So... having read through their marketing material, this is an on-device tool that opens up what appears to be most of the Android application API to at least the user of the device, and potentially to any Droidscript applications they grab from other sources, and... maybe to other apps on the device? It's not clear from a quick read how extensive the runtime control is.

So just right out of the gate this is defeating basically the entirety of the Play Store vetting process. Droidscript itself may not be engaged in advertising fraud, but it makes advertising fraud trivial to deploy. (And it needs to be said: this is the kind of app that would never have been legal at all on any version of iOS.)

Add to that that it's a closed source IDE for an open platform, and my intuition sides with Google here. My guess is that when details come out it will turn out that at-least-plausibly harmful Droidscript garbage was being pushed to users and Google decided to kill it.

Pythonista is a complete Python programming environment which provides access to camera, music, contacts, the network, and so on, and has been available for iOS since 2016. What specifically distinguishes Droidscript from Pythonista such that you think Apple would reject Droidscript?

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/pythonista-3/id1085978097

https://symdstools.github.io/Docs/docs/app/SendIntent.htm

If Droidscript required unknown sources to do anything (not just APK exports), then other apps could check the unknown sources policy on the device and disable certain intents (which they may do anyway at the moment, since that would mean that the applications installed may be untrustworthy). But this way there isn't any way to tell.

Please don't equate trust with any app store like that. Firstly, many incidents have shown that this blanket trust isn't warranted, and second, the final arbiter of trust is the owner of the device, not the owner of the app store.

This is a poor assumption to make. Any data coming into your application should be assumed to be malicious. This would be the same as a server just accepting any data made to its API calls without any validation.

When we get permissions boiled down to one or two popups we end up with issues providing accurate privileges to applications (and might be forced to allow WhatsApp to trawl through our contact list if we ever want to send a picture in it).

Granular control shifts the power to the user and allows programs like this to have more fine tuned privileges.

Given the amazing strides in usability we've seen in nearly every other field it baffles me why everyone isn't onboard with the fact that we can take the learnings from elsewhere and bring them to the domain of permissions.

Permissions are almost always hierarchical and grouped into classifications that make it easier to present the user with fewer more meaningful choices than asking the user to approve whether an app can see each contact on their phone one-by-one.

I'm honestly a bit cynical (puts on tinfoil hat) that marketers have held us back here since a lack of granular permissions aligns quite well with their effort to grab as much personal data as possible.

Consider the permissions for the lowly keyboard app...

A proper understanding of fine-grained permissions basically requires a working knowledge of how that permission might be or has in the past been abused.

And ultimately, fine-grained permissions are probably answering the wrong questions. The user expresses some basic trust via the initial app installation; what permissions ultimately help with is deciding whether or not to keep trusting the developer. If the app ask for lots of unexpected stuff, it's probably malware and should be uninstalled. If the permissions seem reasonable, the app is probably fine, and the user just wants to delegate responsibility to the app to do what it needs to do to get shit done.

It's really /all/ about trust. If you can't trust a random app, installation is a high-friction event. Check the stars, number of users, read a bunch of recent reviews, carefully go through permissions providing access for exactly what's needed. If you /can/ trust a random app, you can just install it, use it to read the fscking QR code and go on with your day. The need for trust is why we've ended up with centralized app stores with stringent content policies, and all the false positives that come along with it.

Imagine if this were applied to actual laws enforced by the police. "You're under arrest but we won't tell you what law you've broken, because then other criminals might use that knowledge of the law to avoid being arrested. And by the way, a secret court has sentenced you to life imprisonment and all of your appeals have been denied."

I'm not endorsing these US policies, but it's worth noting that even in democratic law enforcement it's accepted that the system isn't always bound by transparent policy and process. There are usually justifications for keeping some things secret and discretionary to enhance law enforcement effectiveness.

Suppose it is true that these companies can't reveal their decision making because there's so much to be gained by bad actors that game these highly centralized systems.

Then it seems like a larger number of smaller firms could be more transparent and still achieve the same effective level of security.

This is the epitome of security by obscurity.

Uh... Seems like the actual problem (given that scenario) is that adware is being pushed to users, not whether or not Google defended its ban in public. Complaints about customer service (from everyone, not just Google) are a dime a dozen, actual user security is clearly more important, right?

Your answer presupposes a frame where Droidscript is innocent. What if it's not, and it knowingly nodded to a community of junkware being pushed to its users (again, I have no evidence!). In that case you'd want it banned without "decency", right?

