Please pull hplip-printer-application from the store

I’m currently trying to set up a new HP printer. This is my first one and I’m hitting all kinds of road blocks that seriously hurt user experience and bring frustration and anger to the community. One of these road blocks is https://snapcraft.io/hplip-printer-application

This seems to be a project that was started but never completed, you can look for the user in this forum and find results hinting that this was a summer project under mentorship. With all the praise users hear about snaps and considering that users who find their new printer not to be working and finding HP’s official instructions to download HPLIP, many tried this snap and gave it a bad rating. I also found a comment by Till Kamppeter (he seems to be the Ubuntu printing maintainer of whom I wasn’t aware before) who says according to his knowledge this snap is experimental.

So please, stop hurting your users with non-functional software in production channels. Please extend the description and update the release information so that it won’t display as a result in the store when users are looking for production quality software. Yes I’m talking to you Snapcraft/Snapstore administrators because I cannot rely on a student who couldn’t not finish a project (and probably didn’t receive mentoring up to the point that publishing non-production software publicly is a bad idea) to do that. At some point someone may pick up the work and it may become good software, but at the moment it is not.

My own view is that anything in the edge channel should not be considered ready for production and can be expected to be broken.

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while generally snaps that have only ever been released to the edge channel should be used with a lot of caution, as @mcphail said, did you try to contact the snap owner ?

there is a “message” button at the top right on:

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Maybe it’s a problem not explaining properly the edge risk track is?

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:warning: hplip-printer-application is only available on the unstable edge channel. It could be not working, break, or change often.

IMHO, the best Snap Store can do is to probably make the snap unlisted, is there any procedures available for such things?