icer2312
Yes, you never know who you could be talking to. Reminds me of the trial lawyer advice of "never ask a question you don't know the answer to".
It's exactly as you described. I had a pain point which was trivial for most, but not for me. No existing solutions solved it properly so I decided to make it myself.
While searching for a solution, I found that a lot of other people had the same problem. It was bad enough for them that they took time out of their day to write their complaints online.
In solving my own problem, I was creating something that other people might've pay for. And they did!
I quickly learned that marketing was the most important part of the process.
"Management guru, Mary Parker Follett, tells the story of two highly competitive sisters quarrelling over a single orange that they both wanted. Neither of them would budge until their mother intervened and decided that the only way to resolve the dispute was to cut the orange straight down the middle and give each sister one half each. The first sister then squeezed her orange half to make a drink of fresh orange juice while the second sister grated her orange half for peel to add to orange scones. As a result, the sisters only got half of what they wanted." [0]
The sisters valued different parts of the orange. They'd both think they'd gotten the best deal (dating/marrying up) if they had shared it.
This is what I did. I also had to create a licensing backend to handle cases such as only being able to use your license key on a single account, and for verifying that your license key was still valid (in case you cancelled or got a refund).
Unfortunately, information that helps the good guys get their extensions past the audit check is exactly the same information that helps the bad guys get their extensions in too. The bad guys simply move onto the next security flaw that Google hasn't anticipated.
Maybe the bad guys use some common tactics to get their scam extensions in the store which good guys don't, which is easy for Google to detect and flag. If you release a list of known no-no's, the bad guys just get smarter and avoid them.
This obviously skews in favour of refusing some good extensions to keep most bad ones out.
In terms of Google already auditing every app, check out the source code for Dark Reader https://github.com/darkreader/darkreader. It's fairly complex. I can only imagine how many extensions are as, or more, complex than that. I wonder how much auditing is done manually vs automated.
It's exceptionally practical, since 95% of the time I end up working on that thing for longer than that ten minutes. For me, it alleviates the pressure of thinking I'll need to push through a task for hours by giving myself an escape hatch.
It's a "motivation follows action" technique/trick/hack.