Google terminated our start-up Google Play Publisher Account
android.jlelse.eu
android.jlelse.eu
I can't find Pablo A. Martinez's personal developer account; the closest match is com.pablomartinez, which belongs (belonged?) to a law form, according to the description on Google. (The page is no longer accessible and doesn't seem to be archived anywhere.)
Pablo A. Martinez has additional work history publicly posted on his LinkedIn profile [4]. I just gave it a quick skim, but I don't see anything shady. At least on the surface, there's no clear explanation for the account terminations.
Pablo, if you're reading this, please consider adding more info about the apps you published, ideally with links to back up your claims. It'll make your case stronger.
[1]: https://www.greenlionsoft.com/
[2]: https://web.archive.org/web/20170428152946/https://play.goog...
[3]: https://play.google.com/store/apps/dev?id=583922732690913554...
I strongly second this. If it is not clear, this means to please be clear on what your experimental and play apps were from the original personal developer account.
> My “personal publisher account”, was terminated last August 1th. I probably will never know why. It was mostly abandoned, I had just a few old apps just for testing features or make experiments.
Banning competitors seems like a recipe for antitrust lawsuits.
the case to whom? the primary message from the post is that there is likely no human being who will look at this again (and based on the robotic 24h + 1min timestamp on the email, the question is whether one ever did in the first place).
They're quite strict on the 'if you've been banned and you use another account, we'll ban that one too', so that's the reason for the recent termination. Sometimes it takes months for them to link together accounts like this, because they gradually accumulate evidence like signing apk's with the same key, or logging into the console from the same IP addresses.
The old account I would bet had something shady on it. For example, an ad-clicker or rooting tools.
I still don't know if our "GreenLionSoft" account is going to be reinstantiated but I've got more info from the review team.
Our company account hasn't violated any policy but it was "associated" with my personal account that hadn't violated any policy but was "associated" to a third account from which I had console access in the past and that was terminated due "IP violation and Trademark" months before personal mine. The owner of this account appealed denying any IP violation but was ignored and the termination cascaded from one account to another.
The point here is not whether this first termination was fair or not, the point is that now anybody that shares wifi, hardware or console access with anybody that suffers a termination will be terminated too.
It is quite usual that developers working for a start-up, have also their own personal GP account just for publishing their pet projects or just testing new API's or features. If any of your employees while or before working for you have their account terminated the company account risks to be terminated too.
I have now sent back to the review team extra info to demonstrate that my personal account and company accounts were not created to impersonate this terminated account, nor republish any suspended app.
Still waiting an answer...
I feel like iOS in particular could already do this. They could just let users install apps from anywhere and then do their best to keep their platform secure.
I'm sure others disagree though but I feel like if you want a gatekeeper you should opt in. You're free to only install apps certified by "somecompanywhoauditsapps.com" or "apple.com" but if you want to you're also free to just install them from anywhere.
I suppose you'd still end up with the same problem that if you choose to go through "apple.com" they might not approve your app but hopefully with alternatives there would be more incentive to provide better support. I can certainly imagine Epic Games would jump at chance to offer their own iOS store. Valve might as well.
For FOSS at least, there is F-Droid.
What's wrong with Firefox? Are you talking about yourself or some security update coming soon?
And give publishers like Amazon, Netflix, Spotify, and similar the ability to offer in-app purchases that bypass Apple’s 30% cut? Never gonna happen.
Companies exist to produce profits for their owners. Without public regulation, you should not expect fair and faithful service. If you no longer represent a revenue opportunity - since they clearly decided just that - then you no longer exist.
The solution is often to try to align the incentives of the company with your own, with public shaming campaigns like this one.
> The solution is often to try to align the incentives of the company with your own, with public shaming campaigns like this one.
Which is probably why it got flagged off the front page by people who won't say why they did that. They forget that the internet's ability to "route around problems" is really just a shadow of the ability of people and life in general to do that, and that trying to suppress local solutions just widens the area to be routed around.
