The Android verification is such a broken experience. Recently I decided to purchase a dev account for my company, so far:
1) Provided my company DUNS number etc. once to create the payment profile. I did this some times ago, don’t remember the details but it was an involved verification process and it is marked as verified business payment profile.
2) Later on the payment step verified myself with a passport and bank statement to be able to actually pay with a proper HSBC bank card. Not shady pre-paid card or something, those are not accepted anyway.
3) After I paid I was told that now I need to verify my identity once more but this time with the passport and the incorporation certificate or some other company document.
fingers crossed that in few days it will be verified. While waiting, it tells me that there are still website and email verification to do once the previous step is done. I already verified my e-mail a few times before paying.
It’s painful, slow and annoying because if you fail at a step(i.e. needs verification that takes days and you are told about it at the payment step) you have to start again with the forms.
I just remembered why I never use Android. It seems like no one owns the process and as a result you get unpolished shitty experience that fulfills the requirements of god knows how many people who work in the same company but don’t talk to each other.
I released an Android app to the Play Store ~10 years ago and the most important advice people were always sounding alarms about online in Android dev communities was to not publish under your real Google account you care about, because it's not unlikely a bot will ban your entire account because of some vague infraction that's near impossible to appeal.
Google seems to actively hate people who develop for their platforms. Which I don't believe is a good move with their current hand, where young people in wealthy countries (i.e. the future of people who will spend money on apps) are something like 90% iPhone users these days.
That sounds a lot like my experience as an Apple Developer too, with the added bonus (unclear from your description if you experienced this too) that they took my money before the verification process was finished and wouldn't refund it once their AI couldn't connect my face to my ID and wouldn't let me connect with a real person (the first dozen times were on them, but after that it was maybe my fault for including a middle finger in the photographs).
Develop only Web applications, that are mobile friendly, notice I said mobile friendly, not PWA.
However, thanks to many of us that only favour Chrome like IE of yore, and ship it alongside their "native" applications, the Web is nowadays ChromeOS Application Platform, so we are only a couple of years away of Google owning that as well.
Going through hell with Apple Developer too. I didn't have to do much in terms of verification (probably because I created an account as an individual) but app submission is another story:
- first time I got rejected for mentioning a name of a third party in my app description. The app description said: DISCLAIMER: not affiliated with xxx
- after fixing the app description I got rejected for using my app name(?!), multiple back and forths with the reviewer got me nowhere, they just copy pasted the same response not addressing my messages at all
- filled the app store review board appeal, it's been 5 days and I've got no response.
At this point I'm seriously considering rewriting the app for MacOS and distributing myself. I can't imagine going through all of this with every app update, it's beyond ridiculous.
Lieutenant Appleby rejected my submission almost immediately. The notice informed me that I had committed the grave offense of impersonating a third party in the description.
"I didn't impersonate a third party," I explained in my message to Lieutenant Appleby. "I only wrote a disclaimer stating: Not affiliated with ACME."
"Exactly," lieutenant appleby replied. "By stating you have nothing to do with ACME, you have involved ACME. Therefore, you are unlawfully impersonating an unaffiliated party."
"But I only mentioned them to prove I wasn't affiliated with them!"
"Which is a violation," Lieutenant Appleby pointed out.
It was a Catch-22. The Guidelines stated that to prove you were not affiliated with a third party, you had to write a disclaimer. But to write the disclaimer, you had to type the third party’s name, which was a strict violation of the rule against mentioning third parties you were not affiliated with.
I deleted the disclaimer, thereby making myself safely affiliated with nobody by refusing to acknowledge anyone. I resubmitted the app.
Lieutenant Appleby rejected it again.
"What is it this time?" I asked.
"You are using your app's name," Lieutenant Appleby replied.
"Of course I am using my app's name," I replied back. "It is the name of my app."
"You cannot use that name. It is trademark infringement."
"Infringing on whose trademark?"
"The app's."
"But I am the app! It is my app!"
"Which is exactly why you cannot use it," Lieutenant Appleby wrote patiently. "If you use the app's name, you are impersonating the app. And impersonation is strictly forbidden by the Guidelines. An app cannot go around pretending to be itself!"
