“On August 31, we’ll start rolling out these requirements for anyone creating new Play Console developer accounts. In October, we’ll share more information with existing developers about how to update and verify existing accounts.”
Source: happened to me and all of my apps despite them being Free Software and offline-only. Here's one of the emails they sent me about it: https://i.imgur.com/dVzQj2p.jpeg
Notice how they open with “Hi Developers at [my first and last name]” – developers, plural, and “at” like they only expect me to be a company and not a single person.
The DUNS number thing is such a disaster even for companies with it. We had a the account under a DUNS of a subsidiary but somehow they wanted us to upload verification docs for the main company, of course not matching exactly how they expect, and there is no way to change it without jumping through a bunch of hoops. Similar issues at Apple. Eventually they let us verify the account with "company letterhead" as if that proves anything (despite them insisting the letterhead needs to say dev@company.com instead of support@company.com, again proving nothing really)
For both Apple and Google it's one of those processes where the support doesn't even really seem to understand how it works (they probably don't know what automated emails are being sent, and what the dev side looks like). They would randomly close cases for "no response" immediately after they replied, ask us to upload something despite their being no way to upload it, tell us to ignore the "your account will be closed email" because it actually won't be (wrong again), etc.
DUNS own lookup page doesn't even let you look up by DUNS number (so we could figure out what company some ancient number was associated with). I bet it's because you have to pay for one of their "solutions" to do this.
It seems like to Google, "customers" will only ever be anonymous data points in an A/B test.
They would have gone down quickly if they hadn't "borrowed" Overture's business model of paid ads.
They have no culture of valuing the customers, or (like Amazon) obsessing about what they need.
Apple is at least slightly different: hardware customers and high-value employees are treated okay from what I hear, but devs are left alone.
Indie developers bring both Apple and Google a lot of revenue indirectly, but they don't really have much of a lobby (maybe they should unionize/hire a lobby firm together).
Yeah, DUNS numbers are super easy IME for companies to get, but its hell after that. We had some crazy problems with the App Store where our legal address with DUNS didn't match what we provided Apple, even though we had updated it with D&B, but Apple's systems weren't pulling in that update, Apple told us to talk to D&B, D&B told us to talk to Apple... we ended up literally just making a new corporation and starting from scratch.
Validation issues happen all the time for subsidiaries when the parent company likes to own/manage things. Always fun when e.g. EV certificate validation (sigh windows update stuff) calls the parent company reception and asks for the manager listed as owner, and they just go "who?".
This happens to Google Cloud partners all the time, too, when there are acquisitions, mergers, or DBAs where the legal business entity changes even though the practical relationship stays the same (with the same people, same contact details, same billing/payment accounts, same contract terms, etc). It's extremely irritating.
Both Apple and Google need to be regulated. Their vice grip on app distribution, app defaults, search defaults, payments defaults, user credential saving defaults, messaging defaults, browser defaults, and then their brutal taxation of almost all web e-commerce and businesses is beyond the scale of whatever Standard Oil had.
You cannot do business on the Internet without paying the Apple and Google toll. They control all the points of ingress and egress, and they tax everything that moves.
It'd be bad enough if they were just charging money, but they also make you jump through hoops to design software their way, do unplanned upgrades to their cadence, prevent you from deploying emergency hot patches, prevent you from updating software dynamically, prevent you from knowing your own customer, etc. etc. etc.
And they're happy to sell your competitors ads to outrank you for your own trademark.
These companies need to lose their control over this. Web distributed apps must become the norm.
You can't tell me that with sandboxing, signature scanning, and some clever heuristics, that we can't make mobile completely safe for free and open distribution.
It's not just getting a DUNS number. You also need to consent to having your home address (no PO box or virtual mailbox, needs to be a physical address for your "business") listed publicly on the DUNS website and on all your Google Play Store app pages.
Other app stores are similar, so probably it's some dumb government regulation.
