It has been several months now and days and days of work that we have been trying to get Google to approve that our users can access their Google Drive again through iA Writer for Android. (They suddenly cut it off). Last week we supposedly passed the last test.
This week they come back and want us to downgrade the scope to read only. Read only? It's literally a writing app!
I think we're not dealing with humans but with an AI that just keeps wasting our time. I'm flipping-tables annoyed.
So we tell them that our users (not us) need read write access to Google Drive so they can write their texts, and they want us to go through a scanning process that takes at least 6 weeks. One of the suggested vendors for the CASA scan is KPMG.
It probably costs more than what we make with an app that has more pirate users than regular ones.
Guys, we want our users to be able to access their Google drive so they can write and stop 1-staring us for something we didn't do.
Close to giving up.
They want us to do this CASA certification with KPMG or similar every year. In the mean time we're getting hammered with bad reviews as users think it's our fault.
Instead of fixing their crappy core frameworks (often people can't pay for apps they want, or they pay and Play Store forgets) Google keeps us busy updating this, complying that. I just sent them a stack of paper last week.
Both Apple and Google are squeezing devs with the same percentages. But at least Apple's stuff works.
As expected, the *experts* on Hacker News: "I haven't read the article, but..." And of course: "It's good that Google takes security seriously. I don't want a random app to get access to my Google drive."
It's not us... We couldn't care less about someone else's Google Drive. We never wanted access to any of your stuff.
It's our users that want access to their Google Drive and cause havoc because they can't, and if we downgrade to a tedious standard picker they'd start throwing stones.
Notable: the post has 260 upvotes, tons of comments, posted 6 hours ago, by a 14 year old very active profile... and it doesn't show on the top page.
Arithmetically, it should easily be the top comment. As far as I can see, It gets completely ghosted, not just on the top page. I wonder why.
Here is the link in case you want to get an idea what the Hacker News experts have to say: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41664281
I answered, even though I know that the answer will be ghosted as well. Likely, I'm not active enough. Don't ask me what you need to do so Hacker news doesn't think you're a hacker.
☺️
"The definition of a well informed, happy, modern man: He reads a couple of lines and goes, 'Yep, I know how this article ends. I'm right, he's wrong.' Then he watches the first half of a game, switches off the TV, pumps his fist, and says, 'My team WINS again.' Writes the match report, gets in the shower, soaps himself up, and walks out, unrinsed, fully lathered, super clean."
I just had to. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41664281#41671976
In this book, Sidney Dekker sets out to identify the market mechanisms that explain how less government paradoxically leads to greater compliance burdens. This book gives shape and substance to a suspicion that has become widespread among workers in almost every industry: we have to follow more rules than ever—and still, things can go spectacularly wrong. Much has been privatized and deregulated, giving us what is sometimes known as ‘new public management,’ driven by neoliberal, market-fav
@reichenstein this was a great article (late to the party as usual). As a tiny developer, I've had my fill with #Google and their silly policies.
It seems like they're content with claiming a marketshare crown when there's very little merit to it. I'd love to develop more for the Samsung market, but I don't think the Play Store even allows for hardware filtering to try to prevent some of the annoying "it should be free" "reviews."
@reichenstein You could save everything in your service and offer people an "Import from Google Drive" option (so, read-only is OK)
It's a crappy situation, though. I'm sorry to hear y'all are going through it. It sucks to be at the mercy of vendors and app stores.
@reichenstein Thank you for your insights. For the last decade I took out a Writer subscription and was surprised when the error message with the faulty connection to Google Drive came up. Your support was really nice and helpful.
I'm still not going to cancel my subscription because I want to continue supporting your ideas.
Again, thank you for describing the problem from the developer's perspective. It really helps me to understand this madness better.
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