cut costs and avoid lawsuits.
Agree. Tried to publish my app through Google, and still no luck. Link below.
I was able to share it on f-droid though, and I am starting to think that it may be good just to publish app only through it.
https://github.com/rumca-js/OfflineWebSearch
I'm really excited about Graphene OS partnering with Motorola and putting out true alternatives to Google's OS's.
We really need an open source and funded OS for phones like we have with Linux for desktops/servers.
Also, with AI 100x'ing developers productivity it might be a really interesting time for phone OS's.
Sending unsolicited nudes is sexual harassment, someone at Google could go to jail
The part where the author is aware that any missteps in "debugging" the review process can get their account permabanned is lovely. I'm sure I've read cases here before where a developer has lost all their emails and family photos because their policies.
I only ever published anything on the google play store under another google account than the one that's got my gmail and photos.
> It seems pretty clear to me that counting on google is a bad idea.
A company that does not provide support to normal people and has a compulsive habit of closing services for absolutely no good reason? You don't say?
I wonder if that'll be the future. This is something AI can actually solve. Write replacements for a lot of apps, slop but efficient slop, and use that as a distraction-free phone.
Maybe that could even be extended to browser, OS, webpages (just have a bad AI rewrite every page you read, and in the future maybe every video you watch) ... everything people use. Everything you come into contact with.
Think about it: no ads, and no way for anyone to bring them to your devices!
Big tech controls the AIs. The solution, of course, is antitrust enforcement.
Not really, though? Google isn't a leader in AI on most fronts, especially not the coding front. And, the leading AI companies have little reason to protect Google's and Apple's mobile operating system monopolies.
And, even if we assume the investments in OpenAI and Anthropic Google and maybe Apple have made somehow makes them inclined to defend their monopolies, we still have a variety of other models that can also build apps. Sure, I like Claude and Opus 5.5 is the best model for most things, but I'm not going to be severely put out if I have to use Kimi or GLM or whatever. They're Good Enough. And, I know AI companies outside of the US don't have a vested interest in the ongoing success of Google and Apple and are unlikely to stand in the way of competitors.
But, antitrust is absolutely necessary to fix this problem.
only on the surface, plenty of places have moved out of the big tech ecosystem to models hosted at smaller providers or even self hosted. its not the majority of work but is growing.
I also recently acquired some free e-waste android 6 devices (like a galaxy note 4 pad and a moto 4 phone). Using some vibe coding I was able to setup a dockerized build system for java/kotlin apps and managed to make a number of custom applications for the devices like turning them into timelapse+mjpeg streaming cameras (or irc client, or ice thickness estimation from chirped sounds+dsp). Since they're ewaste I don't mind if they get destroyed or lost.
"Google is incompetent at review"... while the author is misspelling words constantly.
You can't win. If he had had a perfect text with a - or two you'd have written 'Oh, this must surely be AI'.
That makes Google competent how?
Are you an editor or involved with app review? I would rather read this honestly written, succinct blog post than a mountain of AI slop that half of the HN front page is.
That’s irrelevant. The author likely doesn’t have English as their first language. They are an individual, not one of the most valuable company ever