At this point, my phone is PDA level, mostly useful for quick checks. I use a laptop for computing. I know as a tech nerd, I’m far out of the bell curve, but I can’t really bother with those shenanigans unless they’re paying me for it.
You might not have a way to actually file a complaint against them but quite often, their legal department will just have a quick look at your case and just give you what you want without bothering to tell you anything. Worth a shot.
I am doing leatherworking as well as woodworking. No idea if it is possible to actually make money with this¹, but damned if I'm not giving it a go just to have skills in an area where AI is not a threat for the coming decade. At the very least these crafts allow me to make things which do not exist and cannot be purchased off the shelf.
1: I mean, it is, certainly. I'm just not sure if I can make money by making leather gear.
If you are in EU you could try complaining to your local DPA. That certainly sounds like "automated decision which produces legal effects concerning him or her or similarly significantly affects him or her" which is against article 22 of GDPR. Or you could consider suing them directly at least for the refund.
Outside of EU maybe try passing law like GDPR to actually get some rights back.
1) Re-submit an app after it was rejected and labelled a gambling app (it wasn't even close - a 15 second look by a real human would have seen that. This one was even appealed and the support was utterly useless. I ended up changing one word and re-submitting the app, approved no problem.
2) An existing app, in the Play store for years but a nice app - only about 500 installs. I had to submit a new version for no reason whatsoever... Except to keep the customers developer account active.
Those are just issues I've dealt with in the last month or two.
Every single time, Google Support is completely useless - including the appeals process, which is an absolute joke.
Not to mention if you made one app in college and then didn't keep up with the SDK updates, Google perma-closes the entire Play account such that the only way to publish a new app is by creating a brand new gmail account
Forcing people to keep up with SDK updates is a bad thing in itself. Let people target the earliest possible feature set and make the app run on as many phones as possible rather than showing scary messages to people due to targeting an older API.
I think the problem is that older SDK versions allowed you to do things like scan local WiFi names to get location data, without requiring the location permission.
So bad actors would just target lower SDK versions and ignore the privacy improvements
The newer Android version could simply give empty data (for example, location is 0,0 latitude longitude, there are no visible WiFi networks), when the permission is missing and an app on the old SDK version requests it.
Of course, they don't like this because then apps can't easily refuse to work if not allowed to spy.
Phone companies are required to make sure 911 works on their phones. Random people on the internet aren't required to make sure 911 works on random apps, even if they look like phones.
If this is a business account why do they want your passport? And why are you paying with a personal bank card rather than a business one? Or do I misunderstand?
They may want proof that you, the human filling out this form, are authorized to publish apps, communications, etc. as the company you say you represent.
How does a passport solve that? Most small private companies are entirely opaque. A government ID doesn't help you determine authorization. It won't even help you determine ownership since anyone doing things sensibly will be using a registered agent to hold the company on his behalf.
The correct approach here (AFAIK) is to punt the trust decision to the bank by requiring payment with a method that you can confidently trace to the company.
Yeah I would imagine that the value the get out of a passport is not anything to do with validating a company (they’re cheap and easy to make anyway) but validating the person (which is not a throwaway entity)
However that invites those bad scenarios where someone gets blacklisted by BigTech in some manner, later gets hired by a small business, the new employer adds an association to the blacklisted account, and suddenly the company app is banned from the app store seemingly without reason. At least a few such stories have appeared on HN over the years.
I feel like pay to play ought to be sufficient because in addition to being a barrier to entry it also provides funds for moderation efforts.
>suddenly the company app is banned from the app store seemingly without reason. At least a few such stories have appeared on HN over the years.
Which is not that unreasonable even. If a person is flagged for making scam apps, them having publishing rights in a reputable place makes taints the reputation of such place.
You should be able to appeal of course and the oauth should not be towards google in the first place, but being associated with known fraudsters and scammers is not what you want.
That seems at odds with how our society is structured. We treat employees as interchangeable cogs. If someone commits a crime they are tried but their family, friends, and coworkers are not. Guilt by association without any act having been committed seems wholly incompatible with both our principles and common practices.
