Hi there. My name is Sam Weaver, and I’m the software engineer behind Homework Homie.
Many of you may be reading this article after finding out Homework Homie was removed from your Google Chrome browser, and wondering what happened. I wanted to provide a little background.
I first developed Homework Homie in Fall 2017, my first semester at NC State. I developed it further that spring, and over the ensuing semesters, Homework Homie became the trusted tool for thousands of NC State students to keep track of their assignments.
After the initial launch period, my involvement with the project was limited. Between my classes, other entrepreneurial endeavors, and an eventual move out of the startup world, Homework Homie was not at the top of my priority list. In my spare time, I did my best to keep the extension functional when updates to Moodle, WebAssign, or other platforms broke features that students depended on.
Homework Homie had a large audience of users, and I received many offers to sell the project to another developer, who might have continued the work. The problem with this is that the third parties that seek to buy Chrome Extensions typically do so with the goal of updating the extension to include malware, in order to harvest data and sell advertising to users. (See Washington Post, 2019.) Selling data was against my mission for the extension, and my commitment to student privacy. Homework Homie has always stored your assignment data locally, and never relied on any cloud services to persist data.
In the past few years, Google has tightened control on the Chrome Web Store, requiring extension developers to jump through more and more hoops to ensure their extensions are compliant and able to be listed. There are two reasons for Google to do this.
- Google deals with increasing amounts of spam and actual malware on its platform, and creating tighter rules on what’s permitted to be posted helps control that problem
- Google seeks to secure a tighter hold on the web as a platform, and would prefer for all web browser extensions to be listed on the Chrome Web Store, a marketplace they can control and monetize
Due to these increasing regulatory requirements from Google, it’s no longer economical for me to comply with their requirements. A few weeks ago, Google notified me that it was preparing to remove the extension, and I investigated what it would cost to update the listing to comply. After a brief assessment, I was looking at several dozen hours of my (unpaid) time and several thousand dollars of legal fees (to write an updated privacy policy and terms of use.) It has been years since I initially launched this project, and I have a full-time job nowadays. As much as I care about keeping the project going for its users, I don’t have the time (or the money) to invest in complying with Google’s onerous requirements any more.
All of these requirements are ironic considering the fact that my extension has never publicly relied on the Chrome Web Store Marketplace to gather users. In fact, the extension page isn’t even visible to the public marketplace. It’s only possible to get to the Chrome Web Store page from this website. 100% of Homework Homie’s users discovered the product through word-of-mouth. We never used paid advertising or any other pathways for discovery.
Some users are reporting that the message Google shared with them was that the extension was taken down due to being “malware.” To be clear, Homework Homie is not, and has never been malicious software. Your data has always remained on your local machine, and the only information we collected from users was aggregate analytics data. This is well within the scope of what web extensions are permitted to collect, I was simply unable to spend the thousands of dollars necessary to justify and prove that to Google.
I wish I could offer you a workaround for Chrome, but Google has configured Google Chrome to limit your ability to install software from any source other than their marketplace. Despite the code still working perfectly fine, and despite the fact that you own your computer, Google does not allow you to install the extension yourself, even if I sent the package file to you directly.
These same restrictions do not apply to Firefox, however. You can still use Homework Homie today if you switch to Firefox, which is (in 2022) fully compatible with Google Chrome and just as fast. If you install Firefox, you can install the Homework Homie extension from this page, as usual.
All in all, Google’s decision here makes me sad, but I was prepared. This was a long time coming. There are dozens of stories about Google making life difficult for application developers on their platform, with enforcement actions sometimes going so far as to deleting access to their family photos, (like what happened to the developer of the popular game Terraria) often when no such action is justified. As sad as it is, I decided it was safer to let Google win this fight, and to move on with my life.
I am open to having someone take over the project, if anyone is interested. However, I’d expect future owners to have a clear answer to the question of protecting user data, including against future buyouts. If you think you can answer this question, you can get in touch with me on my website.
If you’ve read this far, I’m grateful. Most students won’t care about the backstory, and will just assume Homework Homie was malware all along. Thank you for listening. I’m especially grateful for all of the students who supported Homework Homie, and I wish them all the best of luck in their studies!