Happy New Year everyone! Just three hours into 2025, I received an email from Google Play Support with the following subject line:
Action Required: Your app is not compliant with Google Play Policies (Luck be a Landlord)
Nothing has changed with Luck be a Landlord in the past few months,
Looks like the LLM enshitification is coming to the Google Play store now
I don’t really know what you think LLMs has to do with this case, but just for reference - Google have been notorious in automated moderation on the Play Store since long before LLMs were a thing in general use, and they are also really bad when it comes to managing these processes once an automated moderation action has been made. Lots of devs get screwed this way.
Also the automated moderation on YT is also terrible.
Basically, Google never invested enough in their moderation systems. All we get is automated checks and appeals until one overworked uninterested Google employee will just refuse the final appeal.
And if that dev/creator has a community large enough they can appeal on X or some bullshit so that it’s reverted.
It’s a feature, that way they can just say, whoops, all your money belongs to corpos, Get fucked small fry.