It's even more nefarious when it comes to BigTech because you can be blacklisted without having committed any actual crime and without anything resembling a trial.
Individual accounts and employee accounts are conceptually distinct. Permitting anything less gives large companies free reign to run roughshod over the individual by unilaterally depriving him of his livelihood.
> If someone commits a crime they are tried but their family, friends, and coworkers are not. Guilt by association without any act having been committed seems wholly incompatible with both our principles and common practices.
This is no longer the case, see the example of Hüseyin Dogru, a journalist who faces political EU sanctions (no trial) and now cannot transact with EU citizens or travel. Authorities have now siezed the bank account of his wife and are treating her as if she is sanctioned, even though she is not, so their family is now broke and cannot even pay for food. Because they are not allowed to travel they cannot return to Switzerland.
This kind of blacklisting also comes up in non-sanctioned contexts with de-banking and political de-platforming based on government pressure. The world is headed to a very dark place.
There are better ways to do it but Google has long demonstrated they’re not primarily concerned with accuracy or user experience, but instead, whichever solution can be automated and effective.
My government ID card expired and I was too lazy to renew it but I had my passport at hand so why not?
BTW both the id card and the passport have cryptographic authentication and you are able to open a bank account or use govt services completely online by scanning it with the phone Rfid . They could have make me scan that, scan my face and be done with the identity verification. My identity is already verified and tied to my company the same way and also
listed in the companies registry which means they could have had skipped all the other company verification stuff too.
That all makes perfect sense but consider that if they simply punted to the bank as I described they would still get the same benefits only with even less complexity. The bank fundamentally has to do robust identity verification. Any party that needs to handle payments while also lacking a reason to be good at performing in house identify verification really ought to make use of the bank because you are highly unlikely to be better at it than they are.
The entire cumbersome process you describe can be viewed as Google doing a significantly worse job of verifying your identity than the bank would have.
As an aside, I suspect that leaving it to the bank would also provide additional legal protection. Specifically anyone attempting deception will most likely be forced to commit fraud against the bank which will probably be taken much more seriously than otherwise.
I agree, in Europe(EU, UK, Turkey and other countries) banks are considered perfect for proof of ID. In UK a bank statement is as good as an ID, in Turkey for example, you can sign in into the government portal through your online banking and it is considered higher level secure authentication and you can take high risk actions(like signing legally binding contracts) that you can't do by signing in just with password and 2FA.
The bank has to perform the authorization and identity checks, but the bank will not make them for you, they do them for themselves based on their own risk analysis. The scope of authorization could also be different based on who it's presented to.
The authorization is not transitive so to say.
>As an aside, I suspect that leaving it to the bank would also provide additional legal protection
If it would, they will have to pay the bank for it and the bank should also be willing to accept the liability (spoiler alert -- the will not be willing to accept the liability)
> The bank has to perform the authorization and identity checks, but the bank will not make them for you
We aren't talking about authorization, only about identity verification. I'm no domain expert but it is my understanding that banks provide these sorts of services. They certainly already have all the necessary information on hand both for practical reasons (security) as well as legal (KYC and AML laws).
> If it would, they will have to pay the bank for it ...
For the identity verification? Probably, depending on how you went about it. What's the issue? This is already a paid process we're talking about here.
For the additional legal assurance that I described? No, that doesn't cost extra. Please read what I wrote more carefully. It's a transitive property due to the penalties involved in addition to the degree to which the legal system and the bank care (at least assuming my understanding of that legal environment is correct).
That's all fine, they can want their wants, but then, once the bad cop writes them strongly worded letter and they start throwing tantrums over "regulation".
I believe you can’t. BTW Apple allows you to pay for a developer account with in app purchase from the developer app on your iPhone. Still has limitations and you may be rejected depending on your payment method and some other factors but even the fact that it’s possible makes it 1000 better than Google’s way of handling it.
What you're describing is not "broken", it's the process and it appears it hasn't even failed for you.
My experience with getting a verified "business" developer account from Google mirrors the experience as getting one from Apple, except it's a one-time fee and much less than Apple.
Yes there are hoops to jump through, identification usually requires some hoops, but pretty it's straightforward. I am not commenting on the requirements of these hoops, yes, it's BS that they exist but it's their platform so it's their rules.
