←back to thread

1525 points garyclarke27 | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.2s | source
Show context
spians ◴[] No.23222629[source]
This "Not approved by Government or Public Health Organizations" rule seems to apply to all the indie apps except for the apps built by mega corps

- Twitter app asks users to follow Covid-19 related news as the first item in their home screen after login (and has a separate tab for news related to Covid-19 in Search screen).

- Reddit official app asks users to subscribe to /r/Coronavirus (that subreddit is not moderated by any government).

- Quora android app has a banner at the top that is similar (follow Coronavirus Space - all the content in that topic seems to be generated by users).

- YouTube app currently has a featured video related to Covid on my feed from one of their official Spotlight channels.

I'm sure Facebook has something similar to follow news related to Covid.

So there's no consistency of banning non-official speech on Covid-19

Also this is not the first time it happened. Same thing happened to

- A meme generator app because one of the memes contained word Corona (https://www.reddit.com/r/androiddev/comments/fn0wzl/app_with...).

- An RSS reader app for showing news related to Covid (https://www.reddit.com/r/androiddev/comments/ggb3s7/a_week_s...)

- A self improvement app that curates articles (https://reddit.com/r/androiddev/comments/gem317/our_app_was_...)

And in all of these examples, app seems to be restored after talking to someone at Google. Shouldn't that be the first thing done by the Google play team (before suspending the app) instead of dev losing all the installs and revenue for the time the app is suspended?

replies(1): >>23231151 #
1. searchableguy ◴[] No.23231151[source]
None of the app stores are fair. Apple charges amazon 2x less for any subscriptions done through the app store. They all reject many indie apps for protecting privacy or security but then all the big apps are allowed to do it. Their apps can access system APIs that are off limit to others.

Some people in the comment section only recently feeling the censorship done by china affecting them but imagine other non-US countries that get censored by American companies all the time.