Now, this was a special situation. I had a personal relationship with the developer, and I was happy to vouch for their honesty. Yet it still turned out Google had been right all along. Now, it's a shame Google couldn't let them know what was the issue. However, it's a safe assumption that the vast majority of people Google support deals with are spammers. And there's a lot of them. If Google gave a detailed explanation to all of them it would mean a ton of additional work – which would create an unsustainable situation at this scale.

You describe a situation where Google was going to put a whole company out of business -- probably ending your friend's job, as well as that of many other honest people -- rather than give them the information they needed to fix the problem. And you think this is reasonable, because it would be "a ton of additional work" for Google? We just have to accept people losing their livelihoods as collateral damage in the war on spammers?

Imagine if we applied the same logic to the government. If they think you committed a crime, they just toss you in jail and don't have to tell you why. They could catch a lot more criminals if they didn't have to waste time prosecuting them!

No, we need a Habeas Corpus for tech companies. If you are banned, you have to be told why. Make it a law. I don't care if it results in more spam.

> No, we need a Habeas Corpus for tech companies. If you are banned, you have to be told why. Make it a law. I don't care if it results in more spam.

The whole ordeal seems like an attempt to educate app developers by whipping, where the victims have to guess what they did wrong.

I don't think that's reasonable. What if most are spammers ? Better let a few spammers in than treat someone unjustly. Why would it become unsustainable ? I've seen this argument repeated ad nauseam, but have yet to see proper proof.

In this particular example, a copyright violation was detected in a image, so an automated response "someone else's image was used without permission, violating copyright" seems entirely plausible.

Look at the tone-deaf example this employee just shared. All they had to do was say in the same email that they used to ban someone "you have copyrighted images".

The moment they find an infraction they could literally take a screenshot, say "the problem is X" and email it, which would incur the 5 seconds it takes to add a screenshot and say the problem you already identifies, but make a world of difference for developers.

This nonsense about "it's to stop spammers" isn't about the cost, the laughably bad logic Google uses is that by identifying what rules you broke, spammers will get better at not doing stuff Google catches...

As if the spammers don't already know what they did to get caught!

Google should not be enforcing copyright in the first place without at least a report of infringement by the copyright holder - and in that case they should pass the report along to the developer.

> which would create an unsustainable situation at this scale.

Financial sustainability may have something to do with it, but I suspect the larger issue is that providing too much detail essentially trains malware authors to route around the company's defenses.

Imagine the Play Store as a castle which has both good townsfolk coming and going as well as being perpetually under siege by a malicious lord. Sometimes, the castle's defenses inadvertently prevent a townsperson from getting to market to sell their onions. When the townsperson is like, "Hey, I can't get in to sell my onions." it's helpful for the castle defenses to be like, "Well, we have the portcullis raised from 9am-11am on Tuesdays and the gatekeepers listen for your accent to decide if you're a local or an enemy."

But that's, like, exactly not what you want to say if the "townsperson" you're talking to is actually an enemy spy taking notes.

>"Rough consensus, and running code. We are not the Protocol Police."

Half the problems we have nowadays is because we have manufacturers playing "the Program Police", which leads inevitably to the point you just made.

You are now, like it or not, adversarial to any User looking to do anything you find unconformant with your bottom line. You cannot solve these issues by whitelisting, just like you can't solve the problem of crime by whitelisting, and hiding the conformance suite. If you can't know the test, you can spend infinite cycles changing the wrong thing to comply with it, and I do not find that to be a tenable state-of-affairs to push on users, even if intentionally aimed at the malicious ones. This is the same problem we have in meatspace with our overly byzantine legal system; but nobody accepts that secret laws are a good idea because if everyone can read the law, it's a national security risk. At least no one without some serious conflicts of interest.

Do you really think that your company is going to nail down a good solution to a problem that society at large can't even handle reasonably? I mean, think about it. This really is a subset of the general question of how to keep everybody doing something productive. I don't even need an answer. I just want to encourage people to think.

This model absolutely does not work when it comes to creating spaces where humans interact. There are bad actors and someone has to police them or they will abuse other users.

If you run a bar, you have to hire bouncers. It's simply part of the cost of hosting a safe venue.

Perhaps so, but it seems not unreasonable to have SOME ability to work with the creator of an app that's been on the store for years with a substantial number of ongoing users and (speculating) a non troublesome patten of installs and purchases.

Nobody believes that Google is technically out financially unable to do this, which leaves the other option - at a corporate level not giving a shit enough to even bother trying.

Google will often do the right thing whether by plan or by happenstance, but it pays to be aware that when it does the wrong thing there is no recourse and will be no correction.

You do have an ethical obligation to inform them of what policy was violated with sufficient detail that a good actor has a reasonable chance of complying with your policy.

