A question for Googlers who may be responsible/adjacent - what is the intended function of this warning? It seems to be attempting to filter out low quality apps, but instead seems to be killing any attempt to change the status quo. If the app has fewer users than competing apps, the message Google is sending is "we don't need any new apps that do similar things to existing apps" and "if you're a small app, don't even think about unseating the dominant players."
Google's Play Store policies have been harebrained for quite some time - previously with the 15 reviewer approach they decided to make it even harder for developers with fewer resources to distribute their apps. It's ironic that even though the iOS App Store is arguably more of a walled garden, it's so much friendlier to human beings who are trying to build a product. But at this point it seems ingrained in Google to release self-defeating features (remember the finder network that prioritized "first of its kind privacy" over being able to find things?)
> we don't need any new apps that do similar things to existing apps"
I’m not a “Googler who may be responsible”, but my understanding is that Apple does this too… and Google App Store has a reputation for being lower quality.
I assume it’s because unoriginal apps at some point are just “polluting” the market and making it harder to find higher quality products. Which is generally what users want. Some things are redundant - how many flashlight apps, weather apps, ChatGPT wrappers, etc are needed? I guess Google doesn’t see value in hosting and distributing such apps.
I’m not sure I agree with this, but I understand it. Target or Walmart don’t need to sell your random trinkets that no one buys, and Google is deciding that the same applies to their store. At least with Android you can generally side load and access alternative stores, so you can build a richer marketplace where different “stores” can serve different customers.
> Some things are redundant - how many flashlight apps, weather apps, ChatGPT wrappers, etc are needed?
For what it's worth, the wording Apple uses in their App Review Guidelines [1] is:
> 4.3(b): Also avoid piling on to a category that is already saturated; the App Store has enough fart, burp, flashlight, fortune telling, dating, drinking games, and Kama Sutra apps, etc. already. We will reject these apps unless they provide a unique, high-quality experience.
I’ll give credit to Apple for formally writing a policy to this extent, but it’s disappointing. There’s always the risk of putting in a lot of time for an app that is genuinely unique but Apple may not think so.
I’d much rather Apple let in junk apps but do more to promote curated lists of good apps. I like the “Editors Choice” section. I think it is generally a step in the right direction to surface decent apps.
Plus there’s also already some kind of precedent: Maps does an acceptable job promoting third-party “Guides” to attractions and food for many cities.
For what it's worth, that bit of the policy was written early in the life of the App Store, when there really was a glut of low-effort novelty apps, particularly in the categories they mentioned, and when app discovery features in the store were more limited. It's probably not as necessary nowadays, but it does help guide developers away from writing apps which users are unlikely to find useful. (And if you've genuinely put in the effort to create something novel, it shouldn't be difficult to convince the reviewer of that - App Store review is a two-way street.)
quoting from a nice piece: https://lmnt.me/blog/app-stores-and-payment-methods.html "It still blows my mind how little the App Store has improved over the last decade. It’s barely changed. Almost every bad thing about the App Store still exists. And almost every good thing that happened for app distribution and payment methods is just the result of regulation."
I don't really understand this thinking. If a long tail of mostly unremarkable apps make the good ones hard to find then that is a flaw of the ranking algorithm.
If an app is not even in the app store, how can it possibly attract user interest? What if users happen to like some quirky feature that seems unremarkable to app store reviewers?
I used to think this, but then I just abandoned their search and now use Kagi. (I use the !gp bang for the Play Store, no App Store bang seems to exist.)
I can't imagine ever going back to native store searches now that they're full of ads.
Sure, could be a neat feature, but practically, 95% of the time that I’m searching for an app I know the specific app I need already and am just searching by name. The !gp bang doesn’t search Kagi, it directs to the app with the matching name on the Play Store, but skips having to wade through ads to get there.
The other 5% of the time where I’m looking for an app for a particular function, there usually don’t exist enough apps that perform that function for filtering on search results to be worthwhile.