What type of "experience" are you expecting to have anyway?
With Apple I filled the forms, accepted the agreements, entered the DUNS and paid with a card on my name and that was it.
How does that mirror uploading my passport many times, entering company details many times, typing my e-mail and phone numbers many times both because I had to start over and because I was asked many times even if I provided these some steps back? Now I paid and waiting, hopefully I will later be verifying my e-mail address or something that I verified a few times prior.
> What type of "experience" are you expecting to have anyway?
The Apple experience. An experience that is well thought and streamlined, that doesn’t keep me entering the same information over and over again. I don’t mind paying a little more for well designed products. The $75 difference is nothing to justify this charade, I don’t think that that Google was short of $75 and designed this low quality experience, I think it’s engraver in their DNA.
Are people again learning a new set of tools? Just tell the AI what you want, if the AI tool doesn't allow that then tell another Ai tool to make you a translation layer that will convert the natural language to the commands etc. What's the point of learning yet another tool?
That's like saying there's no point in attending a lecture on "how to get the best out of your time at University" because University courses are taught in spoken language so you could just ask the professors.
The idea that AI can write code like a seasoned software developer but not being able to use its own tooling that can be learned through 11 chapters tutorial doesn't make any sense.
"Part of the initial excitement in programming is easy to explain: just the fact that when you tell the computer to do something, it will do it. Unerringly. Forever. Without a complaint.
And that’s interesting in itself.
But blind obedience on its own, while initially fascinating, obviously does not make for a very likeable companion. What makes programming so engaging is that, while you can make the computer do what you want, you have to figure out how."[0]
I haven't used Claude, but the problem seems to be not refusal, but cheerful failure. "Sure, I'll help you with that!" And it produces something wrong in obvious and/or subtle ways.
I think somewhere between 2016 and 2026 the market realized that programmers _love_ writing tools for themselves and others, and it went full bore into catering to the Bike Shedding economy, and now AI is accelerating this to an absurd degree.
Me too, I love writing tools for myself and end up yak shaving all the time but why there's a tutorial for a machine that understand human language? Just type down your inner monologue and it will do it.
honestly, the biggest reason i deep dove on proper .claude stuff, was because im a cheap ass. I saw someone mention their agents/ that delegates to cheaper models, and figure that was a way I could reign in my own overall usage, and its been true so far. Im sure im one of the very few heavy claude code users that still stubbornly sits on the pro version. It won't be forever, if i land an important contract or job, I'll pretty quickly hop to max or whatever, but for my own usage right now, im getting by.
Sure, maybe this stuff isn't crazy relevant 2 years from now, but right now? Giving your agent a clean way to navigate and delegate tasks to keep that context window clean? its 100% vital.
It's actually quite pleasant user experience for scrolling. Some interactions are better with a pointer, others are better with touch.
You can try it on an iPad with Magic Keyboard attached, it's very good to be able to do precision through the trackpad and then casually move large things on the screen with your fingers.
Honestly I just hate having fingerprints on a screen. And I use pageup/pagedown mostly which to me is better than scrolling.
Trackpad is nice for a device you can lay flat on a table or keep on one hand while sitting on the sofa, not too much when the device has a keyboard permanently attached to it and it cannot fold. I know I have a thinkpad like that and I never use the touchscreen.
Yesterday someone online told me I'm a boomer because (among the many other issues I mentioned) I said that apple computers lack page up/down keys which is annoying.
Two keys rather than one, but makes up for it by not being way off in some oddball part of the keyboard. You can one-hand it pretty easily, since there's an "option" right next to the arrow keys.
As a stolid classic-era Thinkpad user I don't have a dog in this fight, but it seems to me that the strain of having to hold down another key as I scroll rapidly would get tiring rather quickly. Perhaps if there was a Cmd lock it would be fine.
US is already very unpopular even among the traditionally very pro-US populations, which means anyone not distancing themselves from US will underperform and in many cases pro-US politicians will be ousted.
These posts are getting flagged but its actually vey relevant for US tech as US tech may end up blocked across the world with potentially reducing its userbase by %90 percent as US population quite small actually.
