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Noel Braganza

'Not Compliant' - ‍‘Not compliant’ – Two words that are killing Coronavirus app innovation

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We are looking for help from the community to help ship an app that is being denied publishing on both Google and the App Store. We wrote an open letter as a last resort. https://www.mysymptoms.app/open-...

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Jake Price
Interesting response from Google - I think they are right in limiting apps that are aimed at this pandemic at this moment as surely too many apps are just going to water down the usefulness of what a system can provide? If you think your app will really help - would it be worthwhile in making the app a web only (PWA?) product at this time? If you do get traction, then that might be the time to communicate with Google again, but this time with a much bigger selling point to them?
Noel Braganza
@jake_price1 Thanks for your response. We have considered that, but the issue with the webapp is that we will need to track and manage user credentials, and we wanted to keep this app as anonymous as possible. Also the main use case for people to benefit from such a service is on their device. We understand Google's response too, but feel it's a bit boilerplate. We haven't violated any of their conditions, but they are just banning everything. The only level of innovation left for COVID19 apps are glorified forms, information of which we can easily find even on websites anyway. I mean if they took this sort of initiative to block genuine and fake apps for Covid19, I don't know why they didn't follow a similar process to ban fakenews apps that have caused possibly more damage in the world than COVID19
Jake Price
@noel_braganza Absolutely see your point of view - and for what its worth, I agree with you in regard to Google response and stand-point. It feels like they are stifiling innovation due to this new guideline they have set out - which also makes me feel like this might be something they might change there mind on? Fingers crossed they see sense and you can start generating data that will help.
Noel Braganza
@jake_price1 Fingers crossed. We are still trying to get the Open Letter picked up online somehow. Any ideas of what to do would be greatly appreciated.
Jake Price
@noel_braganza Nothing outside the norm of contacting news and tech sites. Something I have seen recently is people using platforms such as Hacker News as a way of targeting responses from big companies such as Google so that could be an avenue as well?
Noel Braganza
@jake_price1 Yeah, we did publish the article there too. Got some traction. Let's see how it pans out.
Tania Zapata
Two ideas! 1. Create a change.org campaign and 2. Provide the APK for people to download it on their own, not through Google play?
Noel Braganza
@taniazapata Hey a change.org sounds interesting, maybe we might. We already have an APK available. But non-technical people always get stuck not knowing. how to install it. You can download the APK here https://www.mysymptoms.app/downl...