IIRC you can actually organise a call with somebody at Apple to discuss issues, but not with Google. Can anyone else confirm this? The app dev who shared this info with me was making millions for both Google and Apple.
The same app dev had their app taken down from Google Play but then reinstated within 24 hrs after some furious emailing. I know of another dev who received no response to their desperate emails, who was told to never try to create another account, just like OP. This dev hadn't made Google any money.
Sure, that company developed a business around Google. But it still feels bad.
The only problem is that I don't trust a large portion of American politicians that are seeking regulation - they seem highly motivated to force Google to become a Chinese-style propagandic censorship machine (i.e. Republicans complaining about "bias" because the president's picture shows up if you Google image search for "moron.") So while articles like this make me feel bad, I feel trapped into a need to fervently defend Google and "tech companies" to avoid my concerns being coopted.
And that's why you don't build that critical point of failure into your product, even if it's harder and more expensive to do it another way. Which, sadly, means don't build your company around an Android app.
They can do this to your personal Google account, too. What are the repercussions, to most people, of being summarily banned from all Google products? (Hint: What's the recovery email address for all of your random online services? What's your personal contact email for work, taxation, etc.? Do you have a local backup of your Gmail archive?) It's unlikely, sure, but if it does happen then it's gonna suck.
Otherwise I don't think I use a google account for anything else.
hey_$service_dont_spam_me@my_domain.com
> What's your personal contact email for work, taxation
my_name@my_domain.com
I always thought of gmail like gmx.net or something, it's where people who don't know internet things could get free email. I figured it's a good way to test the waters, I also had free email long before I had a domain... but over a decade later, we're actually building houses out of this duct tape? It's duct tape, it's useful, but it's still duct tape.
I don't mean this to blame the author. (Though them making another account with Google for private stuff made me despair)
My first thought was, if companies want to be persons, and do this to other persons, a fair response would actually be "Dear Google, stop existing. Please don't make another company, either." I know it's not realistic, not even desirable to me -- we don't even boycott really horrible actors on a large scale, so why ruin Google and all the lives that hang off of that. I don't believe in collective punishment under any circumstances, ever. But as a response to Google (et al.) "as a company", it would be fair -- and no need to tell them why, either.
You may fairly say that I am engaging in slippery slope, but I take freedom of speech and thought very seriously, and so any attacks on it to any degree are terribly inflated in my mind.
Perhaps Pablo should get a job with a high profile but small on tech company (maybe a bank?) and watch Google change their policies immediately.
At the same time, it drives me nuts to see these kinds of flaws in the system. People get invested in a platform, and then one day that platform kicks you in the nuts, and slams the door as you fall out on the pavement.
Your point, to me, is just another indication of how transparency is a win.
I would guess they supplement their own app income with contracting.
https://web.archive.org/web/20170428152946/https://play.goog...
https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:lx9Xke...
At first glance doesn't seem to be scummy, but you never know.
But the ad and in-app revenue streams mentioned in the article suggest that they have also been active in other fields. In-app purchases that still go on after account termination might be a hint in the right direction though: would IAPs via Play still be going on? External ("untaxed") IAPs are the biggest sin from the app-store's point of view. External purchases are allowed to be handled externally (e.g. paying for physical goods in the Amazon app), but definitions are not always clear and then it's all arbitrary judge-and-executioner.
Remember that one which told you which platform your train at eg Penn Station was likely to come in on, so you could wait on your track instead of in the designated waiting area? To put it in clickbait terms, "station operators HATE this", because there are a variety of safety and efficiency problens with people waiting on the platform, even when it helped the user be the first on the train.
(I have no idea what is going on in this case.)
The waiting area is on top of the escalators at Penn as well, but since you don't know which track you need to wait for, it is always a mad dash down the corridor for your train once the track number has been posted. This is made even worse by the fact that by the time the track number appears, there is only 3-5 minutes before departure of the train, so there is a sense of urgency required to get to the right place before the train leaves.
