from Hacker News

Our app was banned because the button says “Report User” and not just “Report”

by igitur on 3/15/21, 9:56 AM with 216 comments

  • by jonathanlydall on 3/15/21, 11:27 AM

    For those not from South Africa, this app is primarily for people to be able to get notifications or look up when their area will be affected by a "planned power outage", or as Eskom (our state owned power utility) refers to it, "load shedding". "Load shedding" is enacted whenever they have a power production capacity issue where different areas take turns without power so as to not let the power grid collapse.

    This app aggregates information from various data sources and provides push notifications too. It is without a doubt the best source of this information and the app being unavailable significantly affects the day to day lives of a significant portion of the South African population who use it to plan around these power outages.

    While the app also has a "chat" feature, it's really tangental to the primary purpose of the app and I expect that most users of the app, like myself, don't use that feature at all and only care about knowing when they will be without electricity.

    In case you're wondering why they hell we have load shedding, it's because Eskom is grossly incompetent. Their incompetence is hugely exacerbated by nepitism and corruption where government has historically appointed people to Eskom management positions solely as "favours", rather than on qualification for the job.

  • by euph0ria on 3/15/21, 11:52 AM

    The company I work for has forbidden the use of Google and their services such as GCP etc. due to how they treat their Play Store developers and other customer, in particular that there never seems to be any human being that you can talk to and find out what you need to do to fix the situation. We do not want the same to occur to our servers or if there is an overflow from Play Store ban to GCP etc. The business risk is too high when you rely on Google's services.

    Some examples:

    Terraria banned - https://twitter.com/Demilogic/status/1358661840402845696

    New project banned - https://medium.com/@amton15127/why-you-should-not-use-fireba...

    Google bans company - https://www.reddit.com/r/tifu/comments/8kvias/tifu_by_gettin...

    Google bans mail - https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/a-serf-on-googles-farm

    Ban app for communicating changes during covid - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23221447

    Adwords ban - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23224791

    Serverpunch bad support - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17431609

    Delete app - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20826618

    Google bans game with pandemic - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23229073

    Google bans dev with no recourse - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15197357

  • by tommilukkarinen on 3/15/21, 11:13 AM

    This is the other side of the Play-store problem. The other side is the tax.

    Play store employee can ban your app = destroy your business at any time. The reason can be 'new policy', 'misunderstanding' or something more problematic, such as influence from your competitor to the employee.

    A 'power to destroy business', should not be a click away from some random employee.

  • by panpanna on 3/15/21, 10:52 AM

    Daily reminder that your business/project/hobby should not depend on anything controlled by Google.

    Edit: Despite all their shortcomings, I wouldn't mind seeing android phone makers join force and create an independent app store.

  • by CivBase on 3/15/21, 2:13 PM

    > We don't allow apps whose primary purpose is featuring or hosting objectionable [User Generated Content]. [...] your app currently only includes feature to flag inappropriate users. [...] the app must provide a user-friendly, in-app system for reporting objectionable UCG.

    It's user generated content. How is reporting a user functionally different from reporting content?

    This makes me even more driven to switch to F-Droid for everything I possibly can. Hopefully we'll see a daily-drivable Linux smartphone before too long so I can ditch Android all together.

  • by fakeyguy on 3/15/21, 12:01 PM

    Google doesn't understand customer service. They really don't. When speaking to customers, I ask them what is the biggest issue with using a google product.They will most likely say - reaching a human being.

    PS: I work for a competitor of one of google's products.

  • by poisonborz on 3/15/21, 10:46 AM

    Watch the amount of these posts rise steeply in the future. Mass moderation is a Don Quixote fight, and in addition to their own products, big platforms increasingly force these policies on everything available in their app stores.

    There was a great thread on moderation just now: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26458826

  • by thiscatis on 3/15/21, 2:10 PM

    Our app recently got banned a full week before being reinstated because of a non-published outdated .apk in an alpha test track that was not used.

    To be fair, we cleaned up our artefact management but still. Google is evil.

  • by threatofrain on 3/15/21, 10:25 AM

    What's hostile is the timing and bluntness of Google's treatment of developers on their platform, as well as the difficulty of getting a decent human conversation with the party you're doing business with.

    But if Google sets clear rules about how your bad people/behavior reporting button must look, I don't see Obvious fault in such policy.

  • by Farbklex on 3/15/21, 9:30 PM

    This is my new favorite ban reason. "Reviewer glanced over functionality and decided that a required feature is probably not implemented although it is implemented. Ban immediately on a Saturday."

  • by rendall on 3/15/21, 1:39 PM

  • by Dissley on 3/15/21, 12:48 PM

    After reading this, I think Signal is also violating this policy. I was not able to find a way to report messages or users. In comparison on WhatsApp I can report a user or group and the "most recent messages" will be forwarded to moderation.

    I think it is kind of strange that even a private messenger needs to implement a report system for messages.

  • by IncRnd on 3/15/21, 1:48 PM

    It's sad and ironic that Google used the exact same banning procedure they incorrecftly surmised the app used.

  • by toastal on 3/15/21, 11:37 AM

    It won't solve these issues with gatekeepers fundamentally and doesn't work for all cases, but embracing PWAs means anyone can click the 'install' button for your application and side step some of this nonsense while getting a fairly robust feature set.

  • by djohnston on 3/15/21, 2:23 PM

    This seems so unnecessarily hostile. Honestly if I build a side project it has to be viable as a web service, I can't imagine hinging my business on the arbitrary whims of the apple Google duopoly.

  • by IshKebab on 3/15/21, 10:47 PM

    Kind of ironic that their own mod tool apparently uses bans as the first step!

  • by lerietaylor on 3/15/21, 2:26 PM

    I think people forget that you don't need an app on the app on an app store to use it. The app is out there already, just give it to people. The app store simply gets rid of the "bad boy message".

    Stop complaining and find a way around it.

  • by devtul on 3/15/21, 3:54 PM

    How long until we have to validate our code against a list of banned terms, like "master" or any new truly egregiously offensive terms of the day, before we are able to host our code or binaries on a third-party service?

  • by tjpnz on 3/15/21, 2:03 PM

    This troubles me enough to start considering webviews again for my next project.

  • by throwawaysea on 3/15/21, 1:47 PM

    A more fundamental question is why it is Google’s business at all to police apps or the content users generate on them. If someone finds content “objectionable”, they should just move on, and not complain or try to shut down that content. What an utterly unnecessary fiasco. We need decentralized platforms and alternatives to the hegemony of Google, Apple, and other big tech companies.

  • by zo1 on 3/15/21, 11:41 AM

    For anyone unaware, the name of the app is a play on a swear word. "EskomSePush" is an intentional play on the phrase "Eskom Se Poes". Eskom being the power utility that provides electricity to South Africa, and has been woefully inadequate at doing so.

    See here for a meaning of the word Poes in Afrikaans. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/poes#Afrikaans

    Wonder if Google is aware of that and has been getting lots of "reports" by genuine users that are offended by this? And this weird "technicality" is just a cover for why they really got banned/taken down.

    They have a one-hit wonder that they're trying to ride the wave on. So instead of sticking to the functionality they had (notifications/schedule/etc) which was perfect for users, they decided to add a "comments section" it seems for people to vent their frustrations. So no sympathy from me, despite Google being in the wrong here.