As Android™'s official app store, you would think the Play Store would be the premier resource for the best Android apps. While there are numerous third-party app hubs that serve as an alternative to the Play Store, most Android app developers prioritize Google’s offering given the sheer size of the audience. But with volume in mind, it's no secret that the company has had to rely on artificial intelligence to make some judgment calls on approving and pruning apps. But as we've seen before, there are downsides to this reliance on AI and machine learning models to keep tabs on guideline violations. The latest victim of said downsides, Pushbullet, is putting out its story.
The founder and CEO of productivity-oriented app, Ryan Oldenburg, has charted out the team's experience on the Play Store since June 2020 with Google’s automated systems sending a total of seven violation notices through to this week for supposedly minor or virtually non-existent infractions regarding Pushbullet's privacy policy disclosure. While the devteam didn't think much of the initial few notifications, it quickly became apparent as the so-called violations morphed that they were the result of an AI that wasn't very intelligent.
Oldenburg received the first violation notice "out of the blue" on June 9, 2020. In the notification (pictured below), Google asks the developer to have a valid privacy policy and prominent disclosure about publishing users' contacts information to Pushbullet servers.
Accepting that this may have been a genuine violation on Pushbullet's part, the team pushed an update with the required changes. The comparison provided by Pushbullet gives us an excellent idea of what really changed between the old and the new versions.
Fast forward to July 7, 2021, when a small update pushed by the developer received a rejection notice from Google, citing that the developer hasn't mentioned the privacy policy in the app and on the Play Developer Console. The developers then discovered that there was no link to the Privacy Policy within the page that allows users to disable or enable SMS sync. After making the required changes, the update was approved.
Much to Pushbullet's surprise and frustration, another small update they tried to push two weeks later was also rejected for the same reason. Unable to understand the nature of the violation, the team decided to create a dedicated Privacy Policy page mentioning the SMS sync feature and even stored the page locally within the APK to avoid any potential network-related issues. This seems to have temporarily resolved the Privacy Policy issue for Pushbullet.
The developers received another surprise notification on February 12, 2022, and it didn't come in response to a recent app update. But the violation was virtually the same as the previous one, leading the developer to conjure up a dialog box forcing users to manually confirm the disclosure related to the collection of SMS and contacts data (pictured below). Pushbullet also moved the SMS Privacy Policy link toward the top of the screen for good measure. Unsurprisingly, the changes were approved by Google.
Another notification arrives on May 15, with similar violations as the others, but this time pertaining to SMS Log information. At a loss for solutions, the company simply proceeded to increase the text size of the in-app Privacy Policy link and successfully submitted the update.
More time passes by until yet another dreaded notification arrived earlier this month claiming the privacy policy disclosure is not mentioned in the Play Console. To remedy this, the developer decided to write a new policy that combines all disclosures while also mentioning it within the Play Console. The Pushbullet team then submitted the update and that was later approved.
The latest notification came about on October 26 (shown below). This time around, the team was dinged for not providing disclosure about when email addresses are sent to Pushbullet's servers while using a Google account to sign in. As Oldenburg notes, this is pretty bizarre offense to be called upon as the app didn't get flagged for these violations in the weeks or months prior.
Pushbullet acknowledges that it may get additional notices in the future and is willing to stay on top of them to ensure that users have continued access to its services. Oldenburg had a gloomy outlook for the future, though, saying that developers have no option but to continue making up subtle changes to appease the automation model before resubmitting their apps as they risk losing a big chunk of their revenue if the app is removed from the Play Store. Maybe he's right and this is the cost of doing business with Google. However, reacting to a policy violation notices could be a bigger burden to bear for small-scale or independent developers.
It's worth remembering that Pushbullet dropped its iOS app in January 2020 for similar reasons on Apple's side as was mentioned in this Reddit post. Meanwhile, the Pushbullet Chrome extension also faced trouble from Google a couple of years ago.