There’s even more than that, actually: if you’re an individual developer you also need 10 people to beta-test your app for 2 weeks, along with having your home address listed online. Google really doesn’t wan’t anyone who isn’t a company developing apps for Android lol
Ran into this myself late last year. Registered as an individual developer for a free, non-monetized app and had to find 20 people (they reduced the number since) to sign up (and remain signed up) as beta testers for a 2 week period to get the app listed.
Luckily I was able to hit that number (the app is a stat tracking app for the game Destiny 2, so I was able to get beta testers via posting on a subreddit filled with Destiny 2 PvP players). But it took way longer and was way more of a burden compared to getting the same app listed on both the Apple App Store and the Microsoft Windows Store (the app is written in Kotlin/Compose Multiplatform and was relatively easy to make multiplatform).
If I didn't happen to be an Android "main" myself (creating a vested interest in wanting to make the Android version easily available) I might not have bothered with the Play Store hoops give how much of a pain in the ass it was compared to the other listings.
Watching it happen, it also felt like hurdle after hurdle kept being added (in addition to the never-stopping API level treadmill).
Even if I were OK with jumping through the current set of hurdles, the promise of a never-stopping hurdle-jumping exercise with new requirements being thrown at me every quarter is not exactly encouraging for anyone who actually has a life outside of developing their apps.
>Google really doesn’t wan’t anyone who isn’t a company developing apps for Android lol
I mean, it's Android. You can publish an app yourself or through an alternative app store. Given that you have options on the platform I don't have a big problem with Google enforcing pretty stringent requirements on their own store. In fact I prefer a pretty clear dividing line between trusted apps in the Play Store and 3rd party apps at your own risk. There was so much crap in the Play Store it was often hard to tell what's a scam and what wasn't.
I’m currently working with a startup that was just incorporated. We needed to join the Apple Developer Program to get APNS push certs to set up our MDM.
It took over five weeks to get our ADP membership approved, and that was with internal backchannels. We had to launch without MDM, all the laptops on mostly default settings.
These companies are making so much money from ads and rentseeking and IAP cancer that they have zero incentive to do anything else well. They know they have a monopoly position, so just like the public utilities charging you an extra $2 convenience fee to pay your bill, you’ll shut up and take it, because they are the only game in town.
You know it, and they know it, and they know you know it.
At least on Android you can install f-droid. On iOS they are the only game in town. There’s fuck-all that’s “insanely great” about not being able to install the programs you want to use (such as Fortnite).
Exactly, I happened to have long running apps, in the store, I didn't update them for some time but they were simple and working as designed, good for their job.
Suddenly there was this weird obligation to declare a company or disclose publicly info about me, so i did nothing and it expired, and they removed the app.
I saw many solo devs recommend switching to an LLC company to avoid the hassle Google introduced since late 2023, but it doesn't seem to be an easy task either. I've already witnessed two experiences:
The process for getting a DUNS number and getting it approved by Apple was such a nightmare. Even when I did everything correctly, I got flagged for some unspecified reason that required a bunch of extra back-and-forth. I didn't even want to list on the app store - just to allow other people to run some music-related code I wrote without getting stomped by Gatekeeper.
I haven't tried the specific flow for private individuals (seems to just be a radio button), but I do recall getting DUNS numbers as just filling in an online form with name and location and getting the number by mail, without any hoops for fees.
A bit silly to require for private individuals, and a bit annoying to have to go back and do, but not itself a big deal.
> I do recall getting DUNS numbers as just filling in an online form with name and location and getting the number by mail, without any hoops for fees
Having to do it at all is the hoop, and more than zero hoops is too many. I got nothing out of having my apps on Google Play except the joy of sharing in what was at the time a new and exciting medium.
See Windows Phone for a great example of how it would have played out if Google hadn't successfully courted small-time devs like me and countless others. Corporate publishers would have never colonized Google Play in the first place if an audience wasn't already there. The way they addressed me makes it very clear that solo devs are no longer needed, so I will never submit to it on principle no matter how easy it's claimed to be.
