Welcome to Ask Jerry, where we talk about any and all the questions you might have about the smart things in your life. I’m Jerry, and I have spent the better part of my life working with tech. I have a background in engineering and R&D and have been covering Android and Google for the past 15 years.
Ask Jerry
Ask Jerry is a column where we answer your burning Android/tech questions with the help of long-time Android Central editor Jerry Hildenbrand.
I’m also really good at researching data about everything — that’s a big part of our job here at Android Central — and I love to help people (another big part of our job!). If you have questions about your tech, I’d love to talk about them.
Email me at askjerryac@gmail.com, and I’ll try to get things sorted out. You can remain anonymous if you like, and we promise we’re not sharing anything we don’t cover here.
I look forward to hearing from you!
What to do when developers break the rules?
Several people have written in complaining about Music Player – MP3 Player from Red Sky Labs (formerly known as Muzio Player). None of them had anything good to say.
It seems that the app went with a freemium subscription model, showing ads unless a user pays a monthly fee. That’s fine, but when Red Sky Labs did this, they cancelled the premium plan of users who had previously paid for an ad-free experience.
Play Store reviews confirm this, so I’m naming the company to warn you to consider its past behavior before you give it any money.
I hate to hear about this sort of thing, but it’s more common than you think. I’ve been bitten by the very same bug with another app that went free with a subscription after I gave them $5.99 for extra content. You can guess what happened when the app updated. There is a very good chance something similar has happened to you, too.
Why? Are mobile app stores filled with dishonest people trying to scam a couple of bucks at a time until they’ve built a fortune? Not really, though those people certainly exist; it’s just too easy to get away with it, so app publishers may simply not care.
Here’s the rub — it’s not legal to do what Red Sky Labs did with its music player. It’s also against Google’s Play Store rules. And neither of those things matters because of the small amount of money involved. If you pay for a lifetime service, it is expected to last the lifetime of one of the parties. If you change your business model, you need to make accommodations for people who have already paid.
Good luck getting anyone to care about it and help you get your five bucks back because it’s only five bucks. You’re not taking some developer to small claims court over five bucks. No lawyer will take that as a case because it’s only five bucks. It’s your five bucks, and if you’re like me, you feel willing to fight through Mordor to get it back, but nobody else cares about your five bucks.
Google and Apple should care, and on some level, they do. But they each have bigger things to worry about. With millions of apps moving through mobile stores the majority of time and effort is spent making sure they are safe and they handle the intricate permissions correctly. And that’s surely hard to manage, so I’m not surprised that reports about this to Google go mostly unanswered. Do not let this stop you from reporting the offending app.
Also, if you’re so inclined, don’t forget about posting to Reddit and other social media so other people can read and pile on. Attention is how you rectify this kind of problem. If enough people complain, Google or Apple must act, and the app publisher may even find a way to fix the problem so they aren’t forced to give a bunch of people five bucks in app store credit.
Finally, send detailed reports about what’s happening to every tech website you regularly visit. When I see several people saying the same thing, I look into it. If it’s something other people need to hear — like an app publisher bringing back the ads and keeping the five bucks — I’ll write about it.
This app has over 100 million downloads at Google Play. People need to know more about the company before it gets another 100 million.
