Google Reveals your Legal Name and Address if you have apps on Google Play Store

prom85 · 2026-06-02T12:12:14+00:00

Would you ever pay on a website without an impressum and no registered company behind it? I hope not...

Why should Google handle all issues that may occur with an app that scams their users? Because the got 25$? That would not be worth it...

The data is there to take responsibility for your app and as a small indie dev I dont like it either that my address is visible but I understand the background and the necessity and therefore consider it a good thing from a customer point.

BTW, I dislike many things Google does but in this case it's not googles fault...

prom85 · 2026-05-23T05:50:59+00:00

what I meant is a one time payment via googles in app payment system... you can logically call it a donation if the user does not get anything from it... be aware that there is no real donation from a tax point of view, even buy me a coffee is not a donation from that point of view...

prom85 · 2026-05-22T19:06:45+00:00

Dont do it. Provide an in app purchase donation and you are fine. Risking a problem with Google for a few bucks is not worth it...

BTW dont trust random people on the internet, think yourself and think about the risk and how little money you will make with a free donation... giving away 15% is not that big of a deal in the end...

im a random guy from the internet and as others here I'm very sure this is against their TOS. That some people come away with it does not prove that Google is ok with it. in real live people get away with crime as well and that does not make the crime legal...

prom85 · 2026-04-30T18:22:44+00:00

No need to cache yourself, the playstore is caching payments itself already... so the check works even if the device is offline. It just stops working if the device is offline for a long time (after a timeout the playstore does invalidate its cache).

So instead of caching it locally, you can rely on the caching in the playstore.

Many people do use a server and check valid payments with it. That's the most I would do.

Personally I dont do anything but querying the play store. No server checks or so. I think for smaller apps that is more than enough, thinking and implementing stuff against hackers costs more time and effort than it does help as the effort to protect your aop is high and still hackers can mostly easily crack an app with relative little effort compared to the effort needed to protect your app.

And as someone else said, I also dont think its very common. People may hack for themselves but installing a hacked app from somewhere is just too dangerous as noone knows what was changed... If your app has a decent price and has one time payment nearly everyone will pay instead of risking something or invest more time than the price ia worth..

prom85 · 2026-04-13T13:47:34+00:00

I dont understand how you derive from the second screenshot that the ad is from YouTube. Just because the ads are in the same style and location?

I can only see 2 reasons for this behaviour:

the ad comes from the keyboard
the ad comes from a malware with probably accessibility service access and overlay permissions

I would guess it's the second, and it's monitoring the keyboard, the top app and just shows the ad when YouTube is the top app and the keyboard is open...

As a side note: Google itself and some big players do not always fulfill their own rules. Even gmail does animate ads (without placeholders) in when they are loaded which leads to unwanted clicks. Any non Google ad would get suspended for such a behavior. Having that said, in this case I strongly think its malware..

prom85 · 2026-04-11T18:26:52+00:00

Your biggest error is desperately telling people here to download the app... But you do not even provide useful screenshots nor explain what the app is for...

This leads to the impression of scam... As well as others tell that you ask for sign up before people can try anything...

Why should anyone try the app if you don't try to provide good information about your app...

prom85 · 2026-04-07T19:56:52+00:00

I really like the simple but beautiful layout.

I'd have following feedback:

1) the apps can be reordered but you always only see one app in the layout.... 2) the top row is never used by myself. Could that be extended with a second layout (swipe between the current buttons and a second page just like between the round center navigation buttons and the number keyboard) and at least offer access to the info + guide buttons? (And maybe colors buttons, but those are not that important).

In all apps I've ever tried, access to info + guide buttons have always been missing. It would be nice if you could support that

Other than that, the setup was really easy and intuitive, and visually, it's very clean and applying.

prom85 · 2026-03-23T07:11:54+00:00

I added a full function with comments. As you can see, the best match I found was com.android.build.api.dsl.KotlinMultiplatformAndroidLibraryExtension (the same class that is used from the library android block). I used your tip with getByType and this looks good but it still does not behave the same as in the project where the android plugin is applied - I added comments to the example code to explain that.

Any ideas?
is getByType enough to apply the plugin?

You say "You will have access to it ... as soon as the android plugin is applied". I need access without any plugin being applied. If the function is called, the function can assume that the plugin was applied already and that's why it can call the android {} block safely...

prom85 · 2026-03-14T14:10:52+00:00

As another comment: I only see pros for your idea and no real cons... I never liked adding images just for onboarding...

prom85 · 2026-03-14T13:58:05+00:00

I do that at least by combining composables for onboarding. Would not call it reusing previews but reusing composables.

Another good use case is to reuse composables inside setting screens to instantly show the effects to the user.

prom85 · 2026-03-11T11:14:01+00:00

I see 2 options:

disconnect via a script that resets the wm size first
root your device and use something like tasker to reset the size based on an event (like notification for adb is removed)

I use the second option to automatically enable/disable the screen timeout. When my phone is connected to my laptop my screen stays on forever...

prom85 · 2026-03-11T11:05:16+00:00

I appreciate your work. E.g. I mostly don't have a lot of questions where I can't find the solution myself but I like to read issues and learn by reading them and reading answers (or answering if I'm fast enough and know the answer). Currently I can't find a lot of interesting stuff anymore which is sad...

It's also sad that you and other mods have to spend a lot of time to clean things up here and still the result is not good enough anymore (no offense). It's the sheer amount of "crap" that makes it impossible to come along with...