The linked source only mentions DUNS only being required for organization accounts, not individuals? And I've recently successfully created an account (albeit haven't published an app yet) without one?
Uh huh, Google just blatantly requiring every app developer on the planet to register with some specific random company. Absolutely no corruption to see here, none at all.
This is the kind of shit why smartphone vendors can't be trusted with their own walled garden stores, the EU has not yet stomped them into mulch hard enough yet I see.
The irony of your comment thinking the EU is going to fight this.
The DUNS number is the European Commission standard for business identification; the choice of D&B isn’t random, it literally came from EU requirements.
Publishing on the Play Store for indie devs or hobby projects just doesn’t make any sense.
You need to jump though so many hoops and doxx yourself in the process, only to make basically no money with the apps, and even if you miraculously do, risk getting kicked out of their platform without any way to contact a competent human.
Even before all this, the general consensus amongst solo app devs was that “don’t waste your time with Android”, now add about a hundred hour of bureaucracy to even get started with your first app, the choice is obvious for many.
I was a long time Android user and switched to iOS because the apps there are just better, I honestly think that Google of running the Android ecosystem into the ground and only the big players will want to go though this mess.
As a Flutter developer, it makes me want to switch to other technologies, because if Android loses its appeal, Flutter, another Google product, offers basically nothing. On web, it scks, on iOS SwiftUI will always have an advantage, Android as discussed is in steady and fast decline, and who the hell needs Flutter desktop apps that have poor integration with the operating system…
I expect Google will attempt something highly amusing, like launching the Play Store on iOS in the EU, with the apps running via a port of the VM (and libraries) to iOS.
No real comment on mobile, but I disagree with your take on Flutter web. I've deployed a moderately complex Flutter web app (SPA) and have been pleasantly surprised at every turn with how capable it is, from performance to complexity management to testing. And the flexibility to produce an AOT-compiled desktop app from the same codebase, should I choose, is nice to have.
What exactly is the advantage of Swift UI over Flutter? Maybe it's slightly more efficient since Flutter does its own rendering, but in my experience I've never run into issues with performance.
And I think everything should be web apps anyway (ideally PWAs), but I like that Flutter lets you produce a desktop app from your mobile app with very little effort. Even without any special "integration" with the OS, it's better than packaging a web app in Electron, right?
Our app is written in SwiftUI because of the ease between iOS, iPadOS, macOS and Apple Vision. There is just minimal configs to make it work between them. I don't this can be done with any cross-platforms.
Ugh I'm so fucking fed up with the Play Store and Admob, and how they have no meaningful recourse for solving issues or providing support. It makes me feel hopeless and helpless knowing I have little options outside of relying on them (don't have any apple devices to test on or build my app) and knowing they could give two shits. Especially seeing that their contact options for Admob have been broken for years now and they refuse to fix it or provide actual help. And there seems like there's no way to get them to budge, like even through our reps.
I've been hemming and hawing over whether to explore new PWA tech or catch back up on Flutter/Android with a current small-scale personal project... Sounds like I'm going PWA. This seems too onerous for any non-corporate developer.
For me the really unreasonable change was the app testing requirements on non-corporate developers. Having to get 20 users to beta test an unlisted Android app for two weeks before getting it on the store is not a reasonable thing to require for hobby projects. I'm not sure I even know 20 Android users well enough that I'd feel comfortable asking for that level of engagement from them.
It's a particularly bad policy to launch with existing developers grandfathered out, because the policy probably looks really successful to start with due to the difference in new developer vs. old developer populations -- the entities who are right now making most of the quality apps aren't affected. What's being affected is the pipeline of new developers, but the effect of killing that pipeline won't become obvious for years.
When making LearnTheWords[1] I had to wait 6 weeks for approval from Google. They weren't happy with how I documented what this testing process was like. I had to wait 3 rounds of 2 weeks between submissions, writing ever more kafkaesque descriptions of the insights i gleaned from the definitely-not-paid-for test users that i'd required.
I wasn't expecting it to be easier to launch on iOS than Android, but here we are.
