Thread by @ay_meshkov

Something not good was going on with the Chrome WebStore since November, but this case is definitely a culmination.

Dashlane password manager (3M+ users) was removed today for who knows what reason:

https://twitter.com/ay_meshkov/status/1226810925639962624

Thread (1/9)

First of all, the CWS team was trying to solve a really serious issue - tons of malware and adware extensions that were overwhelming the CWS. The obvious solution was to introduce a manual moderation process and that's exactly what they did.

(2/9)

This has lead to increased review times so now we can wait for up to 3 weeks until the extension update is reviewed and allowed to CWS. There's no way to ask for an expedited review so if you shipped a bug, you are f*cked.

(3/9)

To make things even harder, the CWS team took an interesting approach to communication. If there's something wrong with the extension, they exclusively use canned responses and never explain anything in detail. You just have to guess what they mean.

(4/9)

And of course, there are bugs and some obvious flaws that also don't help. If you change one word in the description, you have to go through the full review. If you publish the extension to testers only, you have to go through the full review. Etc, etc.

(5/9)

All that was not enough. They decided to enforce the CWS development policies *as they see them*. The problem is that some of these policies are rather vague and can be interpreted differently.

(6/9)

First, they removed the uBO dev build because of their understanding of the "Single purpose" policy:

https://twitter.com/ay_meshkov/status/1183051208715579392

Now they remove Dashlane because of how they understand the "Use of Permissions". Maybe their understanding is okay, I don't know, but

(7/9)

The problem is that they do not explain what's the problem. They use canned emails only, remember? This is what extensions devs get: "You're using too many permissions, you have 7 days (in fact, 1) to fix this or your extension will be removed".

(8/9)

I do believe that they're trying to make CWS better. But I honestly do not believe that 3 months is not enough to fix the communication. This would immediately solve half of the issues I mentioned in the thread.

(9/9)