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Google Play’s crazy automated app review process stands out again.
This time, the Puritan robot rulers who run the Play Store have briefly decided that support for common subtitle files is enough to ban your app. The developer of Just (Video) Player posted their story to Hacker News and wrote in the app’s debugger: ‘After a minor, unrelated description update, Just Player was suspended from the Google Play Store for’Policy on sexual content and blasphemy“. Google has problems with the following: Full Description (en_US):” * Subtitles: SRT, SSA, ASS, TTML, VTT. “
Yes, just the inclusion of standard video player features, such as support for the “ASS” subtitle format, was apparently enough to temporarily suspend. The developer says they ‘immediately filed an appeal’ and today the app is a backup with the ASS subtitles still appearing in the description.
We got an ‘.ass’ filetype thanks to the anime subtitling community. Dissatisfied with the standard SRT files, the community came up with the subtitle editor “Sub Station Alpha” and two file types. The first three versions all use a “.ssa” file type, and then version four and higher were created.Advanced Sub Station Alpha “files, or” .ass. “Although the editor is not knowledgeable, the .ass file extension survives, and compared to SRT, you get advanced features like subtitle styling, precise subtitle placement, and karaoke-style graphs. ASS files are supported by most good video players, including VLC and Google’s own Android video player library, Exoplayer.
It’s good that Google’s reinstated the app, but it’s crazy that there’s been a suspension in the first place, and that’s just another story in the unstable relationship that developers have with Google’s automated app review process.
The robot dominates the Google Play Store
Google gets a lot of criticism from developers for the lack of human involvement in its app review process, with the Play Store instead choosing automatic scanning of programs for viruses, policy violations and other prohibited violations. To say that Google’s app review bots ‘bans first and asks questions later’ would actually be an improvement over the current situation, as the bots cannot ask questions. The bots are banned, send an automated email, and it’s up to the developers to find out why they’re banned and jump through the rings to make the bots happy, often without being able to talk to anyone.
Google and Apple both collect a percentage of the app sales, which the companies categorize as a necessary tax paid for the in-store ecosystem infrastructure. Apple is using this money in part to hire an army of human app reviewers, a system that Google Play developers often cite as an example that Google should follow. Instead, Google only has this bot system – or at best an extremely small team of manual reviewers – and developers often complain that they are at the mercy of an illogical bot, with no one to talk to, not even during ‘ a career process.
Google’s email banning Just Player.
cash / Github
Google Play app developer Magic Frame Studios reflects many of the common complaints in a blog post, saying: ‘We’re working to develop applications for an unfair system controlled by Bots, which we treat as rubbish. We fight against unfair bans, unfairly closed accounts and you can never learn from your mistake to have a better application. “The developer says that if your app is banned, ‘no one can clearly tell you why your app was banned, and if no one clearly tells you what the problem is with your app, how can you fix it?’
Google’s bots have had a particular problem with programs that show web content, often banning browsers, reddit programs, or forum apps for things like nudity or hate speech, because those are both things that exist on the Internet.
Google’s apps are all immune to this illogical ban, and larger companies like Facebook undoubtedly have access to better support than your average developer would get. The people most affected by Google’s application bots are small indie developers, who can have their entire revenue taken away due to a bug bug. Google wants developers to build a business and livelihood on Google Play, but if it’s such an unstable, illogical platform, it’s a difficult way to run a business.