> One factor Google didn’t cite was the new trader status rule enforced by the EU as of this February, which began requiring developers to share their names and addresses in the app’s listing.
I'm usually very supportive of EU tech regulation, but to be honest I don't really want to put my name and address up on apps I throw up on the store
Would like to keep my identity separate to whatever projects I have usually, especially if they're ones that don't 100% align with the your own developer brand that employers might screen for
I have the same mentality as you. But, rather than form an opinion on whatever EU regulation is being interpreted as "requiring" these steps from Google et al, I think I'm going to assert that it's a red herring.
The real issue, IMO, is that it's still too hard to distribute and install applications on my general-purpose computing devices! You can't be on Google's app store if you aren't a "real business" with a physical address and everything? Fine. Let's just distribute our apps on F-Droid, or by just releasing APKs in our GitHub pages, etc.
At least that's still possible with Android. But who knows how much longer they'll even allow that?
From what I can tell, this all should apply only to monetized apps (and I agree with that). If that's not actually the case, Google is using malicious compliance to misguide developers into hating the EU for daring to regulate them.
That's probably where F-Droid is a better choice in the first place ?
Google Play (and the App store) assume by default commercial intent, and I'm sympathetic to stricter verification rules when there's money changing hands.
> I don't really want to put my name and address up on apps I throw up on the store
As a customer I really want the ability to sue someone who does me wrong, call them out publicly, or at least avoid their products. In no way is it reasonable that someone should want to stay anonymous while selling me something (or profiting off of it in one way or another). I really don't see a reason to make an exception for people who have free+offline+etc apps.
You're publishing software, you need to be identifiable.
It is always true that people love regulation until it ends up affecting them negatively, through the magic of unintended consequences and emergent phenomenon in complex systems like human societies and economies.
Agreed. My 3 free apps, one with +100k downloads were also removed because of the EU ruling. Don't want my personal address and phone number to be more accessible to bad actors more than it already is. While I can somewhat follow the idea, the execution in practice has serious flaws.
Almost the same here until they let us verify by document. Can't receive texts to our support number, and also can't get the verification code by phone since there is a "Press 1 for ___" thing at the beginning of the call.
This effectively kills apps that are made by individuals or very small businesses that can't afford an office.
It's kind of incredible how the EU makes changes like this and then politicians scratch their heads about the weakness of European tech. You would think that the politicians would give some thought to that and make it easier/cheaper to fulfill these requirements, but nope. Either pay up for a company (hundreds of euros) and an office (hundreds of euros) or just have your information publicly available.
And when that information becomes publicly available you will be inundated with spam.
On top of that some services will then take Google street view pictures of your home and link all of that information together in an easily searchable database.
Apparently you can use a P.O. Box as address for this purpose[0] when registering for AppStore, which is substantially cheaper. However, Reddit says Google does not accept P.O. Boxes [1], so the only option is a "virtual" office address or something like that. A shame.
Yeah, I dropped my apps from Play, couldn't find a way to avoid putting my personal address on there.. fuck that, I'm making something for free, and they force me to dox myself for it? Nah, I'm good.
Google decided to make it worse than it needed. Those EU regulations are only applicable if your app makes money via IAP or subscriptions. If you are providing a free app, nothing changed, but Google decided that everyone must follow it. That is true even if you choose to not display ads (so at no point Google will send you money).
maybe, or google.. I didn't want to make it into a political thing, EU has done a lot of silly stuff, part due to malice, part to incompetence, but I'd take that any day over the "usa model" of "freedom" :)
My app’s organization is outside the “west”. So in order to complete verification with Google I had to pay some subcontractor of Dunn&Bradstreet almost $500 to get the DUNS. Then I had to get an original certified copy of the organization’s registration from the national registry. Then have an official notarized translation to English and get all that apostilled (another $500 through a service).
Also, Google support refused to tell me what set of documents they would accept. I had to figure it out myself.
We also saw established apps like iA Writer decide to get off the treadmill.
