Why I refused to use the Vkontakte API

Vkontakte has an incredibly extensive, up-to-date database of users that allows you to make convenient applications. In addition to this, the guys made a public API that allows you to legally use all the accumulated content, but still I have to refrain from unnecessarily using such a convenient tool, and here's why ...

Introduction


This chapter will discuss how it all began, why and why I needed this API, and what it was up to about X.
It started with the fact that I had an android device and had a great desire to automate everything and everything, as well as transfer contacts, days birth and other useful information in the phone is now a smartphone.
Facebook was able to do this, but due to the greater popularity of VKontakte among friends, there was a need to synchronize such a large and almost always up-to-date “phone book”.

Lyrical digression:
When all this started, there wasn’t even that miracle that is now called the official VKontakte application.


In view of the need, several applications were written exclusively for private use, which were then posted in the then still android market ASIS:
1) Vkontakte: synchronization and
2) Vkontakte: birthdays *.

* In connection with the circumstances described in the article, these applications were removed by me from the publication.

As you know, interaction with the API is done through the standalone of the Vkontakte application, which (suddenly) can be blocked by the administration with a special predilection - well, it seems and revealed the whole intrigue ...

Here, too, it is probably worth making a reservation - in view of the fact that at that time it wasn’t quite an adequate authorization system with several (as far as I remember) three readers, the application number 1 worked quite unstably (naturally, the hand curvature also affected, but nonetheless. ..). The second application also worked once again due to the lack of an official google API for adding entries to the standard android calendar. Nevertheless, part of the people’s applications worked, some even bought paid versions (and those who for some reason couldn’t buy but really wanted to - wrote to the mail and received a free APK in the response letter, or rather, thanks) in general, everything was as good as possible.

Time passed, the official application of the social network appeared, but nevertheless, until recently, judging by the statistics, up to 20 unique users per day happened.
Everything would have continued if it hadn’t ...

The climax and conclusion.


One fine day (06/22/2013), at the next visit to the user’s page, who is also the administrator of standalone applications, through which all interaction takes place, there were several notifications in the application area, one of which stated that my creation was blocked by the administration.

At first, I thought that there might be some kind of mistake (since I hadn’t used my programs for a long time, but since people downloaded them from time to time and for one reason or another, there was no desire to remove them). When entering the application administration, no traces of locks were found, BUT, the programs from the market stopped working ...

In the notification (it’s good that I didn’t close it, because in the future I couldn’t find it, but I still forgot to take a screenshot) there was a link to those support, which I followed. When asked why and why the application was blocked at all, it was made clear that there would not be a quick answer (there should be a screenshot with the inscription “in view of the load of those support, an answer is possible within 31 hours).

After some time, an extremely abstract answer was given that, unfortunately, my problem takes time, it will be considered in the near future and generally do not care . With all this, they could not even provide an answer, the application is blocked or not.

He decided to organize his own investigation and find out why such a thing could happen as far as I can imagine - this is the problem:
image

At one point, someone actively used the Vkontakte application to spam with the help of my programs, which in turn thought that the most correct thing was ban.

The fact that the application is still locked can be judged by the reviews on google play - if before there were approximately equal fives and units (as I said, the applications initially and essentially do not work on all devices for all users, which by the way was said in the description), then now over the past few days there have been several negative reviews with the same diagnosis - applications can’t download anything ...

It’s good that this problem happened a few days before the holidays and it’s possible to quickly take action, but if it happened a couple of days later, I b You found out in a few weeks and this fact would have slightly diluted the joy of the rest.

Conclusion


Even if I, as a negligent user of the API, started bombarding the server with requests, I still do not think that a public API, especially of this scale, can afford to block applications. By the way - even at the time of writing my programs they had points about no more than N requests to the API from one person in X seconds. So all restrictions should be on the server side and it just should give an error on the next request.

Such an approach as Vkontakte allows another person \ by mistake \ to simply kill your program specifically, and, in my opinion, it looks so that later it will be quite difficult to restore the "good name" of the application.

In general, on this note I decided to tie up with the Vkontakte API.

Updated
Response from support:

Support Agent # 3487
Spam has been reported from this application. We figured out the situation and unlocked the application.

So the assumption turned out to be true, like this.

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