It has happened again and again and again. Building for FB or Google is you making yourself their serf, and you will be allowed to exist at their whim.

You might think, "Ah-ha, web apps!" But no, Google can still casually destroy you there. Or you might think, "Ah-ha, desktop apps!" But the OS vendor can casually destroy you there.

Casually? The amount of effort and goodwill, say, Microsoft would need to spend to prevent me from installing $PROGRAM on my computer is significantly higher than the amount of non-effort a single extension reviewer would need to expend to click "no" arbitrarily because they are having a bad day.

How would Microsoft do it? Add legit software to Defender? Ship a Win10 update that disables a key API call $PROGRAM uses? Add "if program == $PROGRAM then exit" to the CreateProcess code? All possible, none casual. To the best of my knowledge they've never done something like this. I'm less deep into Apple land but I expect something similar holds on macos.

To its credit (though not everyone agrees), MS has spent a lot of effort making compatibility shims, basically doing other people's work for them, but they have no such obligation.

0. https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/

This is a different class of problem. In this case, a gatekeeper is asking you to use their service to distribute software through their channel, and that channel is governed by vague rules that may, in fact, be enforced on a whim. Further, the gatekeeper isn't being clear with the rules, and why you may have run afoul of them.

You sound like someone who's made the mistake of supporting Apple

Well, considering how hard Apple tries lately to make sure every piece of macOS software goes through them one way or another...

My point is not that they can't do it, my point is that they can't casually do it. It would be Real Work and it would risk major backlash.

That's unfortunate, but it is how the software market has worked thus far. Platform owners have massive power over those who build on them. For it to change, the market fundamentals will have to change. People thought the internet would change things, and it did - instead of one monster, we now have several, each with much more reach and control.

As far as actionable advice, well, starting a company isn't easy or formulaic. All I can recommend is look for niches where you'll be hard to dislodge and avoid situations where you have asymmetrical dependence on an entity that has no reason to care about you.

That won't matter if 60–70 % of the users are on that single browser.

At the moment the issue is the app store concept; it is designed to be a choke point, it is designed to be obscure, and it is designed to casually destroy software the store owner doesn't approve of.

(What is the status of Microsoft's app store, by the way?)

Not everything can be a website that just needs basic browser capabilities.

You can't. It seems like if you're in business of mobile/web-apps which are not large enough to have paid, direct contacts with your relevant platforms, you should have more than one business.

I'm not saying it's a reasonable expectation or a good thing. But if you can pull off either 2 ok apps, or 1 main app and some set of simple things, it may be preferable to one perfect product from the business continuity perspective.

1. I agree as to the need to get off the Google lands.

2. Being able to create business relationships to build on other people’s property and work without fear of their yanking the rug out is an incredibly important part of a working society.

The other side of the issue is tough, though: Chrome extensions are regularly purchased & have ads embedded into them ( https://superuser.com/questions/1551266/how-to-track-down-wh... ), so Google's chrome extension team (couple of ~hundred person?) is essentially held accountable by ~1 billion users to the behavior of ~10s of thousands of extensions.

When you are building for an extensible platform it's entirely reasonable to be surprised when the vendor sabotages you. Platforms like this are good because they help both parties, so there is an expectation that one side won't sabotage the other in general. When it happens it's surprising, and usually not a great outcome for the platform provider.

Joking aside, isn't this just what people should come to expect from the company that has always tried to normalize the "no support and no service" model?

If these antics start causing GOOG to lose share in the browser market then they may review these policies, but I highly doubt it. At the end of the day GOOG is an ad company and publicly-traded at that. They have a bottom-line and a lot of shareholders watching it.

Support channels/forums are probably not the way to go, in other words. Stop using their browser, stop using their search. That's probably the only way they will be incentivized to change.

this is one of the reasons why Google cloud will lose to AWS in the long run.

AWS is customer obsessed, Google is not.

"Google deleted my X" posts always rise to the top on HN because they elicit a strong emotional response from developers. I think it's worthwhile to reflect on why that happens. For me, it's because I absolutely despise seeing an algorithm have control over an individual's livelihood. This may be part of the Google mythos? Or it may simply be that they make their real money selling ads, and allocate support resources accordingly.

As result, you get a whole company of yes-men who have no spine.

They officially dropped the "don't be evil" motto some time ago, so yes.

> they make their real money selling ads, and allocate support resources accordingly

Of course. Every company allocates support resources the same way: to their paying customers.

If you need to pre-arrange expenses with the finance department, it's much faster to test drive with credits.

its not like ice cream.

if you messaged random people it's quite reasonable that they didn't bother answering you. i wouldn't have done it either.

you should get in contact with sales people via the proper channels and arrange testing (whether paid or not) with them.

If you message random "people that work at gcp" then "not caring" is probably one of the most polite things they could do.

The more people that do this in general, the better. We've given Google entirely too much power to control what people see and read (and it follows, control over what they say and think).

They don't have our best interests at heart, they have financial interests at heart, and everything else flows from there. I'm not saying this is evil, but it's certainly not _good_.

I actually prefer DDG in a few fronts, like configuration of language and region.

https://duckduckgo.com/bang

The very core of the issue here is less about the manual review process (although that sucks) and more about how the review process is necessary due to how extension permissions work in browsers to-date. The current process works similar to how Android and IOS permissions worked back in the day by requiring the user to grant all permissions up front (equivalent to giving an extension sudo permission to your browser).

The feedback you'll most likely get from Google on this isue is that the solution to this is to narrow down what URLs your extension works on... but that comes with a pretty big assumption that an extension can declare that information up front. Many extensions (including developer tooling) don't need to run on EVERY page - they need to run on specific pages where some extension-specific code is running (this is the case with Urql, Preact, React, Rexux devtools). Narrowing down by URL just isn't possible and an ad-hoc solution where extension-specific code on the webpage can trigger permission requests (similar to how a website requests access to your camera) is needed.

I've written up a proposal for this case which I think addresses 90% of use cases where "sudo permissions" are being requested up front and in reality, could be requested on an ad-hoc basis. Whether it's an agreement or some criticism, anyone who is able to get involved in this discussion - please do! Every other platform is using ad-hoc permissions and we need to push for the same with browser extensions.

Here's the proposal: https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/#!topic/chrom...

Here's my rant on Twitter about this problem (see retweeted comment): https://twitter.com/andyrichardsonn/status/12529205656960040...

The issue is the outdated permission spec for browser extensions (I've gone into more detail on another comment on this thread)