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.

Yes, we've rate limited your account because it posts comments that obviously break the site guidelines, such as https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41880814.

Could you please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and use the site as intended instead? I don't want to ban you but it's not cool when people keep posting like that.

Btw, if you (or anyone) don't want to be rate limited on HN, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future.

It would be a good first step for you stop being sneaky about this. Very hard to respect you as a moderator when you employ underhanded tactics like sneakily rate limiting accounts and trying to gaslight people into thinking this is an universal limit. I suppose it's a (small) step up from the shadowbanning you used to.

Perhaps change the message to something like: "Your account has been rate limited. For more information email [...]"

And honestly, having people beg via email is just gross power tripping behavior.

It's just an attempt to manage overwhelming case load with limited resources. It's on my list to build a system that gives better feedback.

On the other hand, I'm not sure that it won't just make things worse, since not everyone is going to respond as well as you might to a message like "Your account has been rate limited."