I'm sorry that this happened to the author... but I can't help but wonder if any western business or contractor will ever learn that this is a very likely outcome of doing any kind of business in China.
"The faith was that if they didn’t pay, the legal system would enforce our California-law contract and make them pay."
Like come on dude. You left your wife and 2 year old child to fly across the world do this project on the faith that some random AR bus company would honor their word and pay you 35k? How did you think this contract would be enforceable? I've got a bridge to sell you if that's all it takes to get you to go all in.
Business in China does not operate the same way that it does in western countries. Period, end of story. If my California based AR bus company hired this person, agreed to pay them this amount in writing, signed the contract, then bailed. I would get sued and have to either pay this person or spend more money hiring a legal team to draw it out long enough to where this person quit trying to sue me. Either way thats not a great outcome, it makes my business look bad, there are repercussions so I would rather just pay this person the agreed amount.
In China they will just walk away and dissolve the company if you come after them hard enough (like the author mentions) and start working again under a new company name. They know this too, and they know that western businesses (Americans especially) are operating under the assumption that there will be penalties for not following through on something you said was going to happen, so they take advantage.
I guarantee that all this company intended to pay the author was the initial amount they gave to him in the upfront fee, knowing full well they would eventually leave the country once the work visa ended or the project time was up and they would never see them again / be able to just send a canned response back to any follow up about paying the full amount.
The company in China will sign whatever you want them to, you could ask for the moon in return if they don't deliver on their side of the agreement and they would happily sign it knowing that you won't be able to do anything but make a blog post about it if they don't.
I was looking for a basic solitaire app on my phone the other day and went through 3 different apps trying to find one that wasn't absolutely inundated with ads, special offers, gamification techniques, etc...
I finally had to settle on the least scummy one and still have to turn my phone to airplane mode to not have to sit through a 2 minute ad every time I want to play a hand.
Genuine question, why do all mobile app developers do this?
Is there some kind of cost that hosting the app on the app store or running / maintaining it brings with it where they are basically forced to blast ads at every single possible moment? Are the developers just trying to make the free version as annoying as possible so that people end up paying out of spite? Are they hoping that someone with a gambling addiction downloads the app and is willing to spend large sums of money on upgrades and in game currency? What is it?
What is stopping someone from making something like a basic solitaire game without ads or power ups or streaks of any kind, hosting it, and then calling it a day? I feel like this would be such a breath of fresh air people would seek the author out to try to pay them for the experience funnily enough.