Transmit Drops Support for Google Drive Because of Google’s Overbearing Annual Code Inspections

Panic:

Well, Google has a new set of policies that require apps that connect to Google Drive to go through expensive, time-consuming annual reviews, and this has made it extremely difficult for us to reasonably maintain Google Drive access. You may have seen iA Writer’s announcement that they are stopping development of their Android version for similar reasons. Our experience was different, but our circumstances are similar. [...]

Between the weeks of waiting, submitting the required documentation and the process of scanning the code, it took a significant amount of time from our engineers. For example, Google provided a Docker image for running the scanner, but it didn’t work. We had to spend more than a week debugging and fixing it. And because the scanner found no problems, it didn’t result in any improvements to Transmit. No one benefitted from this process. Not Google, not Panic, and not our users. [...]

But then… a couple of months later, Google completely removed the option for us to scan our own code. Instead, to keep access to Google Drive, we would now have to pay one of Google’s business partners to conduct the review. They promised a discounted minimum price, but no maximum price. We realized that either we’d most likely be paying someone else a chunk of cash to run the same scanner we were running, or our bill would end up much higher.

Never been gladder that I don’t use Google Drive for anything.

★ Tuesday, 8 October 2024