The fact that this guy didn't even say the name of his apps or what they do makes me pretty suspicious of the whole thing. There are enough developers who don't add any value but instead rely on spam, malware or piracy/copyright infringement to get big. I have zero sympathy in those cases, and support Google and Apple taking action against them.
The assumption that the engineer who was banned did something wrong is a bit misguided when there's no evidence for it, but there are countless examples of Google banning users who did nothing wrong. There are even some of those engineers in this thread posting their experiences of being banned by Google.
The opaque and capricious nature of Google's ban hammer, and the special type of an ML-driven bureaucratic nightmare they inflict upon users, affects many people that did nothing wrong at all. Real people and their livelihoods are affected by Google's policies, and that problem exists even if we choose to assume, without evidence, that the OP was a spammer.
The "countless evidence" you mention mostly consists of stories just like this one, and they all add to the confirmation bias. I'm not saying Google is right in 100% of cases, but going by the prevailing opinion here you'd think it was impossible to have a Google account or publish an app without unwarranted banning, but hundreds of thousands of developers are doing just fine with no complaints.
I'd like to be able to judge this case for myself, but if the developer isn't sharing any of his prior communication with Google or any of his apps, why do you think they deserve the benefit of doubt?
It doesn’t matter how you feel, Terms of Service are nothing to respect and local law should be updated to override specific clauses that enable opaque deplatforming.
"No due process is necessary, because these guys are clearly wrong and suspicious. What's the point of giving obviously guilty people any due process at all?"
As in, a real legal demand with a complaint attached that is addressed to their counsel and includes estimates of monetary damages and alludes (not threatens) to the specific jurisdiction and court it would be submitted to for adjudication.
Send copies of this letter, by registered/certified mail, to several contacts.
They will have to respond to this and these responses will be expensive.
If you are in the right - even marginally so - your account will get fixed because it will be much too expensive to continue to ignore you.
Filling in web forms and emailing form addresses costs google nothing. It makes perfect sense that these actions (appear) to have identical results as doing nothing.
Why? If they think they have the right to terminate your account, and you have no standing, why would you expect them not to ignore your lawyer in the very same way they ignore you?
Taking this to court might get their attention, but you also have to show grounds for why you get to override their decision. IANAL, but I don't see why Google isn't allowed to just say "nope, you're outta here" to anyone it damned well wants. Sucks, but it's their reputation to ruin.
They don't have to respond to the demand letter, but they do have to respond if a lawsuit if one is filed. If they don't, it's a default judgement for the plaintiff. (This is one of the things that is broken in the American legal system. You can force someone to spend a lot of money by suing them even if your complaint has no merit.)
So while they don't have to respond to a credible threat of a lawsuit, it would be prudent for them to do so because otherwise there is a real risk for them of having it cost a lot more.
You can send Google a hundred "legal demands" (whatever that means), but they have no reason or obligation to reply to any of them.
You can sue them over it, but a company of that scale handles literally hundreds of lawsuits a day. Almost all of them are frivolous, and will be dismissed.
It might seem like a "correct" answer, but it's not, because it won't accomplish anything. Google has orders of magnitude more money and resources to fight a lawsuit than any individual plaintiff does. This particular plaintiff is not the first, or even the thousandth, to have this problem and find that it's not fixable.
The only really correct answer to the root problem here is for developers to stop using Google Play as a distribution channel. There is more than enough data out there by now to make it crystal clear that everyone who does that is doing so at the mercy of Google's whim. No sane person should be trying to build an actual business that will provide income they and their families depend on on such a shaky foundation.
If you are a business in EU you can request mediation (https://support.google.com/legal/answer/9792937#zippy=%2Creq...). In some cases filling an appeal might work. We usually get only "Google canceled account" part of the story, but no follow up how it ended. Recently was a similar case with Simple Keyboard app, where developer got account terminated, but it was re-instated after few weeks: https://github.com/rkkr/simple-keyboard/issues/333 . Makes me wonder how many incorrectly terminated accounts are actually recovered?
Not saying Google is in the right here by any means, but I'm a bit suspicious of these complaints where the party curiously omits the details of why they were banned, the nature of their previous earnings, etc.
