Google Play Store Mistakenly Removed KDE Connect (twitter.com)

Google's Play Store made a bad mistake on Tuesday, long-time Slashdot reader sombragris writes: KDE Connect, a project designed to enable seamless communcation and control between a desktop computer and a mobile phone, was suddenly removed from Android's Google Play store. According to a Twitter thread by Albert Vaca, KDE Connect's maintainer, the removal was allegedly because the app was in breach of Google's new SMS policy.

There's an exemption which applies to KDE Connect, but the maintainer was unable to contact anyone at Google to provide support. "There is simply no way to talk to a human being at @Google", he said.
Cintora also announced on Twitter that while trying to comply with the Play Store's new policy, he'd initially been stopped again by technical problems. "The @GooglePlay console gives me an internal error, so I can't upload the version without SMS support."

But on Thursday Cintora tweeted that KDE Connect "finally got approved, and SMS support is back in version 1.12.4, both on the Play Store and F-Droid!" Cintora credits this resolution partly to his Twitter thread, which got over half a million impressions.

Its last tweet now features a picture of a celebrating parrot.

Comments

Needs to cost Google

[MikeRT]

"There is simply no way to talk to a human being at @Google"

We need the courts to start saying that if you leave "the computer" to deal with the other parties to a contract, you are fully guilty of whatever "the computer" does to them if they have no obvious recourse to a human in a position of authority to adjudicate against "the computer."

Re:No way to talk to a human at Google ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Unbelievable how a large company like this does not have any 'regular' customer support.

Of course they do. But you're not a customer.

Google will talk to their customers

[FeelGood314]

However most of us are not Google's customers. We are their products and as products we are strictly a commodity. We are easily replaced and not worth the cost or effort of a human interaction.

Re:No problem

[Miamicanes]

The fundamental problem is that Google has increasingly put indie developers in impossible positions by changing the rules, deciding to retroactively apply them to apps that were published via Google Play literally YEARS ago under different rules, then swooping down and suspending them without warning, and perma-banning any developer who gets "too many" apps suspended. And perma-banning (for life) the accounts of anyone whom their AI determines is somehow "linked" to the account that was banned for having old apps that were retroactively determined to be in violation of rules that didn't even exist at the time they were published.

It's as if Google sat down, read about China's "social credit score" (which dings individuals merely for "associating" with anyone whose social credit score is low), then enthusiastically decided to roll it out as the new model for all Google services. There are people who've invested literally YEARS of their careers in Android development who've not only had their portfolios and/or ad revenue cut off without warning, they've been rendered UNEMPLOYABLE as Android developers because any company that hires them would risk getting "linked" to them by association and punished as well. If you're American, you're at risk. If you're from a country like Canada, Britain, France, or Germany, you're at slightly greater risk. If you're from India or eastern Europe, Google will ban you on the slightest whiff of suspicion without a second thought. All with no meaningful route to clear your reputation (or even find out what exactly they think you did that was horrible enough to justify destroying your career), and officially... for the rest of your life.

Yes, Google really HAS become that completely evil and bad. Frankly, I'm shocked it hasn't been the plot of at least a few Hollywood movies yet.

I haven't personally gotten banned, but the extreme danger faced by anyone who develops Android apps and depends upon any Google service has forced me to step back from Android and intentionally minimize my future exposure to Google's potential wrath. Google has now taken it upon themselves to be judge, jury, and economic executioner... based upon algorithms with confirmed, known false positives and literally ZERO accountability or pretense of due process.

For a developer, the implications of getting banned for life by Google goes WAY beyond merely being unable to publish apps via Google Play. Getting banned ALSO locks you out of the entire Google Play ecosystem, so you can't use Play Location Services or Google Maps API for apps published independently of Google Play, either. It can result in the loss of access to every Android app you've ever purchased through Google Play, and could get you permanently locked out of any third-party web site that uses Google's authentication services.

And once again, people have gotten such bans not for publishing malware, but merely for having ever published an app that was completely acceptable to Google at the time it was published, but later failed to comply with Google's changed requirements. Most outrageously of all, Google won't even settle for allowing you to preemptively unpublish your now-noncompliant app, because even unpublished apps remain accessible to people who've purchased them in the past. There are documented cases of developers who've unpublished a now-noncompliant app from Play, then ended up getting that now-unpublished app suspended at some later time ANYWAY (possibly triggering a lifetime ban of the developer's own account).

Google has NEVER been known for particularly caring about anyone who falls victim to its policies as collateral damage... but this is seriously the kind of thing that's going to end up putting Google on the receiving end of a class-action lawsuit that would probably end up getting appealed all the way to the US Supreme Court (basically, asking the court to decide whether a company that intentionally injects itself into so many cross-cutting aspects of interstate commerce ought to be held to a higher