It is pretty terrible, but so is everything else about Penn.
If this is a serous problem, why is there no other app store? There should be plenty of programmers who need another method to reach their customers.
For starters, Amazon's app store should do [1]. If enough developers reach out to their customers, it could become a viable alternative.
That said, "The Castle" [2] should be a compulsory reading for each Android developer, or app developers in general.
It is serious, but only for a few developers, not for most, nor for Google. It has to be wide-spread to make alternative store(s) viable.
Google's overall approach to building it's walled garden is not much different from Apple's. They give some fake "choice", because they know, that tech-illiterate consumers won't be able to make use of alternative options.
https://www.reddit.com/r/androiddev/comments/9n88wv/the_futu...
I just get aware of the existence of this thread.
I still don't know if our "GreenLionSoft" account is going to be reinstantiated but I've got more info from the review team.
Our company account hasn't violated any policy but it was "associated" with my personal account that hadn't violated any policy but was "associated" to a third account from which I had console access in the past and that was terminated due "IP violation and Trademark" months before personal mine. The owner of this account appealed denying any IP violation but was ignored and the termination cascaded from one account to another.
The point here is not whether this first termination was fair or not, the point is that now anybody that shares wifi, hardware or console access with anybody that suffers a termination will be terminated too.
It is quite usual that developers working for a start-up, have also their own personal GP account just for publishing their pet projects or just testing new API's or features. If any of your employees while or before working for you have their account terminated the company account risks to be terminated too.
I have now sent back to the review team extra info to demonstrate that my personal account and company accounts were not created to impersonate this terminated account, nor republish any suspended app.
Still waiting an answer...
The only Google services I rely on are email and search, and even in those cases I’m looking for alternatives.
Pay for your own domain and if you can’t live without Gmail, at least go with GSuite.
Personally I think Gmail sucks for delivering email and I got off it based on technical limitations too.
It's a bit out of date, but it looks like they were working on commuting apps for metro bus lines, etc.
Imagine a world in which Google Pay is dominant, and your Google Play account is terminated, and nowhere takes cash, and you can't buy food now, or ever.
What's a valid reason to do that, rather than clicking "hide" and just ignore the story if you personally don't care about it? Sure, I'd also prefer an article, that maybe contains this and other things as examples. But the discussion can be in that spirit regardless -- and who who will that article, or have such a discussion, when stuff like this is actively being hidden from sight?
Once again it turns out that most people are way better than the manipulated results make it seem like. I think of that whenever someone says "the market decided that "$shitty_thing is okay".
edit: answer the 2 questions, and we'll see who's contributing and thinking, and who isn't.
My account's payment method has been flagged twice for some reason, and reading this makes me think how screwed I'd be if my startup's gapps account gets flagged.
If this was an error, it would have been fixed long ago. At this point in time I'm convinced it's a deliberate tactic - terminate an account once they start to get popular and see if they can pull enough strings or raise enough of a stink to have a human look at it.
Blaming an "algorithm" is becoming a very convenient way to abdicate from any responsibility for shitty business practices and biases against certain groups of people.
> We recommend that you use an alternative method for distributing your apps in the future.
There is no reasonable alternative method for distributing commercial apps on android. The app store is a monopoly.
How about your company's website?
If your target audience will only use Play, then the only reasonable target store _is_ Play.
I'm in the F-Droid target audience, so you could target me.
However, as they appear to be publishing transport/mapping tools for Spain... It's unlikely they can reach their target audience any more.
skype id : viewpoint92
From the wording of the email, it sounds like his previous ventures might have been doing something shady and those accounts are linked to the startup account.
That's distressingly vague, especially when he provides screenshots of the recent termination emails. If there wasn't more to this, you'd expect the history of that other account, which is pretty clearly relevant here, to be laid out in a lot more detail.
I agree that Google is prone to arbitrary and Kafkaesque behavior, but this instance smells fishy.
hahahahahhahahaha
no
Pay to play? I guess so.