This is such a common occurrence these days with tech platforms. I had a similar situation with PayPal when I opened a business account for the first time. Minutes after opening the account I was perma-banned and I was told there was no appeal. Of course, there’s always a way of appealing if you can speak to someone with the authority to fix things (as I was able to in my situation).
Unfortunately companies seem to be getting worse and worse at allowing you to speak to sufficiently empowered people to solve problems.
I hope the HN effect helps you out here and someone at Google decides to swoop in and rescue you.
If you live in America and you can’t otherwise resolve this, I’ve heard that filing a small claims lawsuit is an excellent method of last resort to get big tech to respond to you.
My wife forgot her PayPal password and got kicked out after a few failed attempts. To restore her account she had to send a fax. Consequence? She hasn’t bought anything off eBay for 15 years which is eBay’s loss not hers.
It might take a few decades but sooner or later these platforms will bleed away all their customers.
> I had a similar situation with PayPal when I opened a business account for the first time. Minutes after opening the account I was perma-banned and I was told there was no appeal.
So... what did you do that got you banned?
I know it's popular to hate on PayPal, but they're not in the business of banning people, they're in the business of facilitating payments. Banning people for literally no reason doesn't serve that cause.
Almost every time, when you pull on threads from this sort of story, it unravels into high-risk accounts receiving unusual payments from unusual places all within a limited timeframe where PayPal (or any payments processor for the matter) doesn't have time to evaluate your legitimacy.
Your story might be the one out of a thousand that was on the wrong end of a rouge bot or something, but I have serious doubts.
PayPal processes billions of dollars of payments annually. They don't do that by banning everyone for no reason. Did you use a VPN to deceive them on your location? Did you try to open a business account in the US despite being a UK citizen? Something you did tripped their system into believing you are/were not legitimate, and it's likely you would have also been banned from other similar-tier payment processors, such as CyberSource, Authorize.net, etc.
I hadn’t even made a single transaction before I got banned, so presumably there was something about my email address, phone number or postal address they didn’t like. I was registering in the UK with all UK details etc. something tripped, but I have no idea what. Upon contacting PayPal’s executive complaints team using details I found on Reddit they decided to do a whole bunch of KYC and reverse the ban, but they were adamant that it was irreversible when I initially contacted them using their normal phone number.
To this day I have no idea why (and it wasn’t clear to me that the complaints people even knew), just that something flagged in their automated system.
There are always false positives with this kind of thing, and you can only hope that you don’t become one. I’m lucky that it was possible to fix my issue but as automated decision making becomes more common there will be increasingly large numbers of people who are just arbitrarily denied access to services with absolutely no recourse.
Paypal froze my account over a decade ago for not being 18. I had about 400$ built up in there from selling various gaming cheats as a kid. Despite being assured at the time I would get the account back after turning 18, many appeals later that never happened.
You are a bit naive. I opened account for my mum, and I've seen how when I want to send or receive (legitimate and small) payments for her PayPal just says "cannot proceed with action" or something like this.
It is better if you submit your passport and other data, but still far from painless. Their automatic systems flag transaction and then you are stuck, sometimes for ages. If you use browsers that prevent tracking or VPNs (legitimate and needed in many cases), then it is even worse.
It takes half a year for the new account to become more trusted and be less flagged.
Internet is full of stories how PayPal blocks people and they can't find why or appeal.
These large companies have to deal with large amounts of spam, scammers, and regulations. If you come close to resembling or running afoul of any them, It’s just easier to ban you rather than spend the time and money to see if you’re legit.
Until there’s legislation prohibiting this, it’s just going to continue and the broad brushes will likely broaden.
The thing is, there are obvious flaws in the review process that let a ton of spam and scammers through. It's not as if there's some high bar that keeps the bad stuff out but also some good stuff. It feels more like a sparse minefield that lets 80% of the crap through and occasionally hits something, and sometimes what it hits is bad.
Yeah. It's not just that as well. Last week I was out for a walk with some friends and one of them left her android phone somewhere. She does everything on her phone. Unfortunately she found out she can't log into her google account without an SMS and she can't move her number to another SIM because the account details and MFA are also on the lost phone. Various attempts to contact Google have resulted in being redirected to the community for help and that's it. Her whole digital life shelved.
Now I know this is partially end user incompetence but both platforms sold her the MFA option without a backup leaving her in the mire.
Having been burned with my gmail account being hosed a number of years ago I keep everything separated, portable and backed up offline these days as well.
While too late to help your friend, this is part of the reason I decided to pay for Google One -- I want to be a customer who can reach a human, and have some recourse.
I also use multiple yubikeys -- worth double checking time to time as my longtime key in my wallet died while I was out of town (lasted 8 yrs tho)
Filing a lawsuit would be an excellent method of making 100% sure a company will never ever do business with you ever again in any shape or form.
Right now this person needs to get lucky and find a real human to speak with to possibly reverse the automated decision. That possibility would be completely erased by taking any kind of legal action.