> In order to allow our users to access their Google Drive on their phones we had to rewrite privacy statements, update documents, and pass a series of security checks, all while facing a barrage of new, ever-shifting requirements.
Sounds like there are a range of reasons, but the bigger picture explanation is : Google no longer cares about incentivizing apps to be on the store.
The mobile OS wars are over: every company and dev that wants to do anything is locked into having to provide an Android and iOS app no matter how difficult it is, so all the incentives are for Apple / Google to insulate themselves from risk now by raising the bar on devs.
We need to start exercising the minimal rights / capabilities to ship alternative app stores on these platforms. Easier said than done.
I dunno, many developers already choose to ignore android entirely because it's less profitable. Raising the bar will only encourage that. At least for me the dox your own address + onerous testing requirements make android extremely unappealing
I guess I could publish on fdroid but why bother? The android platform clearly doesn't care about me.
Web APIs are also more capable than ever before and can be added as icons on the home page. For an individual developer, you are probably better off just doing a web app.
Android already has many alternative app store. I believe there is nothing currently for paid app (beside OEM store like galaxy store or Huawei) but if there is a need it's absolutely possible to do.
Apple side on the other hand, good luck with that. Even in Europe they made the rules so strict the third party app store are basically dead.
Readit News
“On August 31, we’ll start rolling out these requirements for anyone creating new Play Console developer accounts. In October, we’ll share more information with existing developers about how to update and verify existing accounts.”
Source: happened to me and all of my apps despite them being Free Software and offline-only. Here's one of the emails they sent me about it: https://i.imgur.com/dVzQj2p.jpeg
Notice how they open with “Hi Developers at [my first and last name]” – developers, plural, and “at” like they only expect me to be a company and not a single person.
For both Apple and Google it's one of those processes where the support doesn't even really seem to understand how it works (they probably don't know what automated emails are being sent, and what the dev side looks like). They would randomly close cases for "no response" immediately after they replied, ask us to upload something despite their being no way to upload it, tell us to ignore the "your account will be closed email" because it actually won't be (wrong again), etc.
DUNS own lookup page doesn't even let you look up by DUNS number (so we could figure out what company some ancient number was associated with). I bet it's because you have to pay for one of their "solutions" to do this.
They would have gone down quickly if they hadn't "borrowed" Overture's business model of paid ads.
They have no culture of valuing the customers, or (like Amazon) obsessing about what they need.
Apple is at least slightly different: hardware customers and high-value employees are treated okay from what I hear, but devs are left alone.
Indie developers bring both Apple and Google a lot of revenue indirectly, but they don't really have much of a lobby (maybe they should unionize/hire a lobby firm together).
You cannot do business on the Internet without paying the Apple and Google toll. They control all the points of ingress and egress, and they tax everything that moves.
It'd be bad enough if they were just charging money, but they also make you jump through hoops to design software their way, do unplanned upgrades to their cadence, prevent you from deploying emergency hot patches, prevent you from updating software dynamically, prevent you from knowing your own customer, etc. etc. etc.
And they're happy to sell your competitors ads to outrank you for your own trademark.
These companies need to lose their control over this. Web distributed apps must become the norm.
You can't tell me that with sandboxing, signature scanning, and some clever heuristics, that we can't make mobile completely safe for free and open distribution.
Other app stores are similar, so probably it's some dumb government regulation.
Yeah, they need to show your address and phone number to comply with the EU's Digital Services Act.
There's more info here (from Apple's docs, but the same applies to Google):
https://developer.apple.com/help/app-store-connect/manage-co...
https://support.google.com/googleplay/android-developer/answ...
Luckily I was able to hit that number (the app is a stat tracking app for the game Destiny 2, so I was able to get beta testers via posting on a subreddit filled with Destiny 2 PvP players). But it took way longer and was way more of a burden compared to getting the same app listed on both the Apple App Store and the Microsoft Windows Store (the app is written in Kotlin/Compose Multiplatform and was relatively easy to make multiplatform).