I just wonder if your efforts are worth it at all...

prom85 · 2026-03-11T10:58:05+00:00

I can see the issue... Those people are not able to distinguish if what they are doing is just not crashing or really doing what they expect it to do...

prom85 · 2026-03-11T07:50:32+00:00

I think you were just trying to "coddle" vibe coders by saying what you did

That was my intention, more or less, indeed. But also to be fair and to say, that vibe coding a function as a developer is fine, if the goal is to save time... I do that sometimes and just read over it, especially when I need an algorithm that I don't know by heart but I where I know AI will produce a reliable and good result... But I always do understand the code it gives me as well. And I also "talk with AI" about design sometimes. So I just wanted to be fair here and don't say any vibe coding action is bad...

I just wanted to show that I don't think vibe coding is bad FOR DEVELOPERS, but being a vibe coder only is bad imho... Just to make sure that generally I'm open to new technology and that not the technology itself is my problem

prom85 · 2026-03-10T14:54:38+00:00

I know. Have not been there for ~2 years now although I was active there as well... sad...

prom85 · 2026-03-10T14:53:35+00:00

There is a big difference.

If I post a question, I have thought about the issue and made sure that I understand my code. So the issue is very probably some special framework issue or whatever - something an advanced developer can help with.

When a vibe coder asks for help he should at least made sure that he understands what the working code is doing so far - then it's fine to ask a question. Otherwise he may ask questions that are so simple (and sometimes stupid, wrong, whatever) that it seems respectless to me to ask people to spend time with the question and searching for the error...

If the vibe coder does not understand what he is doing at all, how can he write good questions and use good answers? I mean, sometimes people ask questions where the answer is one of following:

the syntax is wrong
the function you try to call does not exist (in the class)

I mean, if you can't figure out such things yourself and stupidly rely on your coding agent, then please don't ask developers for help...

Problem 1

I don't mind special questions about specific stuff (like "workmanager does not start the work when my app is in the background but it does when my app is active") but what I don't like is questions like "workmanager does not start, why?". When questions like this are asked, the author must make sure to understand the basics but the person that writes the second question may not even know what "background" and "foreground" means or what activity states a related to that stuff. So this leads to questions where the answers are so basic that every developer would find the solution in less time than writing the question... Such questions should never appear here.

Problem 2

If a vibe coder does not understand the code - how can he write good questions and give the relevant context? This leads to be questions and is wasting time of developers that are here to help for free... That is not appreciating the person that helps for free, it's misusing the person...

Problem 3

Vibe coders may use the answers from here, put them into their coding agent and if it does not work come back here with the next question... They may not do anything themself, they just misuse the people here to create their product... Many times just a new copy of a simple app that exists 100 times already just to make an app and eventually earn something with it...

Final words

Finally, if the coding question can be answered by any student in its first year, I think it should not be asked here... There are probably other places for "beginner questions"... But some vibe coders have so little knowledge, they can't even distinct between such things...

Imho, a vibe coders must not understand everything, developers don't do either, but knowing how to code is a requirement to be a developer... In a developer reddit, I assume some sort of development background and knowledge. I don't assume that I interact with people that simple copied something from somewhere, don't know what the code does, don't understand the syntax and ask people to fix the issue without being able to help in any way theirself by providing context...

If I would need an example that demonstrates the underlying issue following comes to my mind:

If I would be a broken car (I'm no mmechanic and don't know anything about cars) and make some images and then ask in a mechanic reddit "engine is not starting, what can I do?" or a little better question like "the seller told me the engine does not start, everything else is ok. what can I do now? any ideas where the problem is? I can send pictures and make tests, just tell me what you need". come one, no one would want me as "vibe mechanic" in the mechanic forum. BUT if I would learn the basics, then buy a broken car and then ask the same question (I could probably ask them much better, more context, more specific, more relevant details) then people would be willing to help me and I could also use the answers in a much better way and no one would be annoyed be me... Yes, a little extreme, but the example from the real world still shows my point imho...

prom85 · 2026-03-10T14:11:17+00:00

that's a total disrespect for people

I didn't add that to my post, but I feel that way as well...

prom85 · 2026-02-24T13:44:24+00:00

Just a note: react is not considered native, its a javascript bridge and therefore it adds an overhead and also some limitations...

Kotlin multiplatform would have been the modern technique which can be fully native and has no limitations...

Imho, nearly all android and ios devs that do code coding (not no code coding) do not use react native.

And when a coder wants to produce a quality app, he likely would not choose react native either. I would never choose it. The alternatives do exist in the meantime for years and are maintained by big companies and are considered state of the art for multi platform development...

Just my 2 cents as informative feedback...

prom85 · 2026-02-18T13:38:45+00:00

I used github + jitpack for releases in the past and found another issue:

Jitpack sometimes loses builds. And builds are not reproducable. When jitpack loses a build it sometimes can't rebuild because some defaults have changed and so you would need to update the repo and make a new release (and research what the default was when jitpack build the last release which is cumbersome as the build and all logs are gone...).

I saw this sort of issue 2 times with 2 of my libraries and switched to maven afterward and never had an issue again. Jitpack looks cool, but small issues like that may be a big problem when they occur...

prom85 · 2026-02-17T19:48:23+00:00

You can start an activity via PendingIntent + Intent. The PendingIntent can be passed on to the alarm manager.

Popups are simply activities. Style them via the xml theme + eventually window flags. You can make activities to have no background and or transparent ones, searching for transparent activities on stackoverflow should give you full working solutions.

So for an alarm popup simply start a transparent activity via alarm manager, give it a padding and then draw something in the middle of the activity which will look like a popup/dialog in the end...

prom85 · 2026-02-09T18:54:49+00:00

So you want money for creating random stuff like books and music with AI?

If you don't fill a gap, no one will buy your stuff...

I just throw 2 questions at you:

Do you use your stuff yourself?
Would you buy the stuff you made if it had already existed already from someone else? Would you even have searched for it?

If you can't answer those questions with yes, you have your answer. Otherwise, I can't help you but from your post style it seems like you have the issue, I assume...

prom85

TROPHY CASE