I think that this should be required of any company that to provides publicly available goods/services, not just Google. This doesn't just help with monopolies, but also makes it harder to hide racism and censorship behind opaque policies.

I bet you indent your code in an inclusive way

you see exactly this happening all the time here on HN. the sentiment for the past few years is abysmal. google is actively blowing up their power user/developer customer base. looks like a metric somewhere got optimized a bit too well.

No they weren't. It was not right to terminate the entire app because someone used an image wrong.

But it's all good, Google is a private company™ and can do whatever they want®.

Due process isn't really a sound concept if it's only for innocent people.

Google itself is adware.

If I can't ship my closed source IDE on the platform is the platform really open?

> My guess is that when details come out it will turn out that at-least-plausibly harmful Droidscript garbage was being pushed to users and Google decided to kill it.

Of course they will say it was because x, y, and z were done to protect the users. But is it really for the users' benefit or just about control over their walled garden?

For clarity: the Play Store is not an open platform. The Android API being exposed by Droidscript very much is.

Yes, I'm sure Google will carefully release details that paint them as the good guy. Certainly, we don't want to be needlessly unfair to them, but there is zero reason to give them free trust them at this point.

Best case is the right person sees this social media outcry, silently gets it fixed and Google moves onto destroying the next developer.

No more than being able to build an app on my laptop and push it over ADB.

> (And it needs to be said: this is the kind of app that would never have been legal at all on any version of iOS.)

It also needs to be said that this is why I don't use Apple devices. What they inflict on their platform is not an argument for what should happen elsewhere.

I think that this is what has happened. The author of DroidScript claims that

> Unfortunately we also have to inform our users that we could no longer support AdMob for use in their own apps either, because we can't test it anymore and can't guarantee that Google won't treat them in the same brutal way.

So apparently users were able to do stuff with AdMob on DroidScript's back, and maybe AdMob registered these fraudulent actions with some Google-ID which was assigned to DroidScript.

Yup. Check out aurora store. It's a open source frontend to the google play store. All apps can be installed(except of course paid apps. Though if you bought the app and sign in to the account with aurora you can)

Compared to what? If someone wants to run a random APK that has some kind of ad fraud in it, they very easily can even if Droidscript doesn't exist.

If droidscript enables ad fraud, isn't it an issue with how the android sandboxing model is fundamentally broken? Given that there are far more people using phones than computers, and a lot of new smartphone users will have never used a desktop or laptop computer, droidscript might be their first venture into programming and/or hacking. Let's not shut it down.

Also the product has a very heavy emphasis on security, the security team is superb quality and well funded, and Google know that the team is trustworthy.

> (And it needs to be said: this is the kind of app that would never have been legal at all on any version of iOS.)

Exactly, iOS is not an open platform and Google has decided they want to be more like iOS.

I am not an expert in JS or the Android API, but I wonder if you couldn't do it automatically? If types line up closely enough, I would think that you could get a list of Android APIs (pull it from AOSP if you have to) and mechanically translate to a JS API.

[0] https://github.com/ionic-team/capacitor

My gut feeling says these devs aren't telling the whole story.

You can code up Garbage in Java just fine and get it on the app store. I've seen apps send passwords in plain text....

When did we collectively decide that programmable computers were a Bad Thing?

I thought the parent comment was speaking generally. Maybe I misunderstood.

Either way, I was thinking of downloading Droidscript as one way of saying "I want arbitrary code exec."

I think it's reasonable for Google to say "Most users don't understand what this implies, so if they want this they'll have to get it outside the Play Store."

That said, that doesn't actually seem to be what they're saying here.

I just think it's a reasonable stance to hold as an App Store.

You mean the one that doesn't exist?

I wouldn't really be surprised if EVERY scripting/programming app in the play store technically violates some play store rules, though.

You can later eject it to an Android Studio/Xcode project if you want.

Define "fixed", it was removed from Play Store but anyone can still install from APK or F-Droid, right?

If that's the argument I can sort of see Google's point here. The Play Store is supposed to be curated and the application should follow certain guidelines. This tool as I understand it effectively provides a loophole that lets people run non-curated code without jailbreak. I know that Apple removed apps for similar reasons in the past.

TFA is a bit misleading, the whole "AD FRAUD" angle is frankly irrelevant, it's just that since Google considers that the app violates the guidelines it can't be eligible for the ad program.

Installing non-curated apps has always been supported on Android - no jailbreaking required. Just get an APK either straight from the developer or through any number of alternative app stores, open it, click the "yes, I'm sure" option in the security popup and you've got yourself an app.

Also, according to DroidScript itself, Google accused them of ad fraud, so maybe there is something there.