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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.
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.
At least in Germany, and I think the entire EU, you have to have some kind of imprint page with contact data, so one knows who to sue or contact in case of problems.
Ah, I just checked, and on google.com there's an "About Google" link, and at the bottom of that page, there is an imprint link, leading here: Google Imprint. So apparently, you can even call them, but it goes to Ireland. And there's a Germany-specific e-mail address.
They also give the large number of messages as a reason to use their usual web-based forms.
This is a case of them having their own filter bubble, IMHO. where they think what they predicted people would contact them about is good enough because those are the only things people can contact them about.