FYI there are two ways to keep the screen on at the native API level: a window flag (screen doesn't turn off while your window is active) or a WakeLock (screen doesn't turn off while your app is running, even in background). Neither of them affects any settings. Changing device settings actually requires a permission that you declare in the manifest that the user then has to manually grant.
I'm pretty sure the developer did absolutely nothing wrong. Google's AI is just full of shit like it's always been. This stuff happens all the time and the best way to resolve it is to know one of their developer relations people. Yes, they actually have employees whose only job is to talk to developers.
When your business model calls for scale so large that it's infeasible to have humans involved in important processes (due to costs), this is what happens. The fact that they can _get away_ with this is a failure of government.
We have to realise at some point that these are no longer private companies in the traditional sense, and start regulating.
It's entirely feasible for Google to involve humans in review, and create a team for developer support. The scale is not nearly as large as people think, and Google is wealthy beyond belief.
Larry Page said it very clearly: “Find the leverage in the world, so you can be more lazy!”[1]
Not having support, for users or devs, not even escalation, is a great example of being lazy. And Google demonstrated for its entire existence that it can get away with it. Who in Congress is willing to speak for the indie devs getting their accounts banned?
It's not a matter of scale. The whole business premise is that it can be almost fully automated via computers. The terrible customer service is baked in, no matter if Google has 1 million or 1 billion users.
We have a EU-resident dev and tried that with Facebook when our app was disabled due to a bug on their end for a couple of weeks. There's nowhere to actually initate the process, as far as we could determine. Every avenue got a "not our department", even the clearly appropriate ones like the "got a question about our privacy policy? email privacy@fb.com" sort.
I have a Chrome extension with 10,000+ users. At one point Google flagged my extension as malware and automatically uninstalled from all of my (paid!) users. Of course, they didn't tell me why.
Nothing had changed in my extension in _years_. What could it possibly have been? This happened right after some well known extensions got busted on the webstore after being sold to shady people and the webstore got bad press for it. Google came out and said they were improving their security measures. I assumed Google was doing some kind of automated scanning and with that in mind I took a wild guess...
I wrote my own JavaScript minifier/obfuscation build tool and figured it was probably triggering the automated system (likely due to compressed strings). I stopped using my build tool and compiled the extension with no minification or compression at all. However, I couldn't upload it (me being banned). I created a second account, paid the developer fee and uploaded under a different category and I was... approved.
You really need to put on your mercenary helmet when dealing with these platforms. I got my first Google Play account banned due to dubiously "breaking" their deception rules, and was literally told in an email: don't create a Google Play account never again. Well, I created 4 more accounts that still exist. We are dealing with automated banning systems here, so keep pushing. You can re-publish the game under different email, account, id and name. If that doesn't work, a game made with Unity can be converted to other platforms like Steam. I even have APKs uploaded to Itch.io . And if you need a revenue stream you can lean on Patreon and others.
The piece of code to keep the screen turned on is my guess of the app's deletion. The re-uploading the app (since they asked me to send a new compliant version of the app) was what I think was the cause of my account's closure.
I don't understand why google play really bad about developer relations. indie developers can't memorize everything in 100s pages of policies/rules etc. it's not hard to warn "don't do this" and ban accounts forever if repeatedly doing same thing.
you are already using AI for banning accounts, so it shouldn't cause any more resource, just small adjustments.
Google has always been about automation and cost cutting. They started as a web search engine running on cheap consumer hardware in a garage, with software patching over the reliability/performance problems of such a setup.
You need humans for good CS, and humans are both non-automatable and expensive. Google does have some humans in CS (I think), but they try to automate as much of it as possible, hence the prevalence of boilerplate responses from them.
What's even worse is Google could easily use the exact same automated checks and block the app before it gets onto Google Play, and then NOT ban the developer. What is the up-side of the status quo for Google or its customers?
> indie developers can't memorize everything in 100s pages of policies/rules etc
I am certain that if there are any developers that care about policies, it's the indie ones. And there are still too many rules for them to follow, and invisible lines they're unaware they can't cross.
The developers at Big Tech don't get banned from Google Play because Google isn't going to de-list Netflix, Spotify or Microsoft.
Hello, BeefySwain. I'm the owner of the account of the Reddit post. Thank you for putting this for me, I just noticed when I was about to.
If you have any news please let me know.
Thank you kindly.
Hopefully you would get some resolution but I think everyone should ask: “could this game be publishes as a web page?” because if it is at possible to do what an app can do with a web page you can completely avoid app store bullshit.
It is exactly “the things an app can do that a web page can’t do” that are (1) frequently user hostile (a reason the user is usually better off using a web site instead of an app if it possible) and (2) heavily regulated to manage but not mitigate this harm.
Readit News
Unfortunately companies seem to be getting worse and worse at allowing you to speak to sufficiently empowered people to solve problems.
I hope the HN effect helps you out here and someone at Google decides to swoop in and rescue you.
If you live in America and you can’t otherwise resolve this, I’ve heard that filing a small claims lawsuit is an excellent method of last resort to get big tech to respond to you.
