Among other things, what's happening with Google is the same thing that happens with Facebook and Apple and so on. They got too big, and they don't care, so there are few to no humans involved in human-facing, human-affecting decisions. Humans don't scale well or cheaply, so they automate. Things go sideways as a result. No one cares, because they're too big to have to care about this anymore, and they've switched into parasitic extraction of revenue instead of caring.
And, of course, because they're so huge, any problem that affects a "tiny fraction" of their user base affects a whole lot of people.
They have the resources to not have these problems. That's the bit that should be leading to barbarians at the gates, but, isn't.
> They have the resources to not have these problems.
I'm not sure they do have the resources. We're talking about companies with a user base larger than literally any country on Earth.
The basic problem is that these companies are taking on problems that nobody should ever take on. "Mass curation" is not a problem that can be solved by anyone, and not a thing that should be attempted by anyone. This is why we need personal freedom and not global gatekeepers.
Well I said X because it doesn't really matter. I'm very confident that my argument is true for X=100, and it's probably true for notably smaller numbers. I don't need exact statistics to know that it's much much less than 3.5 million.
And this isn't about a deep check for every single update, this is about deeper checking in case of blocks and bans, which happen at a much slower rate.
Of course as the number of apps that are coddled or given special treatment gets smaller, the easier it gets to coddle or give special treatment to apps. But how does that help the Play Store overall? How is it fair that a few developers are given special treatment, while everyone else still suffers from the same arbitrary rejections?
Besides, the small decisions are collectively impactful too. Take 3 million apps, and add up all of their users. Multiple smaller apps may collectively have more users than 1 larger app.
It feels like giving special treatment to more famous apps is just a strategy for Google or Apple to avoid bad press, without making their stores much better.
> It feels like giving special treatment to more famous apps is just a strategy for Google or Apple to avoid bad press, without making their stores much better.
That's what they do now. I'm suggesting a massive expansion on what apps they treat better, because 'famous' is a very small group.
And I'm not saying they shouldn't treat all apps well. It's just that it's less clear how much that would cost.
What's clear right now is that they aren't even trying.
Also we probably shouldn't have 3 million apps to start with. I bet a lot of those are below even the lowest reasonable quality bar.
And, of course, because they're so huge, any problem that affects a "tiny fraction" of their user base affects a whole lot of people.
They have the resources to not have these problems. That's the bit that should be leading to barbarians at the gates, but, isn't.