I’ve had some luck asking ChatGPT “How does AppX make money?” I’ve also asked it to find me games based on genre, style, and control constraints “without ads or with removable ads” and it does a fair job.
> I’m not a “Googler who may be responsible”, but my understanding is that Apple does this too… and Google App Store has a reputation for being lower quality.
It doesn't help much for Apple. You can search for pretty much anything on the App Store and get at best a handful of useful results, followed by page after page of complete dreck.
Speaking as a user, I do find that low number of downloads and reviews for an app strongly correlates with low quality and outright scams. The problem is that you have all those shops cranking out barely functioning apps for trivial things just to get into the listing and hopefully capture a few installs from users who don't have the time or the inclination to do proper vetting. And those apps are so pervasive that they drown out the genuinely useful and well-made new apps.
i'm guessing it's intended to warn that you're about to download one of the 500 apps that look like the ChatGPT app, but aren't actually the ChatGPT app.
Correct. Google's incentive is not to maximize players in the space. Their user isn't the developer; it's the person who downloads things onto an Android phone. If those users get burned too often because it's too hard to tell legitimate apps from knock-offs, they'll stop trusting the whole Play store and probably the whole phone platform (in favor of Apple instead).
Google has the numbers to know that "buyer [or in this case, downloader] beware" isn't good enough because people aren't smart enough. It sucks, but at scale it's a pattern we see over and over and over again (see also "Why does Windows force updates," "Why is Apple so paranoid about side-loading," "Why is it so hard to get an app on Apple's App Store in the first place," and "Why does Facebook log a big warning in the browser console to not paste any code in there and hit enter").
Its a nice theory but if Google actually cared about that Play Store would periodically take out the trash by prompting users to confirm they DON'T want recently installed/unused apps to be sent to /dev/null.
Weird - it's hard to beat widespread online narratives, but as someone who worked at Google there's no company I'd trust more with the "handling" part of my data. There's no doubt that on device is always a more private option, but if you've decided to keep data in the cloud, then Google is probably one of the most secure options you could choose.
Same, as another former Googler. I worked on a team that had a relatively large amount of data access, and the amount of protection in place - technical and procedural, preventative and remedial - made me extremely comfortable giving Google basically all of my personal data, knowing that only the bare minimum would ever be looked at, and even then securely and in an anonymized or (usually) aggregated format.
as an outsider, Google is one of the companies I trust the most to prevent unintended leaks of my data, but also one of the ones I trust with my data least.
I think there’s a bit of a mismatch here between data Google collects on me as a regular user which they can and due process in a million different ways in order to sell shit to you. This extends to AI unless you’re paying for it in which case it’s a very different ballgame.
Then there is data that I put into a Google service like drive or cloud which genuinely is probably the single safest consumer option I know of in 2025.
> but also one of the ones I trust with my data least.
What thing have they done with user data that you feel will negatively affect you? As far as I know people just don't like that they have a lot of data, nobody every said they did bad stuff with that data.
I think the "LLM is intelligence" crowd has a very simplistic view of people. If you feel that natural language and the systems responsible it are pretty much the only things that human intelligence produces, then I can see the argument.
But I don't believe that. That a machine that can produce convincing human-language chains of thought says nothing about its "intelligence". Back when basic RNNs/LSTMs were at the forefront of ML research, no one had any delusions about this fact. And just because you can train a token prediction model on all of human knowledge (which the internet is not) doesn't mean the model understands anything.
It's surprising to me that the people most knowledgeable about the models often appear to be the biggest believers - perhaps they're self-interestedly pumping a valuation or are simply obsessed with the idea of building something straight from the science fiction stories they grew up with.
In the end though, the burden of proof is on the believers, not the deniers.
> It's surprising to me that the people most knowledgeable about the models often appear to be the biggest believers - perhaps they're self-interestedly pumping a valuation or are simply obsessed with the idea of building something straight from the science fiction stories they grew up with.
