How we became the world's foremost expert on Google Play Store policy violations

By Ryan Oldenburg on

Starting in 2020, we at Pushbullet began receiving more and more Play Store policy violation notifications from Google. At first the violation notifications seemed plausible, if a bit abrasive. At this point though, I'm pretty sure we're being picked on by an AI. We'll see what you think after you hear our story.

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Closing The Portal App

By Ryan Oldenburg on

Portal was a passion project that we built to experiment with other ways of moving data between phones and computers. We built the slickest app we could and have continued to support the app, site and server for over 6 years now.

Unfortunately, over 6 years later, I’m now writing this post because many things have changed and the time has come to close Portal.

Important: The Pushbullet app is not affected by this announcement.

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An Update For Pushbullet Facebook Login Users

By Ryan Oldenburg on

Unexpectedly losing access to your Pushbullet account due Facebook Login being blocked is very frustrating for many Pushbullet users (and for us at Pushbullet). To help reduce the stress and inconvenience, we've been working to enable a smooth transition so affected users can continue to access their Pushbullet account.

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Notice to Pushbullet Facebook Login Users

By Ryan Oldenburg on

Facebook has blocked pushbullet.com, preventing Facebook Login from working for Pushbullet users. We're working to remove Facebook Login but this will take a little bit.

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Updating Our Chrome Extension After Our Google Scare

By Ryan Oldenburg on

Three weeks ago Google was close to removing our Chrome extension from the Chrome Web Store. Fortunately things ended up working out. Not fun though!

To meet Google’s requirements and stay in the Chrome Web Store we needed to remove a few permissions from our extension. It has become clear over the past few weeks, however, that those permissions enabled our extension to work better than it does now without them.

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Our Chrome Extension Is Safe

By Ryan Oldenburg on

This is a follow-up to Wednesday’s Let’s Guess What Google Requires In 14 Days Or They Kill Our Extension.

Let’s get the good news out there right away. Our extension has been approved!

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