Maybe not, but it stretches credulity that they have absolutely no idea, not even a guess, as to the cause. The ban letter says they previously received other notices. Where are they? And what steps, if any, did they take to resolve then? They don't even describe their app, which ordinarily would seen like the first thing to do to establish the injustice of the affair. "My app just makes generative cat photos. What's ban-worthy about that?"
With rare exceptions, I read my-account-was-canceled stories and there’s something sketchy. Here it’s:
I became part of a company where we teach people to create their own applications and create their own app business.
Logically there’s nothing wrong with that. Empirically, in 2022 the reliable ways for random developers to make money by publishing apps involve gray areas at best.
I mean, what are the generically applicable methods this company teaches likely to look like?
How Google handles whack-a-mole accounts isn’t surprising.
Sounds kind of like the old "marketing training" scam, where once you pay for $5000 or whatever what they teach you is... "spam a bunch of websites about how to start your own marketing business for $5000"
I can and it seems to be an app to listen to Latin American radios specialized in Cumbia music.
I am not sure of the legality of it ,though,since there are already a handful of online radio players available and those seem to be doing just fine as far as I am aware. Maybe it gave access to some paywalled content ? Either that or some algorithm thought it was something illegal and flagged it as a such.
As a small (or even medium) developer, relying on a Google Play app is very dangerous. Our app with user generated content was pulled from Google Play store, because they found one profile out of 36 million (!) that had a suggestive photo. They used our profile search functionality to find it, you could not get it just by scrolling profiles. We have a neural net that rejects anything resembling porn and extensive word vector based text filtering, that forbids searching for anything explicit (unlike their own Google search app). The app cost us about 1m. Appeals were rejected with template emails. The enforcement is clearly selective, because Twitter has plenty of much more explicit porn.
Never mind the tons of porn on Reddit. They did ban the OnlyFans app though.
How many people use their mobile phone as their only internet device? So we now have two companies with essentially identical policies deciding what is or isn't too sexy for us with essentially zero accountability...
The irony here is Google hides behind Section 230 immunity to avoid any responsibility for bad actors on its platforms (claiming it's even vital that they are so immune), but it doesn't extend that idea to entities under it.
My advice - just rip the bandaid off and do it. I had anticipated taking a whole weekend to update the email address on all my accounts, but it was a lot less painful than I had anticipated. Changing over ~50 accounts took me about 3 hours all told. Most services allowed me to change my email even if it used email as the “username.”
Using a password manager made this much easier, as I could easily keep track of which accounts I needed to update and which ones I still needed to do. I switched over to Fastmail and haven’t looked back.
The first step is moving to a custom domain. You can stay on gmail if you want; but set up a custom domain, and set up email on it and tell everyone to use your new email address.
Once you have a custom domain, it becomes way easier to change to another email service without losing any messages.
I've had Google Workspaces/Gsuite like that, but how do you accomplish the same thing with just gmail? Do you have a separate email service forward to it, or is there some way to set gmail as your DNS MX mail server and have it direct a custom domain into (and out of?) your gmail address?
Totally agree. I've been doing this for over a decade. I've barely used my actual Gmail address for anything. I've gone through many incarnations of email, but at some point Gmail was just a solid enough UI, had the best spam filtering, and so I switched.
Everything just forwards to my Gmail address. I have a personal domain which is also setup as an outbound address. Several other domains/addresses also forward. I also do a wildcard *@something.example.org which I use for accounts/signups (unique email per site), which lets me track who's selling my address (or is breached) and has some other security benefits.
Ride both horses at the same time for about a year. Setup Fastmail on a custom domain, forward your Gmail there, and as you see people emailing your Gmail, update those accounts as you get the chance.
I had a Gmail as my primary for over 10 years, did exactly this for 3 years, and now I’ll get maybe 2-3 junk notices per year to my old Gmail.
Gmail has an option to send all the emails you get to another email address, and also delete them from the original email if you want. The way I'm currently doing it is waiting for something to send me an email and then changing the account for that particular service. Eventually, I would have completely left google's influence.
My concern is the hundreds of GB of photos I have saved with Google and Apple. I assume one day I will wake up and find I've lost access to them with no recourse, which means backing them up on a large hard drive is my only real option, exactly like 2010.