No, this is a different strike. Please read the NYT article you linked more carefully.
> The Feb. 28 attack occurred the same day as a U.S. Tomahawk cruise missile struck a school in the city of Minab, several hundred miles away, killing 175 people. In the case of Lamerd, though, it involved a weapon that had been untested in combat.
You're welcome to review my commenting history; I'm by no means supportive of either administration nor the Iran War. (You'll find me, for example, noting Israel's campaign in Gaza is ethnic cleansing; https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46519718)
What if the repairable ones crunch the numbers and find out that Apple got the right idea from business standpoint and the only reason they can't do the same is that their laptops or their brand is not as good? It will mean that if they actually end up making a product that people want that product will not be easy to repair as well.
I wonder why Trump just doesn't sell this himself, like golden tickets that you can buy from ICE where they just push back the free-tier line enjoyers to insert the patriotic gold level travelers.
In Turkey people with connections to the government get strobe lights permit to skip the traffic through the emergency line. There's so many opportunities both for monetization and loyalty rewarding.
Due to lapses like that sometimes I question my theory that all those people(Erdogan, Trump, Putin etc) are in the same group chat.
What will US public do if US in Iran ends up like Russia in Ukraine, recruiting 30K soldiers every month to die in middle east?
Maybe at this time they are having trouble recruiting but just like Russia US has large prison population that may like the offer thar Russian prisoners got: 6 months on the frontlines, if you survive you are free and well paid.
Just today Iran backed militants released a video of drones takings out US helicopters and radars, very similar to what we are used to seeing in Ukraine.
Is US public really ready to support such a thing and endure hardship like the Russians for ideological causes?
It’s fascinating, maybe Trump is right- maybe his supporters are literally tired of winning and want attrition?
In Vietnam, there were 58k US dead for the whole war. US military dead in WWII was 400k. 30K dead/month gets you to WWII losses in a little over a year. US dead in Afghanistan and Iraq was much less.
I'm wrong about a lot of things, but I don't think the US public would accept losses on the order of 30k/month: there would be massive demonstrations and congress would likely act to cause disengagement.
No one cares about war crimes since years, US itself is allied in this war with credibly alleged war criminals. Besides, there's much to do against drones reaching a base other than locking down the gear in reinforced building and that's not practical when the gear is used which means whatever is on the open gets blown up. The Russians were putting tires on the wings, it did not help much.
I know no one cares, rather I was explaining why this Iranian hit is not a demonstration of any great success, they were hitting an unprotected target, in a non-US base.
I used to think the same but according to the polls I keep seeing the support for war seems to be very strong, up to %100 among MAGA in fact.
They used to say they are against war, against "jewish influence", against this against that but nothing seems to be changing their minds. I thought that this high ranking MAGA dude who resign over "Israel influence concerns" and immediately did rounds on the MAGA-sphere popular outlets doesn't seem to have any influence on the support for the war.
They don't appear to be ideologues but demagogues. Maybe its some more primal urge to kill and get killed and Trump has control over it?
It looks like about 30-40% of Americans look upon Trump's war favourably. That's _very_ low; I'm pretty sure that that's the worst _any_ American war has polls this early on. Approval of the Iraq war didn't fall under 50% until _2005_, and didn't hit 40% til 2008.
> up to %100 among MAGA in fact.
Sure, but I mean if Trump shat himself live on TV, he'd probably get about 90% MAGA approval for that, too. That's not really the point.
Thats the general public that apparently doesn't have any grip. You can do whatever you want if tens of millions of people + the billionaires support you till the end when hundreds of millions are mildly annoyed by you.
> What is Deno's business model? How do you build business around a JS runtime?
Everything else. Seems everyone and their mother are building "platforms", so they can properly lock you in, look at Vercel for example, to get some inspiration where the rest is probably at least aiming.
Not sure why people keep falling for it though, guess it's easy enough to get started that people don't really want to understand deeper, if you can pay someone $XXX/month to not have to think about it, many people tend to go that route, especially if VC-infested.
> devs nowadays aren't willing to pay for development tooling
I can't speak generally because it varies but is this really the case here? Other posters have commented on missing features and issues with their product i.e. Deno Deploy so is it not willing to pay or not worth it?
