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Eons ago, I built an Android app which allowed using high quality photos for contacts. I made the "huge" mistake of using a celebrity photo in one of my screenshots. Lo and behold, few months later, my free with no advertising app got removed from the store and the only way to put it back was to create a new app which would have a new URL and none of the ratings or reviews carried over.

The reasonable thing would have been to send a warning asking to change the damn screenshot, which would have taken me literally 10 second to do.

No more app development for me, not unless I control the distribution channel.

6 comments

There's no possibility of controlling the distribution channel anymore. Some think that web is it, but it isn't. Google Chrome is by far the majority browser, and all they have to do is decide that your website is unsafe:

https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/99020

Sure, users could choose to proceed if they know they want to, but the likely outcome is that you will lose 95% of them.

Nothing is absolute. Even in absence of Google Chrome, you still have all cloud services and ISPs abiding by the laws of the country they operate in.

The point is how much control one has over the end to end distribution. My own website could potentially receive a DMCA take-down, but I can just take down the offending content and continue with my life. In case of Google Chrome, I can't recall the last time I came across such a warning and I surf all over the place, hosting all kind of crap. So it's very unlikely.

I work on a cross-platform App used by millions of of people and one day during event that runs on our App google blacklisted out domain as phishing (for all of chromes) because we had too many dots url in the url and too many requests coming into the service to quickly.

So even IF you DO get past the ban-hammer, there is always another ban-hammer just round the corner if you app gets too much traction.

Google is great until you get caught in the web of censorship. Apple is great on the surface but a hot-mess of bugs under the hood.

Devs at chrome seem more compentant then the devs who work who on webkit. Both just serve to reinforce parent companies positions. The APIs that the parent companies use, most of the time, the rest of the APIs, its anyones guess when they will break release to release.

> you still have all cloud services and ISPs abiding by the laws of the country they operate in.

Those typically have due process and transparency. Google has neither.

> In case of Google Chrome, I can't recall the last time I came across such a warning and I surf all over the place, hosting all kind of crap. So it's very unlikely.

I'm not sure how common it is for chrome to mark whole websites, but they do like to warn on executable downloads that are flagged by crappy artificial stupidity anti-virus vendors who have no incentive to reduce false positives. And by warn I mean that Chrome (and other browsers that let Google gatekeep the web, which is most of them including FF) refuses to download the file and makes it obfucated enough to override that decision that many users think they can't download the file.

Example: http://dege.freeweb.hu/

Google has been moving in the direction of exercising ever greater control over the web. These little Chrome features aimed at "protecting users" are just parts of it. They control discovery (Google Search), the infrastructure (Google Cloud), the client (Google Chrome), and a very common support channel (Gmail).

The fact that those are theoretically not absolute (some people use Bing, hosting can be on AWS, and Firefox still exists) is beside the point.

In practice, almost any business is damaged to the point of being unsustainable if Google cuts them off.

That's not really comparable.

> No more app development for me, not unless I control the distribution channel.

What about something like F-Droid? F-Droid users can even add new repos to source apps from if you don't want to submit it to wherever F-Droid sources from by default.

That said, the culture around smartphones unfortunately was poisoned from the beginning so that normal users are suspicious of anything that doesn't come from the "official" corporate app stores, unlike PCs where they'll download just about anything on the internet, so I do sympathize with swearing off app development.

F-Droid came to be in late 2010 and I built the app in early 2012. As such, I didn't really hear about F-Droid at the time and I assume the user base would have been very small (but still better than nothing).

> unlike PCs where they'll download just about anything on the internet

Google has that covered too with their "Google Safe Browsing" crap.

I'm finding it extremely difficult to have any sympathy for someone who used a celebrity's image for commercial purposes instead of buying some stock photo or hiring a photographer friend and a model.

You're lucky you weren't sued into the ground for damages.

> commercial purposes

It was a free app with no advertising, so it was not used in a commercial context.

> I'm finding it extremely difficult to have any sympathy

People have sympathy for much worse things - you should perhaps work on your sympathy. Here's something to help you: the person wasn't a business owner for decades and just wanted to help others with similar issues, hence spending dozens of hours of his personal time to build an app to share for free.

Can you clarify whether you used the photo correctly under an appropriate license?

He did not since he mention it was a mistake. The quotes around huge convey the meaning that he admits the error while finding the punishment disproportionate.

Frankly, I asked for clarification.

Nope. Just google searched and dropped it in the screenshot.

Having once made this mistake in my teens about twelve years ago, just be glad that the copyright owner didn't pursue you over it, it could have been much worse, and is a lesson learned a relatively easy way.

Yeah, parent should have been laying at least 10 years in prison for such a “huge” mistake. Maybe we need to re-introduce back a death penalty for such serious crimes?

Intellectual property law is intellectual property law.

Nobody said they should go to jail. We're saying maybe parent commenter is being a tad unreasonable complaining that their app got pulled and banned "without warning" for commercial use of a celebrity's image.

"I didn't break the law that bad, why was I punished so severely!" is exceptionally immature.

I think it's very reasonable to be upset if my entire app was pulled because google didn't like a screenshot!

> commercial use of a celebrity's image

It's only commercial use if I made any sort of profit from it, which I didn't. So nope, not commercial.

I solved this by requesting a new app url from the server, if there is any the app would request the user to install the new app. I even managed to create my own update method.

If it was free and not without ads, why not publish the code and have people build the APK ?

I did — but only a tiny percentage of users can do that.