Brutal, the frustration is palpable. Forgive my mobile engineering ignorance, but does developing on Android pose similar risks or is control less centralized to Google?
It's worse on android. You'll lose access to every google account you have (email, photos, drive) and if you circumvent by creating a new account and are caught then you will be banned again as well as all of the accounts that are associated with the new account. This could potentially destroy an entire business if they hire a banned individual and get their entire company banned because of it.
But you don't actually need any access to Google's stuff to develop for Android, so Google can't lock you out and destroy your business. Google can just cause a lot of inconvenience.
If that's what you call it, but business have had their paid Google Apps accounts nuked, and critical data lost. Publishing on Play is basically mandatory to get users.
I mean you can still develop and publish your APKs online but not being on the Play Store is enough to kill most apps.
I mean if you're so popular/useful that users will seek you out independently you might be okay but there are a lot of shops where the store is their only marketing funnel.
Possibly. Government agencies (Australia most recently) are starting to require citizens to use e-mail addresses from "trusted" partners. Google is one of those partners.
I'm pretty sure that already in 2019 losing a linkedin accout might have serious effect on your career. Not completely unemployable, of course but this could have significant impact in some industries
I don't think this is true at all, or at least not outside of certain niches. I deleted my LinkedIn account years ago, and doing that had exactly no discernable impact on my career.
If anything the threat to Android developers is much worse, because of Google's habit of banning entire google accounts for any infraction.
Recently, hundreds of people had their entire Google accounts banned (with that ban upheld on appeal) because they were sending a lot of emotes (By request!) to a streamer's chat.
These people lost everything. Emails. Everything in their Google Drive. Over totally normal behaviour.
Using a separate Google account to do your app development doesn't help, because they ban accounts they suspect to belong to the same person as well.
So yes, the danger exists for Android developers too, and is much larger in scope.
That's a crazy incentive to split your information across multiple services. These read like horror stories. I'd be in so much trouble if I got locked out of my google accounts.
Yes, that case was a final wake-up call for me to start migrating as much as I can away from Google. Phone is the hardest part - I do like Android much more than iOS, but the risk of getting randomly banned by some deep neural net without any recourse is something that I can't accept anymore.
Sometimes I wonder who are the developers that coded that and if they're proud of their work, destroying a not so insignificant part of many people's live.
Consent is an active process. Either party can revoke consent at any time without cause without being an asshole; future consent thus cannot reasonably be assumed in perpetuity.
Yes you can legally revoke consent, but if you are a global oligopolist and your revoking consent wipes out people's digital identity, personal data and professional existence, then you should not be surprised if you get crushed by regulators eventually.
Developers in particular have nowhere else to go. Backing up your code doesn't help if you get locked out of one of the 2.5 app stores on planet earth. Your skills are worthless.
"Make backups" doesn't quite cover it - not even for consumers. How do you keep up-to-date backups of your Google Docs & Sheets? How do you restore an Android backup including all your purchases after getting banned by Google?
The principle of "either party can revoke consent" is based on the assumption that both parties have other realistic options. But that is no longer the case. This market has become completely dysfunctional.
Google is running a service that is practically the most important service, for millions of people. If they get locked out of their email, they could potentially lose access to everything.
To ban people flippantly and then hide behind automated customer service is inexcusable.
I know a small team of 3 devs who were developing along just fine. Their app on the play store was mildly popular (relative to a new app) and gaining traction and then their accounts were shutdown without warning.
They received no meaningful response from Google that wasn't effectively "We looked into it" and they just kept them locked out. No explanation why.
They came up with the theory that one of the devs had worked at a company that after he left was associated with some scummy practices where they would buy apps and turn them into spyware. They figured google somehow associated that company's apps / acts to that one developer and then it was guilt by association from there. Sadly that company was still active under new names and the 3 devs who weren't associated with them couldn't get around their ban.
For the record I personally can't confirm any of this except to say I do trust the folks I know that were involved.
I recall seeing a few stories on here in the past few months regarding people's apps disappearing from Google Play and Google's support providing no real "support".
Technically yes, you can only be banned from the Google Play Store, and you can still host your own app binary. When you consider how many users only look in the app store, the power is still effectively absolute.
