Independent developers have struggled with Google's Play Store developer support for years. The company claims to be doing more to make things better recently, with more actual human beings and fewer automated tools on the other end of those appeals, but it could still be doing much more in its role as the toll-taking gatekeeper for Android apps. Unfortunately for at least one developer, the company's reliance on automated tools has struck again: It looks like Google incorrectly flagged an open-source app because of its own reliance on machine translation as part of its new war against the word "free," and F-Droid's semi-official Nearby app also ran into trouble.
The first app in question is Catima, and it's a simple loyalty card and ticket manager. It's free, open-source, and popular within its niche — 10,000+ downloads and an impressive 5.0 rating with 139 reviews. It's still available on the Play Store and hasn't been taken down, but the developer behind it has documented a months-long saga involving the app's title and the use (or, more accurately, the non-use) of the word "free."
Previously, the app went by the name "Catima — The Libre Card Wallet" on the Play Store, with a similarly derived (and, we should note, seemingly human-translated) name in other markets. Open-source fans and technologists should understand the term "libre" in this context as the free-as-in-freedom intention behind open source software, with freely available code and the ability to modify it, as in the context of LibreOffice. The developer behind the project, Sylvia van Os, took pains to translate the title for each supported locale, with volunteers finding the correct analogs for "libre" in their respective languages. But Google apparently didn't return the favor.
Last October, she was informed out of the blue that her app had been "rejected" from the Play Store due to its Dutch and Norwegian titles, neither of which she tells us had changed for many months. A review of the recent policy changes led her to believe that Google might be misunderstanding the Dutch word "vrij" and its Norwegian brother, both of which mean "libre" for that free-as-in-freedom sense and not "free" as in no cost. See, Google decided it didn't like the word "free" in titles since they're usually attached to spammy, low-quality, bad apps, and Google's trying to clean up how its Play Store looks. And to be fair, you can see for yourself if an app is free. But why was Google flagging Catima when it doesn't use the word in that sense?
Sylvia suspected that Google's error came down to how it was performing its translations, which a later title review would seem to confirm — Google later objected to the word "free" when it wasn't even in the English title, showing that it was "translating" even that version, and doing it incorrectly. Playing around ourselves with some titles Google took objection to, it appears the company is relying on automated translations for its title reviews in other markets, with examples like the Dutch "vrije" and the German "freie" both clearly meaning free as in freedom, openness, and liberty, rather than free as in price. But this distinction is lost on automated translation tools like Google Translate, which go for a hard-and-fast word analog, ignoring the imprecision and multitudes of meanings for the word "free" in the English language.
This initial title review caused a cascade of issues for Sylvia after she rephrased the two not-actually-erroneous titles, with a flood of other seemingly machine-translated errors hitting her inbox over the next few days, as Google incorrectly took issue to words like "libre" and "libero," even later claiming that the English title used the word "free" when it never did. Clearly, Google was translating even the English app name's use of the word "libre" incorrectly.
A "bug" with the Play Store Console further compounds the issue, as the developer can't save titles for all language localizations unless all of them are below the new 30-character limit, and she has to wait on her Bulgarian Weblate translator volunteers to come up with a "fixed" version for Bulgarian that addresses Google's incorrect translation. (Humorously, the developer may have more human input on her title translations than Google employed.) Google even falsely rejected her app just a few days ago with a baseless claim that her app requires login credentials to review, even though it doesn't.
The issues are mostly resolved now, and Catima is available on the Play Store under a new title, but this is an all-too-familiar saga for independent developers dealing with Google's Play platform support. We reached out to Google for more information, as well as to explicitly confirm whether it's using machine translations of titles for rule enforcement rather than human translation, but the company didn't offer a response.
Catima isn't the only app that's caught Google's anger over the word "free," though. F-Droid, the popular and open source app repository (seen by some as a defacto Play Store alternative), says it's unable to promote its officially unofficial F-Droid Nearby App on Google Play, due to its use of the word "free." In this case, it's actually the word itself, but in the same libre-like context of open-source software, and it's not clear if Google understands the distinction.
The developers behind the app (who I'm told are tied to F-Droid even if the developer account doesn't have that branding, it's a long story) say they never received an email from Google about this issue, and just happened to notice it "by chance" in the Google Play Console — it wasn't even in the console's inbox. (Apparently, Google doesn't even notify developers for reduced search ranking for these sorts of offenses now.)
After covering Play Store support issues like these for years now, I can't help but be critical of Google's support and review process. Whatever lip-service it pays in blog posts and announcements, for all its excellent developer documentation and events like I/O, the folks actually running the Play Store simply refuse to make the investments necessary to provide a high-quality support experience that developers can rely on. Unless your name is big enough to merit special treatment, you're constantly at the whims of automated systems that fail to take into account the true granularity and gradients of any subjective review process. While we've raised enough of a stink in the past for issues like these to be resolved on a case-by-case basis, I sincerely doubt this is the last time I'll be writing one of these stories.
All Google needs to fix this is to spend a little of money on more warm bodies to justify the actual billions of dollars its making with its Play Store cut. For context, Apple has over 500 experts involved in its App Store reviews — though even people make mistakes.
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