They have 2x the number of apps as Apple.

Millions and millions.

The cost of false rejections is generally quite low.

The expense to review them deeply used to be large, a few years ago. There should be a review process that consists of putting the source code in some escrow build environment and letting an LLM do a full audit. What would that be, a few bucks at-cost?

Okay, can you concoct some prompt-injection-like scenario where you can fool increasingly sophisticated agents about the presence of your malware? Sure, maybe. It's MILES ahead of where both major app stores are today, though, where you can find obvious scams that sailed through review just by looking at their description.

Exact same philosophy they use for hiring.

AI apps are flooding everything. No doubt they are using or planning to use AI to help manage the load.

And then of course all the apps will use some kind of AI, and because humans don’t care to wade through a trillion tip calculators or whatever, they’ll use AI to pick the app. And then have AI use the app for them through a voice assistant.

If only they would charge developers exorbitant fees that could fund such work...

Of course I understand that they are not going to spend money on improving their review process for our benefit until regulators force them to.

only on the surface, plenty of places have moved out of the big tech ecosystem to models hosted at smaller providers or even self hosted. its not the majority of work but is growing.

How do we do this though? Like who do I vote for to make this a reality? Republicans? Hardly. Democrats? Also no.

They are hardly mythical, for one I could think of Steam and Epic Games.

Competition is what stops the exploitation.

Epic Games has always offered lower fees and their CEO has been advocating for small developers for years.

There is no reason why Google and Apple get to bundle their stores, and these other big names have to collect the scraps from users who care to look up alternative stores and go through scare screens.

They don't have access to the content anymore, as mentioned a bit later in the article.

Anybody who's ever tried to get through their review process can attest that the article writer's experience is far from outside the norm.

This is an argumentum ad populum fallacy. "Everybody Knows" this kind of thing is true, ergo you should believe the example here without evidence.

It's also kinda ridiculous in context. I mean, no, there are no cases in the literature where Google has rejected an app due to misidentification with NFSW content and then sent screenshots of said content as part of the review. Even not in combination I don't think. Like, has either situation every been documented on its own? "Far from outside the norm" indeed.

I don't understand how Google aka the company that famously automates all the things can't "vibecode" a review tool to handle the increased submissions. I'm sure they already have which makes the delays puzzling. With all that compute, and all those brilliant engineers they should should be cranking out reviews, security audits and approving new apps/updated apps quicker than ever.

Are you an editor or involved with app review? I would rather read this honestly written, succinct blog post than a mountain of AI slop that half of the HN front page is.

That’s irrelevant. The author likely doesn’t have English as their first language. They are an individual, not one of the most valuable company ever

You can't win. If he had had a perfect text with a - or two you'd have written 'Oh, this must surely be AI'.

Agree. Tried to publish my app through Google, and still no luck. Link below.

I was able to share it on f-droid though, and I am starting to think that it may be good just to publish app only through it.

https://github.com/rumca-js/OfflineWebSearch

I also recently acquired some free e-waste android 6 devices (like a galaxy note 4 pad and a moto 4 phone). Using some vibe coding I was able to setup a dockerized build system for java/kotlin apps and managed to make a number of custom applications for the devices like turning them into timelapse+mjpeg streaming cameras (or irc client, or ice thickness estimation from chirped sounds+dsp). Since they're ewaste I don't mind if they get destroyed or lost.

It seems pretty clear to me that counting on google is a bad idea.

A company that does not provide support to normal people and has a compulsive habit of closing services for absolutely no good reason? You don't say?

Open a corporation and register as an organization. Easier way to get through.

I also had my old dev account that I used during school permanently disabled.

I only ever published anything on the google play store under another google account than the one that's got my gmail and photos.

If Google cares about some of the long-standing problems, I wonder whether they know how to fix them. (Assign OKRs, which may be conflicting, or get quietly triaged/prioritized?)

Maybe they need personnel tasked solely to just go in, with the blessing of some high-up person, find any bad customer service or goodwill problem, bottom-up, figure out why it's happening, and work with the relevant teams to fix it, quickly. Then repeat.

To fit with ingrained cultural incentives for relevant teams, other managers and ICs might have to be convinced that their performance evaluations depend strongly on cooperating with this process.

The app store gatekeepers have so much power that it would be nice to see some legal requirements for operators of those stores put in place.

If your app is rejected, there should be a real appeal process. Maybe developers should be able to demand arbitration for some non-trivial fee?

The first step of the appeal would be for the store to disclose to the arbitrator precisely what rule was violated and in what way. The arbitrator can uphold the rejection and you lose your fee or can force the app store to accept the submission and you are refunded.

Microsoft support used to work something like this. There was a fee to get them on the phone but if the problem turned out to be an actual bug, the fee was refunded.

Anyone can make a website and publish it but for some reason when it comes to apps there needs to be a store with a review process. Aren't apps, in a way, not just specialised browsers (not talking about webview apps here) that run in a sandbox? Why the need for all this "reviewing", does it make apps safer or better quality? Is it a device ecosystem permission / security problem? I.e. why do apps need stores and websites don't?