They aren't claiming the whole app is illegal. Two people have claimed that repo contains cracks. The entire repo that has been taken is basically just for patches for apps to get around premium controls. The ReVanced app repo is not affected nor is the org account. Just one repo that seems to have the sole purpose of providing cracks.
It is legal but it is not ethical. They gave the customer a false impression. Lets say customer A got an impression of the app from screenshots.
You keep talking to him/her and 6 months later the app shows up and it is a piece of crap (not as advertised). The customer doesn't buy it. Yet, you have stolen 6 months of valuable time from the customer which he could have used on productive things (or searching for another app that meets his needs).
Thanks for the detail. It is interesting that violating an NDA about physical hardware results in getting your software pulled from a sibling app store. Clearly an android app would not be similarly affected. Though it does seems like they are getting a light punishment considering violating NDAs can have severe legal and financial consequences.
I think the core thing here is that in a lawsuit a user can now point to an explicit action that they took, and the apps decision not ignore that decision, despite having agreed to obey that decision as part of the use of that app.
The fact that stuff like this isn't caught in the automated portion of review is fairly appalling though.
The legal claims seem spurious at best. The letter provides a list of infringements and claims that each of them is violated. I’ve not used the (claimed) offending apps, but from an overview understanding of how they work it seems like precisely no items from the list would be true.
Did these people not read the agreement before they published their app? I remember seeing that clause when I read it.
(Not that I like the restriction, but professing shock when it's enforced is almost as stupid as building your revenue stream on something that you've been told will be taken away if they catch you.)
I did not say the app was not nefarious, I said that their enterprise account was not revoked because the app was nefarious.
The enterprise certificates were revoked primarily because they violated the #1 rule of the enterprise account - do not distribute outside of your company.
It would be good to actually get a meaningful reply to respond to, instead of the downvotes.
The OP plainly claims they are using the name of a competitor's app in an above thread. And that simply doesn't jive with the agreed upon terms and conditions. If that is in fact what is occurring, the OP plainly has no legal recourse whatsoever.
How about proving me wrong instead of down-voting?
I came here to articulate the counter position to this because people are solidly on the side of the app developer. If you run a business and your employees access your information to do their work through an un-contracted intermediary, it's a real security risk. The information can be filtered or maliciously corrupted, and the company can be easily blackmailed.
I don't think the law offers any direct remedy. The best thing for AA to do is force the app developer into court and make them pay legal fees if they don't want to contract with them, compete by making something better for their employees, or contract with someone else to provide the service. It's costly on all sides but table stakes for running a business in a competitive market these days.
1. Some background process, probably part of Google Play services, installed the app. Users were not notified that the app was installed. Eventually the app, once already installed and running, would put up a notification asking if the user wanted to participate.
The app was intentionally subtle, in that it had no application icon, which would presumably make it very difficult for user to disable contract tracing if they had enabled it. If you managed to uninstall the app, it would get reinstalled silently again.
2. The lawsuit alleges that there was no legal requirement or court order. Even if there had been, the lawsuit argues that the conduct would still have violated federal and state law and constitutions.
It is really pretty shitty, and, IANAL, probably is/was illegal, with the caveats that (a) I'm not sure whether Massachusetts or Google or both should be considered responsible; and (b) they might try to argue that a user's acceptance of Google's ToS and privacy policy constitutes permission.
* ... doesn't mean that they're conceding that they're under any obligation to do so.*
Maybe not, but it seems like the kind of crack in the door a lawyer might jump at next time someone complains that an app offends them, or is copying their idea, or whatever.
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