I would like to request verified account status. Please see my info below:
A list of the snaps that you have, that should have a verified publisher associated with them.
Our registered snaps are:
spaces (private and unlisted)
spaces-dev (private and unlisted)
The institution, foundation or company that you are a member of or work for.
I am the founder of Spaces Communications, Inc. We make communication software for healthcare organizations.
Your role within that institution, foundation or company.
Founder/CEO
The group email address that should be tied to the Verified Account.
developers@chat.space
The way in which your institution has worked, collaborated or partnered with us. If your institution, foundation or company hasn’t so far, let’s start a conversation.
We haven’t.
Hey @chat-space, just wondering—did you end up getting verified? I’m in the same situation and still haven’t received any response. This process seems a bit unclear
Can someone please respond to this? I’m the developer for this project and we won’t make the Spaces snap public or advertise that we have a linux app until it’s tied to a verified account.
Having the “Verified publisher” badge is not required to release your apps on the Snapstore. Holly’s instructions are very clear and specify that you need at least two @policy-reviewers to approve your request.
having a verified publisher badge may not be required, but as a company it would look bad for our product to be listed under an individual’s account.
Have you ever used the Ubuntu Snap Store? Snap store pages do not specify whether the publisher is a company or individual (unless you entered your personal name in the publisher name field)
Holly’s original post explicitly states that “we grant Verified Account status to institutions, foundations or companies that have worked, collaborated or partnered with us…”
I’ll be honest here, and although I’ve no voting powers, and don’t mean this personally, I don’t think this should qualify as a verified account and think the concept of verification needs re-evaluation.
The only metrics I can get of this app are from the Android release, which suggests a total of 5 users ever.
While the other platforms could be vastly more popular, IMO, Canonical marking someone as verified is Canonical giving a seal of approval in the quality of your work; especially moreso now that there’s more recent stricter reviews on submissions from non-verified/stared publishers.
The requirements for a star developer account are sustained contributions over months, and is the lesser of the two account distinctions. The requirements of a verified account cannot simply be “has a domain and viable business model” but backed by so little actual usage.
The domain for the website can be verified and the account name can be set to whatever the publisher chooses; but I don’t think especially in light of recent policy changes (approval required for all snap revisions from non-star/verified publishers) that it makes sense to give less review here than say individuals in the forums who’ve been around for 5+ years with 1000x the downloads.
Apologies that this comes off personal, but I feel this should be applicable everywhere, and this is merely an example. I don’t feel we can reasonably place the same acolades as given to Mozilla or Proton & etc with millions & hundreds of thousands of users, to 5+ downloads.
Ideally that’s a conversation that Canonical would have in private because I can understand this being sensitive to a lot of businesses, but the public data to me doesn’t look satisfactory for how I feel people interpret verified accounts, when domain verification exists and feels far more appropriate here.
This is an app marketed for healthcare. Whilst the criteria is arbitrary, would I be obscene in suggesting Canonical could be presumed to check things like if they’re actually regulated, and the likelyhood of things like data protection compliance, given the importance of such infrastructure? Introduce them to Ubuntu Pro whilst you’re at it, because that’s the kind of business relationship people could reasonably infer from the status, an actual commercial relationship and not just mere usage of snaps.
Whilst often I’m fine with seeing this requirement get dropped when there’s other reasonable balances, I don’t think there is in this instance, because Canonical can’t claim to reasonably know a company that is still to earn a reputation, so that’s the “let’s start a conversation” part.
I also agree with James-Carroll that this does not satisfy the stated policy
I also read that as the company has “personally” authenticated/established a strong trust relationship with Canonical before applying.
Also I would expect the company to show the company registration on their homepage, which leads to the credence of the homepage. How should a policy reviewer find out if that company exists? But maybe that is only a thing where I live(?).
At least in this case could not find such.
I had a look at old request; the recent one from proton-ag made sense to me (which was granted). But I also saw some requests granted which do not seem to fit this part of the policy.
The latest one is Verified Publisher Request - Hurdle Group Ltd
@holly What I find weird though is that many requests simply get ghosted(?). Is that saying that all the reviewers did a -0 (or -1) on such a request?
I understand that we’re a new company, we just went live last week. Our user base is going to quickly increase as we start onborading more customers. We obviously haven’t collaborated with Canonical before, so I figured the “let’s start a conversation” would mean there would be some private back and forth to verify who we are. We’ve already gone through this process with Apple and Google.
Historically, I think there was a job role for developer outreach which is what I think is needed here. In the ideal world, being new, you’d instead maybe have someone internal conduct some basic checks and actually say hello.
There’s no middle ground available in the current setup which I wouldn’t be surprised is why this gets awkward and things get dropped. I’ll also be outright in saying I imagine part of that is likely motivated by increasing attempts at deception on Snapcraft with AI which makes it harder for everyone involved. Being explicit, it’s no longer unusual to see posts that are AI generated and yet convincing enough to get humans to respond to them just fine, including making entire websites and recently seemingly potentially entire snaps.
Things won’t change overnight so having faith in Spaces being legitimate I’d personally just like to see something like a 30 minute call on Microsoft Teams to get to know you and see what your needs are, since I imagine deeper change would take time given the purpose of the policies in the first place and how much they effect.
(But I don’t work for Canonical, so please don’t take this as anything official, it’s just me wanting this to be better for everyone involved )
@policy-reviewers@holly can we set up some meeting? We can provide any documentation to prove our identity. Like I mentioned in a previous message, we’ve already gone through this process with Apple and Google to get our apps in their stores.
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