If I didn't happen to be an Android "main" myself (creating a vested interest in wanting to make the Android version easily available) I might not have bothered with the Play Store hoops give how much of a pain in the ass it was compared to the other listings.
Huge hurdle if you just want to build an app.
Even if I were OK with jumping through the current set of hurdles, the promise of a never-stopping hurdle-jumping exercise with new requirements being thrown at me every quarter is not exactly encouraging for anyone who actually has a life outside of developing their apps.
I mean, it's Android. You can publish an app yourself or through an alternative app store. Given that you have options on the platform I don't have a big problem with Google enforcing pretty stringent requirements on their own store. In fact I prefer a pretty clear dividing line between trusted apps in the Play Store and 3rd party apps at your own risk. There was so much crap in the Play Store it was often hard to tell what's a scam and what wasn't.
It took over five weeks to get our ADP membership approved, and that was with internal backchannels. We had to launch without MDM, all the laptops on mostly default settings.
These companies are making so much money from ads and rentseeking and IAP cancer that they have zero incentive to do anything else well. They know they have a monopoly position, so just like the public utilities charging you an extra $2 convenience fee to pay your bill, you’ll shut up and take it, because they are the only game in town.
You know it, and they know it, and they know you know it.
At least on Android you can install f-droid. On iOS they are the only game in town. There’s fuck-all that’s “insanely great” about not being able to install the programs you want to use (such as Fortnite).
It’s pure rentseeking.
Suddenly there was this weird obligation to declare a company or disclose publicly info about me, so i did nothing and it expired, and they removed the app.
https://x.com/stacy_siz/status/1875849200291975339
https://blog.jakelee.co.uk/publishing-on-google-play-without...
This is also Yet Another Example of how regulation is anti-competitive and hurts small businesses/sole proprietors.
A bit silly to require for private individuals, and a bit annoying to have to go back and do, but not itself a big deal.
Having to do it at all is the hoop, and more than zero hoops is too many. I got nothing out of having my apps on Google Play except the joy of sharing in what was at the time a new and exciting medium.
See Windows Phone for a great example of how it would have played out if Google hadn't successfully courted small-time devs like me and countless others. Corporate publishers would have never colonized Google Play in the first place if an audience wasn't already there. The way they addressed me makes it very clear that solo devs are no longer needed, so I will never submit to it on principle no matter how easy it's claimed to be.
The android store had a whole lot of garbage in it, and a lot of it was the kind that is easy to find and remove.
Uh huh, Google just blatantly requiring every app developer on the planet to register with some specific random company. Absolutely no corruption to see here, none at all.
This is the kind of shit why smartphone vendors can't be trusted with their own walled garden stores, the EU has not yet stomped them into mulch hard enough yet I see.
The DUNS number is the European Commission standard for business identification; the choice of D&B isn’t random, it literally came from EU requirements.
This is literally the result of EU "stomping"
(“dishonest or illegal behaviour”, “the abuse of power or authority for personal gain or benefit”)
Source: I pay my yearly Apple tax and I have no DUNS.
Publishing on the Play Store for indie devs or hobby projects just doesn’t make any sense.
You need to jump though so many hoops and doxx yourself in the process, only to make basically no money with the apps, and even if you miraculously do, risk getting kicked out of their platform without any way to contact a competent human.
Even before all this, the general consensus amongst solo app devs was that “don’t waste your time with Android”, now add about a hundred hour of bureaucracy to even get started with your first app, the choice is obvious for many.
I was a long time Android user and switched to iOS because the apps there are just better, I honestly think that Google of running the Android ecosystem into the ground and only the big players will want to go though this mess.
As a Flutter developer, it makes me want to switch to other technologies, because if Android loses its appeal, Flutter, another Google product, offers basically nothing. On web, it scks, on iOS SwiftUI will always have an advantage, Android as discussed is in steady and fast decline, and who the hell needs Flutter desktop apps that have poor integration with the operating system…
They really think they can capitalize on desktop gaming with their ad-riddled p2w casual games.
