the state of messaging is quite depressing. You have apple doing its own thing and with apparently no intention to have its communication service on all the major platform.
Google doing what google does and running like an headless chicken creating a new service every minute instead of creating one good one.
Last time I tried to launch WeChat, you had to surrender to it a disgusting amount of personal information to even launch the app.
You have some outliers like Telegram or Signal, but good luck getting all your contacts on there.
As a result I just have a dozen of messaging apps installed on my devices.
If it works the same way as the play store does, the DA has little to do with that.
A play store advocate can not look up why your app got rejected, they can at most ask their play store colleagues to look it up and to contact the app owner.
It is this way to avoid getting in a situation where being friends with a DA is an huge advantage.
Their job is to collect dev feedback, as well as evangelizing good practices.
And granted, both teams could do a better job at pinpointing the issues (and devs might also try harder to follow the rules .. fwiw play store bans threads have just been banned from r/androiddev because devs had a tendency to forget to talk about the legitimate reason why they got kicked out)
I remember when I was able to make the switch from Eclipse to the first beta of Android Studio.
This was night and day as well !
Sadly, I feel that the experience has degraded a LOT since then.
IntelliJ did not technically get worse, the typical Android build just grew in complexity way faster than IntelliJ optimizations could follow.
Same thing with Gradle actually. It has been getting significantly faster. But if during the 6 months you spent in order to speed up gradle by 30 % the typical build complexity has increased by 50%; sadly it means that you are losing.
By scrape I meant that there are some sites allowing to download apks from Google play
They usually cache the apks for a couple of days so that would have been a way to download it.
And after that, I would have looked at the app manifest (it contains all the permissions that the app might want to use, so there might be some interesting stuff there) and maybe use it.
I don't plan to look at the bytecode for shady behavior .. that's not my forte and I am not interested enough to spend one week looking at bytecode.
edit : I have just opened the article again to get the app package name .. looks like it got reinstated.
But no comment of the author as of why it was removed.
Google could improve devs relationships for sure, but these are pretty clear.
FWIW, I had several strikes as well, because of a permission used by an unpublished app on a beta channel :/. The whole process of getting the account reinstated was pretty easy in that case.
I am kinda curious to scrape the op app and look at what might have got them in trouble, I might give it a go if I have enough time.
The timing is pretty brutal and outrageous but other than that, unless there are indeed no violations of the policies, I have no issues with an app getting kicked out.
It is hard to have any opinion on the accuracy of these strikes though, since almost all the times devs believe that whatever they do is legit.
What I find interesting about this post is that it only talks about blocking ads but not about how to replace them as a source of revenue for websites.
I actually do pay for some websites, including for not seeing ads on Youtube (with mixed results now that ads are just baked in the video, when the entirety of the video itself is not an ad) and I want an easy way to do so : I want to be able to access the content I want while its creator gets paid.
So far, ads have been a successful way to do micro payments (the only ?).
Instead of waging this increasing war between ads and ad blockers, I would rather see organizations that try to find a better solution (with privacy somewhere at the top of the checklist).
>Do non-technical users typically do a lot of actual work on their mobile devices?
What does it has to with anything ? the discussion is about desktop UI.
And non technical users are a large chunk of people doing work with computers .. devs are a minority. I am not sure why I need to mention this point, but looks like that's where we are.
> it's simply the statement that people who don't know how to do X will struggle to do
That's a tautology .. if the only test for an UI is whether it is usable with step by step instruction, there is no distinction between e.g. MSDOS and Windows 10.
>First of all, I want engineers that are good at working with others
Yes !
The worst engineers I have had to work with were sometimes pretty skilled technically, but their ego or shitty personality was preventing them from being somebody the team could benefit from.
I would have thought that it is why we have cultural fit interviews though.
Personally I would sooner drop whiteboards than cultural fit interviews, but the later probably need way more training for the interviewer than what I got.
I have worked on integrating a shazam like library inside an app.
We have looks at more than 12 solutions before finding a company with a song recognition library good enough to be called shazam like.
It is by no mean a small feat you can reproduce during a weekend.
I have NE headphones but they are too big for me to comfortable sleep with them (I tend to turn in my sleep)