> it bothers OP less that they take a 15% tax than the fact that google provides terrible support for their own play store.

The terrible support is really deeper than support. You literally stopped doing business here, because the lack of a feedback channel that allows Google to improve their business (i.e. realize they need a way to quickly correct stupid automated decisions) been Google's worst enemy and best friend. By ignoring support & feedback, the friction for internal decision making is low (no pesky customer demands, the product manager is king, management gets their way), but it leads to I think a lot of Google's products failing because they do not really understand their users, and the why behind the what they use.

I'm not sure being a monopoly alone explains Google's behavior here, but it could be as simple as that: who cares about one small customer... it's not like they have a viable alternative.

Yeah, I spend my free time making it accessible to bike in my area. Some of that is providing google with free street view data and other stuff. The amount of broken stuff and lack of support, when I'm literally giving them free work, is insane. I hate to do it, but the good outweighs the bad imo (I also provide it to open alternatives like OSM, Mapillary etc).

Like, their pipeline has been broken for months. No way to contact them. There is a support page for the api, but they close all issues as "the api is working". Well, sure, you accept the street view so the api is technically working, but haven't processed any for months.. It's probably a different team, but no way they would bother talking to each other..

Being a monopoly alone does not explain Google's behavior here. Google has a long history of not providing support.

The company's philosophy on the issue seems to be rooted in the hacker ethos of not giving repetitive work to humans if a machine could do it. When a machine can't do it, Google's thinking is to improve the machine. If the systems are good enough, nobody will need support.

The systems are not good enough, and that has been true for a long enough time that a reasonable company would have realized that a good support team is necessary until some far-future time.

> I'm not sure being a monopoly alone explains Google's behavior here, but it could be as simple as that: who cares about one small customer... it's not like they have a viable alternative.

The last line contradicts the first line. Being a monopoly means they don’t have to care. If Apple and Google were required to allow competing app stores as first-class citizens then they would have to provide better service or no one would use their stores and they’d lose out on all of the rents they’re collecting from app developers.

My favorite quip in response to asking for something to get improved inside of Google is, "no one ever asked for this", knowing full well the opportunity to ask was near zero and no one ever looked.

Google is a crazy town, data driven by cherry picked post-hoc rationalizations driven by perf. The user never enters the equation.

> the friction for internal decision making is low (no pesky customer demands, the product manager is king, management gets their way)

I'd like to support that this goes "both" ways for companies who destroy their customer service. Not only do they not know what their customers want/problems they're having, but they don't know what their customers wouldn't want/problems they're not having. Like you say, it "lowers the friction," so some dumb, destructive idea that somebody has gets implemented based on title and force of personality.

But that's a monopoly. Nothing they do is destructive, other than putting any more work in than is necessary. If the store went down for weeks at a time, they might have a problem. The problem would result from this personally irritating and inconveniencing a regulator/politician, judge, or major stockholder/owner.