Google set to purge the Play Store of low-quality apps

I fear google will use this to purge low cost or even free "no-nonsense" (no ads, in app purchases, unnecessary features, etc.).

there already had been a pattern of google discriminating against such apps

and from a pure monetary sense it makes sense, while for most users such no-nonsense apps are preferable they make little money for Google and compete with apps which do

in a certain way google has motivation to feature _especially_ consumer hostile apps using all kinds of dark patterns to trick, blackmail or outright scam people into paying more

such a bias is probably illegal under the recent (EU) digital markets act as but that is even more motivation for google do kill a lot of such useful apps now before it's more strictly enforced

As long as Google isn't the gatekeeper on what I'm able to use my phone for, I'm okay with this. Most of the apps I care about are not installed from Google Play anyways.

I guess that it's not bad to clean the store, but I'm just sad because it might be the last nail of the coffin of the good old time "anyone can create an Android app for pleasure in one weekend".

Now you need to be a professional developer with all the relevant infrastructure (a company, a public phone number, dozens of people for testing, fifty policy/regulation to comply with, ...)

As a solo developer of a small app its hard to find 20 unique testers who are willing to test it for 14 days. its going to cost me several times more than the cost of developing the app. just doesn’t make sense.

It would be lovely if Google Play had a filter to hide apps marked as "Contains ads".

What you think google will remove: Spam and malware apps.

What google will actually remove: The configuration utility used to update the firmware and configure your home battery system. -- because it wasn't updated for the very latest android api released three weeks ago.

Random hurdles seem to favor bad actors over niche legitimate tools because the bad actors just become the foremost experts at working the system, while other players have better things to do with their time.

I'd say a welcome change, if done properly. I also noticed they're enforcing business registration and account verification requirements, and shutting down accounts that don't do it.

That reminds me that I need to publish my games on f-droid as well.

Does anyone else think that both app stores should be divinding the apps into 3 categories instead of 2. Like free apps, apps that don’t cost anything to download but have virtually no functionality without having subscription or paying and paid apps or maybe both of the latter two categories swhould be consider paid apps.

So, malware apps are "high-quality" and takes more effort to develop, so they still can be downloaded from Play Store? Until news about malicious apps removed from Play Store keeps appearing, I am assuming Google is not doing everything they can.

It is silly how many hoops single hobbyist developer has to jump through just to keep their app on the Play Store. Want to provide transit timetables app with publicly available GTFS data? You need to keep proving to Google after each update that you do not represent government and are not affiliated. And they keep asking for privacy policy even in rare case your app actually do not collect any user data and actually works fully offline.

And to make matters worse, there is no easy way to close developer account and just leave Play Store for good.

I honestly couldn't care less if an app is low quality, I'll just uninstall it. I don't think it's feasible to have a system where no apps ever get immediate uninstalled after trying for a few seconds and realizing it isn't what the user wants.

What would be really nice is if they cared when developers push breaking or otherwise trashy updates. I've completely dialed automatic updates because of it. The number of times an app updates and everyone including me tries 1 star reviewing to no avail is too high. Especially with the inability to backdate apks without losing all the on-device data

Clever way to rooting out some competition as “copycats” for example

There's certainly a ton of stuff that ideally should be removed, but they'll automate the selection of apps to remove and obviously there will be false positives and obviously there will be no mechanism to appeal other than hoping your sad story about it goes viral.

I hope they start with the ones which are obviously fraudulent (most likely illegal) and have already been reported to them as such. For example "secure end-to-end-encrypted private chat apps" which actually send messages unencrypted to a web server.

Source: Gave up on trying to be a vigilant netizen and reporting to the black hole.

Know someone who makes $10m a year pumping out “casual” games full of ads and dark patterns

> text-only apps

What? Is that a common problem? And where are those text-only apps anyway? I have installed Termux and some vim app and a few interactive fiction games that are all text. Are those somehow causing trouble by not having enough graphics to look high quality enough for Google?

Sooner or later they give in and follow Apple in a lot of things

I seriously doubt that Google can reliably tell the difference between "low quality apps" and "high quality apps".

Apple app store is full of crap as well.

Allow us to filter by country. Ignoring chinese apps fixes 80% of the problem!

See also "Hey Google, what happened to all the fun?", https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40947641, for the perspective of someone impacted by this.

I don’t mind. Yet. As a developer with some old apps with app serving as unlock keys for example, I do mind in ability to properly dispute or communicate with humans when they claim something on my apps that has been in the store for over 10 years and I don’t have a human to explain it…