Hey, this is the Daily Overpass! My name is Eric and I make apps! Now today, let's
talk about the recent changes to the Google Play Developer Policy.
Okay, so today's video is gonna be a very quick one. I want to tal k a little bit
about the changes to the Google Play Developer policy. Yesterday i've got
loads of messages and emails from people asking if i got the same email from
Google Play about the changes in the policy and i have. Let's just talk a
little bit about this. So, have a look at my screen here, if you're a Google Play
Android developer, you've probably got the very same email that I have where
they talk about just a few things - changes to the terms and conditions of
Google Play and some and it all seemed to make really good sense to me. You know,
they clarified their Child Endangerment policies, dangerous products, violence
cryptocurrency, all that kind of stuff. I'm not - I don't have any cryptocurrency
app, so I skip that over, but I'm sure it applies to a lot of you, guy, so I'm not -
I haven't really looked into it. What I was most interested in was a
repetitive content on our platform. Now, I've talked a little bit in the past
about rescanning some of my apps to reach new audiences. So, this might affect
me on some of those applications. Just a few weeks ago, I talked about my
second-biggest app, it's called Ear Assist which it was an exact copy of Ear Spy or
Ear Agent. Which I might end up removing or make it - I might remove it
before it gets removed by them. It's one of these things. So, the language
on this stuff is really different. Let's just have a look at this
repetitive content. You know, copying content from apps without adding
original content or value, creating multiple apps with highly similar
content and user experience. Now, late last year and early this year, I started
getting a lots of problems with Apple about the Apple 4.3 guidelines, so it was
really difficult because they started rejecting my apps for spam reasons.
Saying, you're releasing too many similar apps to the App Store and my whole thing
was, these apps are all different. They have different audiences, they have
different content, so I have a language learning game where we took it and we
started off to learn Mandarin. You choose the words, you do the translation,
kind of like flashcards things. I thought, "Hey, why don't we release this to
other languages too? Let's do a Spanish version and a Korean version...: And the
user experience is the same. The graphics are different, the music is
different, the tech content is definitely different, everything is different about
it. Its marketed differently and everything like that. But Apple
started saying, "No, they're two similar and should all be one app.
My problem with that was that they still only give me one title, 100 keyword limit,
or hundred characters in the keyword ,and it was impossible. So, I could not compete
as these apps. Could not compete with somebody else who only had one language.
So, that was the whole thing. I said to them the content is so different in
these, you shouldn't expect somebody to download a giant app
when they're only interested in one language. That was the whole thing and if
you had asked me before that if I was in violation of 4.3, I would have said no. I
think 4.3 is a great rule, except they were just really the way it was enforced
is terriblle. You talked to anybody with a significant number of apps and
they're all suffering from this 4.3 thing even though the app is completely -
they're making all the changes and everything here. So, when I
read this, I mean everyone was asking am i concerned about this - I am not.
Because I do think that Google Play is gonna be more - I think they're gonna be
bette in enforcing this kind of things in Apple. As Apple has all these
reviewers, have to go through and manually review every single app,
each and every day, and I think this is gonna be something that comes up if
somebody complains about it than it is. So, everything where I'm talking about
having where I have a direct reskin like Ear Assist and Ear Spy, that's gonna be a
problem. But the language learning games not so much at least. I hope not.
Maybe I might need - I'm also curious about the free and the paid version. I
always released a pro version so they could buy it outright and the free
version with in-app purchases. I wonder if that's gonna be a problem in the in
the future or anything. But if it is, I'm hoping we get warnings and not just
suspensions. I'm not too concerned about that yet. I mean, let's look at some
of these other ones here. They also don't allow apps whose primary purpose
is to serve ads. I had a look at this one too where it's just like if you
have too many interstitials after every single user and interaction, then it
could get suspended. I've talked about this before. I've had people that
AdMob tell me that I'm not serving enough ads. I go through and start
putting more ads in and if they're changing a policy on that, I
might need to move back on that, so all of this stuff makes us from a user point
of view. It all makes perfect sense. I'm not too concerned about it yet. And then
there's also the thing about misrepresentation. Anybody who's been on the Google
Playstore knows how much junk there is out there. I mean, when I show you, guys, my
copycats when I do a search online, I show you all
the very low-quality copies of my applications and it's just shamelessly
they're going through copying everything that I do and putting it in there just
to serve ads. And it's - there's a lot of junk that goes in. One of the
reasons why we have to do re-skinning is to reach new markets and that's
because there's thousands of apps going in every day, and it's really
hard to be found. So, reskin is another opportunity for somebody to find your
application or to come into your sphere of influence, your world. But if they
start enforcing these kind of rules, then there'll be less apps going into the
Play Store and into the App Store. So then, it'll be easier to be found. The
discoverability will go up so you won't need to do the reskin. I'm hoping - I'm
actually very optimistic about this going forward. It might be
famous last words but I'm not, I don't think they're gonna be as bad as
as Apple is on 4.3 where I think they're gonna do a much better job on
this. But that's just just my view so far. Let me know what you, guys, think. Are
you looking forward to it? I mean, were you devastated to see that? Because at
first I thought, "Oh, this could be a problem and it can on some of my
applications. but I don't mind getting rid of them if the App Store gets or the
Play Store gets smaller." I mean, to be honest with you. If the
competition - if we have less competition, we don't need to put out so many
products. So anyway, let me know what you, guys, think. And don't forget tomorrow
night is the live stream, 5 or 5 p.m. here in the - 5 p.m. UK time. If you have
any questions or have a chat with the rest of the group, show up! And that's
it for today! I'll talk to you, guys, tomorrow!