It might take a few decades but sooner or later these platforms will bleed away all their customers.
So... what did you do that got you banned?
I know it's popular to hate on PayPal, but they're not in the business of banning people, they're in the business of facilitating payments. Banning people for literally no reason doesn't serve that cause.
Almost every time, when you pull on threads from this sort of story, it unravels into high-risk accounts receiving unusual payments from unusual places all within a limited timeframe where PayPal (or any payments processor for the matter) doesn't have time to evaluate your legitimacy.
Your story might be the one out of a thousand that was on the wrong end of a rouge bot or something, but I have serious doubts.
PayPal processes billions of dollars of payments annually. They don't do that by banning everyone for no reason. Did you use a VPN to deceive them on your location? Did you try to open a business account in the US despite being a UK citizen? Something you did tripped their system into believing you are/were not legitimate, and it's likely you would have also been banned from other similar-tier payment processors, such as CyberSource, Authorize.net, etc.
To this day I have no idea why (and it wasn’t clear to me that the complaints people even knew), just that something flagged in their automated system.
There are always false positives with this kind of thing, and you can only hope that you don’t become one. I’m lucky that it was possible to fix my issue but as automated decision making becomes more common there will be increasingly large numbers of people who are just arbitrarily denied access to services with absolutely no recourse.
It is better if you submit your passport and other data, but still far from painless. Their automatic systems flag transaction and then you are stuck, sometimes for ages. If you use browsers that prevent tracking or VPNs (legitimate and needed in many cases), then it is even worse.
It takes half a year for the new account to become more trusted and be less flagged.
Internet is full of stories how PayPal blocks people and they can't find why or appeal.
Until there’s legislation prohibiting this, it’s just going to continue and the broad brushes will likely broaden.
It’s even easier to just not release anything officially on the Play Store and go 100% into sideloading apps. Cut Google right out of the equation.
Now I know this is partially end user incompetence but both platforms sold her the MFA option without a backup leaving her in the mire.
Having been burned with my gmail account being hosed a number of years ago I keep everything separated, portable and backed up offline these days as well.
I also use multiple yubikeys -- worth double checking time to time as my longtime key in my wallet died while I was out of town (lasted 8 yrs tho)
Right now this person needs to get lucky and find a real human to speak with to possibly reverse the automated decision. That possibility would be completely erased by taking any kind of legal action.
See: https://www.engadget.com/how-small-claims-court-became-metas...
I'm pretty sure the developer did absolutely nothing wrong. Google's AI is just full of shit like it's always been. This stuff happens all the time and the best way to resolve it is to know one of their developer relations people. Yes, they actually have employees whose only job is to talk to developers.
We have to realise at some point that these are no longer private companies in the traditional sense, and start regulating.
Larry Page said it very clearly: “Find the leverage in the world, so you can be more lazy!”[1]
Not having support, for users or devs, not even escalation, is a great example of being lazy. And Google demonstrated for its entire existence that it can get away with it. Who in Congress is willing to speak for the indie devs getting their accounts banned?
[1] https://fortune.com/2024/08/19/larry-page-google-advice-be-l...
I have a Chrome extension with 10,000+ users. At one point Google flagged my extension as malware and automatically uninstalled from all of my (paid!) users. Of course, they didn't tell me why.
Nothing had changed in my extension in _years_. What could it possibly have been? This happened right after some well known extensions got busted on the webstore after being sold to shady people and the webstore got bad press for it. Google came out and said they were improving their security measures. I assumed Google was doing some kind of automated scanning and with that in mind I took a wild guess...
I wrote my own JavaScript minifier/obfuscation build tool and figured it was probably triggering the automated system (likely due to compressed strings). I stopped using my build tool and compiled the extension with no minification or compression at all. However, I couldn't upload it (me being banned). I created a second account, paid the developer fee and uploaded under a different category and I was... approved.
It's still up there today.
Note that the OP thinks that was the problem. Google did not tell them a reason for the ban aside from the generic one.
Edit: s/Google/Google's "AI".
"My guess is that they deleted the account because I broke another rule: uploading a rejected app twice."
Its confusing, but this seems a more likely reason for the ban than whatever they did to keep the screen turned on.
you are already using AI for banning accounts, so it shouldn't cause any more resource, just small adjustments.
You need humans for good CS, and humans are both non-automatable and expensive. Google does have some humans in CS (I think), but they try to automate as much of it as possible, hence the prevalence of boilerplate responses from them.
Because these are the lowest effort and cost actions they can take and there are no consequences to doing it like this.
I am certain that if there are any developers that care about policies, it's the indie ones. And there are still too many rules for them to follow, and invisible lines they're unaware they can't cross.
The developers at Big Tech don't get banned from Google Play because Google isn't going to de-list Netflix, Spotify or Microsoft.
It is exactly “the things an app can do that a web page can’t do” that are (1) frequently user hostile (a reason the user is usually better off using a web site instead of an app if it possible) and (2) heavily regulated to manage but not mitigate this harm.