There are other options. You can use something like rclone to make multiple copies across cloud storage providers. You could also rent some cheap cloud storage like Backblaze B2 and use a backup software like restic.
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The opaque and capricious nature of Google's ban hammer, and the special type of an ML-driven bureaucratic nightmare they inflict upon users, affects many people that did nothing wrong at all. Real people and their livelihoods are affected by Google's policies, and that problem exists even if we choose to assume, without evidence, that the OP was a spammer.
I'd like to be able to judge this case for myself, but if the developer isn't sharing any of his prior communication with Google or any of his apps, why do you think they deserve the benefit of doubt?
You'll find a bunch of screenshots of random cheap looking apps that find wallpapers, phrases to tell to girls, spanish radios search.
So they most definitely rely on ads on their apps and not on building good ones.
Dead Comment
As in, a real legal demand with a complaint attached that is addressed to their counsel and includes estimates of monetary damages and alludes (not threatens) to the specific jurisdiction and court it would be submitted to for adjudication.
Send copies of this letter, by registered/certified mail, to several contacts.
They will have to respond to this and these responses will be expensive.
If you are in the right - even marginally so - your account will get fixed because it will be much too expensive to continue to ignore you.
Filling in web forms and emailing form addresses costs google nothing. It makes perfect sense that these actions (appear) to have identical results as doing nothing.
Why? If they think they have the right to terminate your account, and you have no standing, why would you expect them not to ignore your lawyer in the very same way they ignore you?
Taking this to court might get their attention, but you also have to show grounds for why you get to override their decision. IANAL, but I don't see why Google isn't allowed to just say "nope, you're outta here" to anyone it damned well wants. Sucks, but it's their reputation to ruin.
> Why?
They don't have to respond to the demand letter, but they do have to respond if a lawsuit if one is filed. If they don't, it's a default judgement for the plaintiff. (This is one of the things that is broken in the American legal system. You can force someone to spend a lot of money by suing them even if your complaint has no merit.)
So while they don't have to respond to a credible threat of a lawsuit, it would be prudent for them to do so because otherwise there is a real risk for them of having it cost a lot more.
How - how! - can you justify the statement that you have "no standing" when your income stream was arbitrarily cut off with no explanation?
> IANAL, but I don't see why Google isn't allowed to just say "nope, you're outta here" to anyone it damned well wants.
Because it's wildly unfair and morally abhorrent?
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You can sue them over it, but a company of that scale handles literally hundreds of lawsuits a day. Almost all of them are frivolous, and will be dismissed.
The only really correct answer to the root problem here is for developers to stop using Google Play as a distribution channel. There is more than enough data out there by now to make it crystal clear that everyone who does that is doing so at the mercy of Google's whim. No sane person should be trying to build an actual business that will provide income they and their families depend on on such a shaky foundation.
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That's a difficult thing to accomplish when Google has not provided them the details of why they were banned.
It sounds like he has violated something multiple times and was told what was in violation but he is choosing not to share this part of the story
I read it as the dev had no warning or explanation.
I became part of a company where we teach people to create their own applications and create their own app business.
Logically there’s nothing wrong with that. Empirically, in 2022 the reliable ways for random developers to make money by publishing apps involve gray areas at best.
I mean, what are the generically applicable methods this company teaches likely to look like?
How Google handles whack-a-mole accounts isn’t surprising.
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How many people use their mobile phone as their only internet device? So we now have two companies with essentially identical policies deciding what is or isn't too sexy for us with essentially zero accountability...
Using a password manager made this much easier, as I could easily keep track of which accounts I needed to update and which ones I still needed to do. I switched over to Fastmail and haven’t looked back.
Once you have a custom domain, it becomes way easier to change to another email service without losing any messages.
Everything just forwards to my Gmail address. I have a personal domain which is also setup as an outbound address. Several other domains/addresses also forward. I also do a wildcard *@something.example.org which I use for accounts/signups (unique email per site), which lets me track who's selling my address (or is breached) and has some other security benefits.
I had a Gmail as my primary for over 10 years, did exactly this for 3 years, and now I’ll get maybe 2-3 junk notices per year to my old Gmail.
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