Support Request

Why the decision has been made to stop using Google Play Market for the FORScan Lite for Android distribution?

The Android OS was claimed to be a "free" OS, and first versions of Google Play Market, released in 2012 as a replacement to the Android Market, had quite liberal, "soft" policy that distinguished Google Play Market from Apple App Store. In 2015, when we released first version of FORScan Lite for Android, the policy remained soft enough. Unfortunately, in the past few years the situation changed dramatically. Let's see what these changes were:

1. Google started to use the Play Market as a political and unfair competition tool: in 2019 Google banned Huawei, the top manufacturer of mobile devices. In 2022 Google banned all users from Russia and Belarus. Even users who paid for our application cannot download it anymore.

2. The Google Play Market software is buggy. Our users periodically experience different problems with Google Play Market: unable to purchase product, unable to download product. Sometimes Google "loses" a user's license and it doesn't seem to be possible to recover it.

3. It is not possible to resolve any of these problems because Google Support doesn't really work: Google proactively implemented Artifact Intelligence (AI) software to replace live people in the support, as a result now it is not possible to find someone who would be able to help you. This statement is correct not only for end users, but also for developers.

4. Before 2021, when a famous game developer Epic Games raised a riot against Google's and Apple's despotism, Google did take 30% fee of every sale for their service. After the Epic Games revolt, Google reduced the fee to 15% for "small" developers. However, even this amount of fee doesn't match to the quality of the service.

5. Google started to proactively change APIs and force developers to implement these changes in new versions of their applications. In latest version of their API developers and users are quite limited in an access to their documents and files. These modifications not only require a lot of work to adopt on the application side, but also limit users and developers in using the device and platform abilities. We refused to update target API up to the latest levels, it means that Google will limit the application distribution starting from January 01, 2023, no matter the fact it doesn't affect application's functionality at all.

6. Finally, Google can block the developer's account and/or application any time, without any claims or notifications in advance and without any explanations afterwards. In case of FORScan, it happened thrice: in September of 2020, in November 2022 and last time in the December 2022.

So in summary, Google has built a perfect digital jail for their users and developers.