Syncthing Android App Discontinued

Looking at the underlying thread[1], the author mentions that it's very hard to publish on Google Play

> Reason is a combination of Google making Play publishing something between hard and impossible

Can someone expand on what's going on here?

[1]: https://forum.syncthing.net/t/discontinuing-syncthing-androi...

While I don't know about this developer's specific issues, I can comment on my own issues with Google Play as an Android developer. Google Play continues to become more and more stringent with app permissions and the approval of these permissions is very vague. With my own app, from one minor release the next, one day I'll receive approval for my app's permissions and the next week I will not even though only minor changes to the app have been made. When I reach out to Google Play support, the answers are always extremely vague, canned and repetitive and I never know if an update to my app will get approval or not. It's a horrible way to develop anything.

The most annoying requirement is their Play Store delete account url. We have an API where we can delete the user’s account. But no, Google wanted a stupid url.

Is it really that hard to set up a small proxy tool that calls your fancy api when it receives those requests? As an outsider, it does seem quite reasonable to me - Google couldn't possibly support all APIs there may possibly exist for every app there is.

how are you going to authenticate the user? now you need to solve that if you didn't have a web login before.

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Guess @dang decided to rate limit my account again so I can't post replies :-)

> Some token that every account gets generated? It's really not that much to ask honestly.

How is the user going to know this token when they visit the website on their laptop? Keep in mind that the Google requirement is that you link to this delete page from the play store, where the user is not authenticated with your app. You can't just generate an URL containing this token.

> Guess @dang decided to rate limit my account again so I can't post replies :-)

There are automatic rate limits that apply to everyone. IME you can still click on the comment's timestamp to be able to reply.

If you post something the moderators don't like, your account can be manually rate limited to a max of 5 comments per X (24?) hours.

Source? What does this look like?