"Believer" really is the most appropriate label here. Altman or Musk lying and pretending they "AGI" right around the corner to pump their stocks is to be expected. The actual knowledgeable making completely irrational claims is simply incomprehensible beyond narcissism and obscurantism.
Interestingly, those who argue against the fiction that current models are reasoning, are using reason to make their points. A non-reasoning system generating plausible text is not at all a mystery can be explained, therefore, it's not sufficient for a system to generate plausible text to qualify as reasoning.
Those who are hyping the emergence of intelligence out of statistical models of written language on the other hand rely strictly on the basest empiricism, e.g. "I have an interaction with ChatGPT that proves it's intelligent" or "I put your argument into ChatGPT and here's what it said, isn't that interestingly insightful". But I don't see anyone coming out with any reasoning on how ability to reason could emerge out of a system predicting text.
There's also a tacit connection made between those language models being large and complex and their supposed intelligence. The human brain is large and complex, and it's the material basis of human intelligence, "therefore expensivelarge language models with internal behavior completely unexplainable to us, must be intelligent".
I don't think it will, but if the release of the deepseek models effectively shifts the main focus towards efficiency as opposed to "throwing more GPUs at it", that will also force the field to produce models with the current behavior using only the bare minimum, both in terms of architecture and resources. That would help against some aspects of the mysticism.
The biggest believers are not the best placed to drive the research forward. They are not looking at it critically and trying to understand it. They are using every generated sentence as a confirmation of their preconceptions. If the most knowledgeable are indeed the biggest believers, we are in for a long dark (mystic) AI winter.
It's actually hilarious that whoever was in charge of Google's finder network decided to cripple the product's one and only function by prioritizing privacy.
In this tradeoff, Google gained a handful of articles mentioning the "innovative" privacy improvements (before the writers had a chance to test how terribly the network actually performs). For that, they sacrificed the chance to compete with Apple in this category, which outside of device revenue also weakens Android/Pixel ecosystem and market share. You really can't make up this level of incompetence.
> It's actually hilarious that whoever was in charge of Google's finder network decided to cripple the product's one and only function by prioritizing privacy.
That sounds like that "whoever" was the corporate legal team. Every time I tracked down these kind of idiocities in large corpos, it's usually legal or security team that overrode common sense and sabotaged their own product.
> It's actually hilarious that whoever was in charge of Google's finder network decided to cripple the product's one and only function by prioritizing privacy.
That is a hilariously apt and depressing point. Wow.
Google's interest in user privacy extends as far as keeping competitors or customers of google from getting data about an Android user other than through Google.
Well sure, you could accuse Apple and Huawei of the exact same thing and still be right. Hardware OEMs are extremely desperate to force their customers through first-party services to extend the value of their sale. News at 11.
Because America lacks any form of conscious consumer protection, this is apparently fine to our regulators. Our market is entirely comfortable with OEMs fighting over who gets the right to exploit a customer with their defacto monopoly.
The ones debating whether this is nefarious or not are the ones ruining the tech industry. This is absolutely nefarious. Whether or not it's a clever path to promotion due to corporate incentives is irrelevant.
I'm curious what part of Microsoft's culture enables these satirically slimy product decisions. In theory, other megacorps should be no better, but somehow they seem to maintain a bar that Microsoft always manages to stoop below
Not sure about the "less funds" bit, but Google started funding self driving cars in 2009. The continuous investment in tech is just now starting to make the dream feasible - as far as I know self driving cars were never more than a side project for Uber and Lyft.
With Cruise gone now there's basically just Waymo, Zoox, and Tesla (bit controversial) that are the names thrown around when talking about self driving market share, and out of those only Waymo has a functional service.
Google's Play Store policies have been harebrained for quite some time - previously with the 15 reviewer approach they decided to make it even harder for developers with fewer resources to distribute their apps. It's ironic that even though the iOS App Store is arguably more of a walled garden, it's so much friendlier to human beings who are trying to build a product. But at this point it seems ingrained in Google to release self-defeating features (remember the finder network that prioritized "first of its kind privacy" over being able to find things?)