julianee

Do you still have the titles of those books at hand? I'd love to take a look at them.

I would think money plays a big role too. Back when Apex Legends exploded into the scene with the initial user base, selling a hack for 10 a pop would make a lot of money.

Unfortunately they practice these sorts of policy on the app store as well.

We've been saying Google does this, Google does that. The thing is, a company is composed of its people.

I am just curious, how does something like this, something most people with reasonable sense of "fairness" would flag as concerning and potentially very wrong, comes to be implemented? Even more so for a large company like Google? (smaller companies can have a "bad dictator boss" which can push this through without issue)

Policies like these, which appear to have consistencies across their products, how far up does the chain of responsibility go? How does stuff like these occur?

Does it start with some MBA grad who comes in, gets assigned a KPI to "cut costs" and then their natural bias is that customer service is the first to go, proposes it to their managers and it bubbles up for approval and implementation? All the while everyone at each level is oblivious to the potentially damaging collateral the policy would cause, but only think that "oh this is a great move, we would save a bunch!" and then finally gets implemented?

Or would this more be a top-down thing where executives discuss and push this and then the employees, being good people at heart have no choice but to implement it?

I just find it so difficult to imagine something like this being OK-ed by all the people involved within the company. Like, is everyone "in on it"? Or do they not know? Or they know but can't/unwilling to say anything?

I couldn't quite remember the reason as it was quite a long time ago and there was a lot of pain, disappointment, unfairness, despair, helplessness which I'd like to move on from. But I remember it was along the lines of: - Difficult to prove (How do you prove stolen code?) - I am not supposed to be decompiling another app to find evidence - What channel do I use when Google makes it so difficult to make a case/complain for anything? (There are channels, but there is no trust in those, they behave like black holes where you put in effort and just maybe, just maybe if they feel like it, they will respond.) - With the image they portray, I felt that to Google, they would see my case as similar to a single piece of candy going missing in a Walmart store.

I found out when I saw that competitors were copying my Store Listing Text word for word (ASO), and when I downloaded them, I noticed a peculiar bug their app had which was identical to mine. It was a programatic bug due to the way the function was implemented, seeing an identical bug that only fails on the same edge case is a big red flag, so I decompiled their app and saw that my work was copied.

I did send email to the developer at fault but did not get a reply or action.

You are right, unfortunately in the current case, their algorithms have determined many developer's careers and will continue to do so.

As long as they have the monopoly, "developers start not to trust Google" will never be a problem as there is no other choice and Google sees no reason to change.

I actually had the reverse experience to this. My app was 1.5 years old and had 4mil+ downloads with ~200k monthly active.

After updating my app, they banned my app instead of the other clones and crapware. Citing "Repetitive and Duplicative Content". The clones were so bad to the point that they literally decompiled my app, loaded in their own assets and published it.

Appealing did nothing and I got the exact same response as the article. That was 2 years ago.

Going by this, I would assume that my app had better Ad revenue to Google, but comparing in relative-ness, they dont care about the 4-5 figure you make. Another person will take your place in no time.