And I think everything should be web apps anyway (ideally PWAs), but I like that Flutter lets you produce a desktop app from your mobile app with very little effort. Even without any special "integration" with the OS, it's better than packaging a web app in Electron, right?
Fuck them. I hope they collapse.
It's a particularly bad policy to launch with existing developers grandfathered out, because the policy probably looks really successful to start with due to the difference in new developer vs. old developer populations -- the entities who are right now making most of the quality apps aren't affected. What's being affected is the pipeline of new developers, but the effect of killing that pipeline won't become obvious for years.
I wasn't expecting it to be easier to launch on iOS than Android, but here we are.
[1] https://learnthewords.app
Their testing is done by the user. Testing your own software is so strange for them that they don't underestand your docs. /s
Is there some commercial service I can just pay to do this?
Yep, it was probably that.
Would like to keep my identity separate to whatever projects I have usually, especially if they're ones that don't 100% align with the your own developer brand that employers might screen for
The real issue, IMO, is that it's still too hard to distribute and install applications on my general-purpose computing devices! You can't be on Google's app store if you aren't a "real business" with a physical address and everything? Fine. Let's just distribute our apps on F-Droid, or by just releasing APKs in our GitHub pages, etc.
At least that's still possible with Android. But who knows how much longer they'll even allow that?
Google Play (and the App store) assume by default commercial intent, and I'm sympathetic to stricter verification rules when there's money changing hands.
As a customer I really want the ability to sue someone who does me wrong, call them out publicly, or at least avoid their products. In no way is it reasonable that someone should want to stay anonymous while selling me something (or profiting off of it in one way or another). I really don't see a reason to make an exception for people who have free+offline+etc apps.
You're publishing software, you need to be identifiable.
It has nothing to do with EU. see jwz.
https://rocket9labs.com/post/on-the-importance-of-f-droid/
It's kind of incredible how the EU makes changes like this and then politicians scratch their heads about the weakness of European tech. You would think that the politicians would give some thought to that and make it easier/cheaper to fulfill these requirements, but nope. Either pay up for a company (hundreds of euros) and an office (hundreds of euros) or just have your information publicly available.
And when that information becomes publicly available you will be inundated with spam.
On top of that some services will then take Google street view pictures of your home and link all of that information together in an easily searchable database.
The actual change is not by the EU, but by Google who interprets a EU directive and decides how to apply it to its platform.
This is a big difference, in that the EU requires a verified _contact_ address for _traders_ operating on a marketplace.
From there Google deciding to blanket require onerous verification on anyone publishing any app is Google's call and they should get the blame for it.
For comparison you get a different application of the same rules on the AppStore, and none of that for F-Droid.
[0] https://developer.apple.com/help/app-store-connect/manage-co...
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/FlutterDev/comments/1f4nmny/comment...
Haha, how perverse from Google to blame the EU. Google just want more data from you.
Dead Comment
Also, Google support refused to tell me what set of documents they would accept. I had to figure it out myself.
> Google also just increased the target API level requirement for apps on the Google Play Store
https://tech.yahoo.com/phones/articles/google-plays-rules-ki...
We also saw established apps like iA Writer decide to get off the treadmill.
> In order to allow our users to access their Google Drive on their phones we had to rewrite privacy statements, update documents, and pass a series of security checks, all while facing a barrage of new, ever-shifting requirements.
https://ia.net/topics/our-android-app-is-frozen-in-carbonite...
The mobile OS wars are over: every company and dev that wants to do anything is locked into having to provide an Android and iOS app no matter how difficult it is, so all the incentives are for Apple / Google to insulate themselves from risk now by raising the bar on devs.
We need to start exercising the minimal rights / capabilities to ship alternative app stores on these platforms. Easier said than done.
I guess I could publish on fdroid but why bother? The android platform clearly doesn't care about me.
source? all I can find by googling around is about the same number of apps with a bias towards playstore.
Apple side on the other hand, good luck with that. Even in Europe they made the rules so strict the third party app store are basically dead.