Google can't exactly fix the DMCA like the dev may want, but its fake appeal process is infuriating. You can appeal the takedown to Google but no human will ever validate that the DMCA notice even makes sense.
Filing a counter notice is your only option but it also hands over your personal details to whoever filed the DMCA takedown request for a potential lawsuit. This turns the DMCA mechanism into an excellent doxxing system for anyone publishing anything onto Google's platforms.
Perhaps even worse is the insinuation, or sometimes even lie, that appeals are verified by humans. They're either not passing by any humans or they're not being verified. If an actual human had read the DMCA takedown in the first place, this whole saga never would've happened.
Google's entire process is opaque and open to dodgy behaviour. I had an app which was growing really well with about 5-10k downloads a day growing at about 20% a week and an average rating of 4.8 stars over a few thousand reviews. Suddenly this is tanking overnight and when we look into the data, we have twice as many new uninstalls per day as we do downloads a day. Next to no uninstalls from existing users, no change in the ratings, and no technical outages. It looked like a bot farm was just installing and immediately (as in less than a minute later) uninstalling the app over and over again. Google decided that this meant the app was bad, and we went from position 2-5 for our main keywords to not even in the top 50 overnight. I tried appealing, and tried getting information, but Google did absolutely nothing about it.
Its more that Google's implementation of the DMCA is broken. They have automated take downs and have a completely broken appeal process. They certainly aren't the only company failing to deal with the DMCA correctly. There are clauses in the DMCA specifically targetted at false claims, if those were enforced we might start to see a change in the system but as is the DMCA is misused too often.
I think there might be more to this story. This app is what people generally use to sideload apps on a locked Google TV device such as the Google Chromecast. One such commonly sideloaded app is SmartTube, an unofficial YouTube client with no ads and SponsorBlock included:
https://smartyoutubetv.github.io/
I'm not surprised Google is eager to take it down under any pretext, and not so eager to restore it.
Companies that send DMCA takedowns should be financialy liable for fake/wrong ones.
That way, they will take more time to think it trough.
It's not broken, it's working as intended, giving more power to large corporations.
To be fair on the second complaint, if the first thing your app does is display a web view of a page that requests an email address (even if just for a mailing list), I might also say a claim that it doesn't collect that information is incorrect. It's too easy to just say the site is unaffiliated because you used a different entity name for the site and circumvent their controls, and it may be unclear to people whether an email address is required for full functionality.
The alternative to marking the form to indicate they collect personal information would be to load a different web page by default that doesn't try to collect email addresses.
I underatand how when you're mad at a company it can be hard to give the benefit of a doubt about other actions and use that think about them rationally, but I think that's all that was required in the second case.
Governments should demand open app stores for Android and iOS.
Well they recently unbanned my youtube/youtube music account too after writing to them a second time, its been about a few months without those accounts. They said it doesnt violate their policies after saying it did the last time. Are there any grounds to sue them for this?
This type of behaviour should encourage all users to have a third party app store ecosystem similar to how we have with browsers.
Google and Co can't be trusted, just because it's their operating system is a awful argument.
Well they recently unbanned my youtube/youtube music account too after writing to them a second time. They said it doesnt violate their policies after saying it did the last time. Are there any grounds to sue them for this?
I think the Developer of the app is frustrated.
Google is also broken
yes I agree with you. You are right that the developers still made broken DMCA but we work with protectional team they do not made such mistake.
I think the Developer of the app is frustrated...
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I had an app that was making about $10,000 USD a month. It was taken down by Google because apparently I copied some other developer's iOS app.
I asked them to tell me the name of the iOS app they believed I copied. They named the iOS version of my Android app.
They basically accused me of copying myself because the Android version was under my company's name while the iOS version was under my name.
Google unbanned the app, but sales dropped to $1000 a month.
After that ordeal I decided to build web apps only.