Part of the problem here might be conflating abuse prevention with policy compliance.
Abuse prevention is adversarial, and it's risky to reveal details about why something was flagged as abusive. Policy compliance isn't, or shouldn't be. A building inspector wouldn't say "this building has a code violation in the kitchen area" and refuse to provide specifics about what would fix it.
An app store needs both, and they need to operate differently.
> A building inspector wouldn't say "this building has a code violation in the kitchen area" and refuse to provide specifics about what would fix it.
Electrical inspections can be very much that way.
"This isn't up to code, I'm not signing off on it."
"How is it not up to code?"
"Your electrician knows. Or you can look in the electrical code."
Your electrician doesn't know; no other inspector has ever objected to the way they've done things.
That electrical code is paywalled, despite being official government policy (written and published by a trade association, which regularly updates said code mostly to force people to keep re-buying their volumes.)
> That electrical code is paywalled, despite being official government policy (written and published by a trade association
If you're meaning the US National Electric Code written and published by the National Fire Protection Association, I would point out that it is available to the public for free:
Even a cartel would be easier to deal with. Google could then say "your Play Store Certified Compliance Specialist can tell you what's wrong".
It seems more likely that what's going on here is the issue was flagged by a bot which doesn't tell the human reviewer why it thinks there's a problem, and the reviewer believes they will be in more trouble if they make a mistake in overruling the bot than if they make a mistake in agreeing with it.
Abuse prevention is adversarial, and it's risky to reveal details about why something was flagged as abusive. Policy compliance isn't, or shouldn't be. A building inspector wouldn't say "this building has a code violation in the kitchen area" and refuse to provide specifics about what would fix it.
An app store needs both, and they need to operate differently.