Tusky, the third-party Android client for Mastodon/ActivityPub that I use/contribute to, is currently being blocked from updating by Google. Link to middle of a thread by the lead dev about the problem:

https://chaos.social/@ConnyDuck/109004246710026919

They claim there's no "terms of use", ignoring/not understanding Tusky operates no sites and so cannot have terms of use. It is like banning a web browser for not enforcing terms of use.

No one on the project has any idea how to get Google's attention about this :(

(Note: I say "currently being blocked from updating". Specifically, Tusky has two apps on the store, one is the normal release and the other is Nightly. Google has, inconsistently, locked only the Nightly app. We're afraid they'll hit the main app tho next time it updates, and anyhow under its current process Tusky cannot post updates to the main channel or even third party stores without using the established Nightly channel first to gather bug reports.)

I continue to suspect that if the web browser were invented today it would be banned

@mcc "whoa, you mean *anybody* can make one of these 'web pages', and you can just *visit* them? that sounds dangerous, you should add a manual approval step for user safety"