> I can do that in a weekend, which is also probably true for Deno anyway
You can build Deno or even Deno deploy in a weekend? Even AI can't (not properly).
1. People say things all the time especially online. They might even tweet about their weekend project YET they might still buy it. Not equivalent.
2. If you have to buy it is usually tied to a business reason e.g. make work better or their business and so there's a lot more to it e.g. safety, regulations, etc.
What do you think about all those videos on how dangerous Paris is? Having made the move, would you say that those stem from real experiences and are organic or would you say that it was an organized campaign for some political reason? Or maybe something else?
Trump keeps saying that they want to prevent USA becoming a dangerous place like Europe, even said that recently and the Irish president disagreed with him. As an American, would you say that EU has fallen and it has become a shithole or maybe something in between? I'm just curious if its just about differences of expectations or something.
It's not just an inner city issue. Rural areas in the U.S. are bad too! Parts of the rural south and rural midwest have homicide rates that are completely off the charts for a first-world country (Holmes County, MS; Scioto County, OH; McDowell County, WV).
The homicides in the US are not random, they are targeted. There is no need to avoid “bad areas” unless you are attempting to start a new gang or sell drugs there.
I am EU too and I know Europe is doing quite fine on average with some good and bad places but I wonder if all this is propaganda for the Americans or if the Americans genuinely expect something else from life.
> As an American, would you say that EU has fallen and it has become a shithole or maybe something in between?
Would love to know the social media you've been consuming that could make you believe that an American in Paris who is praising French city planning for its positive health effects could possibly believe anything close to that epithet uttered by the current American president.
I don't have anecdata, but Paris homicide rate is 6x less than LA, 10x fewer car related deaths, but only 1.2x less crime.
Comparing countries and policies is a great thing, we have to learn from each other. Just be careful of misinformation and out of context numbers. Sure France's GDP seems lower, but they don't need a larger car and a larger diet coke to be happier.
I just paid about 2 grand for new tires on my car. That contributed to GDP, but it certainly didn't make me happier than I'd be if I didn't need a car in the first place. GDP is very misleading when it's measuring work that shouldn't need to be done in the first place. Hurricanes and earthquakes are also amazing for GDP, especially in places that never bothered to prepare for them.
I have visited Seattle, SF, LA, Phoenix, Miami, Shanghai, Tokyo, Paris, and Amsterdam in the past 2 years, and I can say with 100% confident that the cities in the US are shit compared to those in Asia and EU. They are not even close, they are just simply shit, there is no comparison at all. I have no idea what the statistics is, but I feel much less safe in US cities.
The idea that Paris is more dangerous than any big city in the US is laughable, and any person that thinks otherwise or that believes anything that Trump spouts is either gravely uneducated at best, or an absolute moron at worst.
AFAIK, 1970s energy crisis pushed Europeans to invent efficient small cars so let's hope this crisis pushes EU into completely abandoning fossils in favor of electricity generated by local means like nuclear, solar, hydro, wind etc. Even if the war doesn't go long enough, the contrast between Spain and Italy in energy security is stark enough to make a point.
Maybe Trump is playing 4D chess after all, pushing Europe into independence so US can spend its energy on China :)
1) Provided my company DUNS number etc. once to create the payment profile. I did this some times ago, don’t remember the details but it was an involved verification process and it is marked as verified business payment profile.
2) Later on the payment step verified myself with a passport and bank statement to be able to actually pay with a proper HSBC bank card. Not shady pre-paid card or something, those are not accepted anyway.
3) After I paid I was told that now I need to verify my identity once more but this time with the passport and the incorporation certificate or some other company document.
fingers crossed that in few days it will be verified. While waiting, it tells me that there are still website and email verification to do once the previous step is done. I already verified my e-mail a few times before paying.
It’s painful, slow and annoying because if you fail at a step(i.e. needs verification that takes days and you are told about it at the payment step) you have to start again with the forms.
I just remembered why I never use Android. It seems like no one owns the process and as a result you get unpolished shitty experience that fulfills the requirements of god knows how many people who work in the same company but don’t talk to each other.
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