Google terminated our startup's developer account – what do we do?
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We are extremely grateful to anyone in this community that may have played a hand in having a real person at the Play policy team reach out, as well as the ongoing conversation here to improve overall relations between the Play store and it's developers.
But no, get to the frontpage and poof, it's solved. It really sucks for all those startups who didn't have luck getting their post viral.
It's 7 years later and my company is still banned from Adsense and to this day they've never told us why.
On the bright side, I should be seeing some of the class action settlement money any day now.. http://www.adsensepublishersettlement.com
1) Reselling their pixel devices (https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/nov/17/google-su...)
2) Using paypal and not Google wallet (when it launched)
3) App being too similar to other popular apps
4) Related account that has a ban using multi-sign (This thread)
5) Invalid traffic to adsense
6) For expired credit cards or invalid charges in Google wallet
7) For bank account switching problems even if there is no fraud (https://www.reddit.com/r/google/comments/3ki65d/warning_to_a...)
8) For attempts to avoid buying apps or too many refund requests (https://www.reddit.com/r/tifu/comments/8kvias/tifu_by_gettin...)
Some unlucky people had all their google accounts purged including Drive and Gmail (Especially with monetary issues like invalid adsense clicks, invalid charge on wallet, too many app refunds)
Keep in mind that the ban is LIFETIME and any account that you multi-sign at any point in your LIFE will also be banned AND there is zero customer support. Some users have been banned for multisign issues even after 8-10 years.
Any company that controls more than (some) percent of a significant (by some definition) market/medium/distribution channel loses the ability to unilaterally ban/refuse to serve a user except for VERY limited reasons, such as non-payment, intentional vandalism, fraud, or other criminal (not company policy-violating but actual law-breaking) activity. If such serious violation is alleged, account can be suspended pending ruling by regulatory agency. If reg agency rules that no such violation took place, the suspension will be ordered lifted and a fine imposed as compensation--no lawsuit by MomsBasementStartup against WeOwnYouMegaCorp is necessary.
So, if you really want to have the power to ban whoever you want for whatever "terms of service" reasons please you, better make sure you never grow very big. Your ability to reject users falls as their ability to reject you and go with your competitors falls.
Banned for the entire life of all the devs that ever worked in the startup because one dev had multiple sign-in enabled
What happens when your outlets for complaints are blocked as well?
What if HN, Twitter, Reddit mods, etc. were asked by the company to stifle any dissent against it, and obliged, where would you go?
Huh? Why would you expect any of those entities to oblige such a request? Other than perhaps some Reddit mods, depending on the subreddit.
Like JetBrains recent DMCA to shutdown the /r/piracy subreddit [0], not for all the probably illegal stuff, but for "Asking about JetBrains Licensing".
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/bestof/comments/b2xslo/reddit_legal...
Is being banned by twitter the same as being banned by google?
And mine too. I had a small utility calculator app with some 100k download and play store suddenly deleted the account. The app was in partnership with someone. No reason nothing. No way to restore.
Play stores auto termination policy sucks to hell.
Update: I just saw the post back. Since it went viral google reinitiated their account to probably shut the matter (instead of fixing the main cause of issue it seems)
They (potentially inadvertently) hired a dev team that was previously banned for malware, so Google terminated the account and banned these new partners of the malware team.
Did your partnership have the same problem?
What is missing from Play (or the ecosystem) is a way to ask if the people you just hired are on their ban list, before you register your app with Google.
Also, banned by Google != less than reputable.
...however, let's consider the other possibility: Google is in a perpetual game of whack-a-mole with nefarious actors who are the ones putting the scams, malware filled trash, etc, on the Android store. They get knocked down and pop up again under a new account, $25 later. These people are never going to admit their actions when telling the tale, however, so I'm always a little skeptical.
That was one thing I appreciated about Apple's process, at least for a company account -- I had to provide various business documents, get a business search done, etc. If I get knocked down, I can't simply make up a new name and appear again. Clearly it isn't perfect, but it does seem to reduce the scum churn.
Big problem is that the current policy seems to insufficiently discriminatory between bad actors and accidental policy infringement. Perhaps they can start with short bans and rapidly increase ban length on recidivism.
Once your app is flagged as spam/scam, the only way to recover is get a human review from Google.
Would a bank hire a security company that has a previous bank robber on staff? Would you put your kids in a school that has a previous child molester on staff?
A more comparable analogy would be one where the hypothetical security company isn't told who of their staff is banned, or for what reason they were banned. Maybe they were a bank robber, or maybe they were just doing business with bitcoin, and it's the bank's policy to ban all such businesses. And the security company isn't just not hired - they're banned from being hired ever again, from 88% of all banks in the world.
That's what background checks are for. If you're hiring someone, it is your responsibility.
This wasn't a case of someone having had a previous developer account, but of someone having being banned for posting malware on the Play store.
As a friend said 10 years ago, this is the end of general purpose computing.
Internal OS code was ‘tweaked’ to cause problems for certain 3rd party applications.
[edit]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DR-DOS#Competition_from_Micros...
Taken from child reply.
Having ‘Stacker’ flashbacks.
After a certain threshold, google bot bans your accounts and then sends you an automated email.
However you can just go to any app in the playstore and flag it. If you have a "high trust" then google algorithm can take it down with just one flag.
I have high points on google maps and it's scary how my edits for even embassy and consulates are approved instantly: https://screenshots.firefox.com/314Jgow6iDMhflNF/www.google....
Scammers have been banning competitors, changing bank phone number on google maps (https://www.hackread.com/fraudsters-changing-contact-details...) and also taking down youtube videos.
Google gives zero shit
But if every developer who has been banned can get other developers banned just by association, this will start slow and then move like an epidemic.
They don't know it yet but unchecked this will seem to them to instantly become an existential threat to the play store. There's nothing like a geometric progression to make you think everything is a-ok just before it all goes to hell.
It’s reflected in their cloud divisions performance.
Anyone sane is using someone else if they can.
I can count the times google has burnt my hand though...
I've heard of people getting hacked and having huge bills because they stared up bitcoin miners with their account. I think AWS actually refunded the charges.
Scary to think if Google would do the same as easily.
I can confirm that we had that happen to a developer account (who did exactly that <doh>) and AWS refunded the charges with zero hassles.
I'm surprised to hear the Google experience is so poor and risky that no one is using it for fear of losing everything.
Don't get me wrong - I hate it and wish we were on AWS for a multitude of reasons, but we use Google Cloud at Lumen5 and despite my personal distaste for it, it mostly "just works" most of the time, even if almost zero of the setup is intuitive. Their Kubernetes offering is a stronger sell than AWS's (IMO) which is a big reason we've stuck with it.
that is true on the other side too.
Snapchat uses Google Cloud. So does Pokemon Go.
There is also a growing trend of multi cloud deployments - using those that are best for your particular use case or increasing your fault tolerance.
The poster child of unplanned outages and scalability issues. Ouch.
The big question is are those organic customers or attracted onto the platform for big discounts in order to be adverts?
GC should be aggressively isolated from the stupidity in the larger company when it comes to how they incorrectly deal with pretty much anything that involves humans. They'd need to put someone in charge of it that has vast experience building very customer-focused enterprise businesses. They need to de-Googleify the whole business top to bottom. This would also go a long way toward eliminating the well-earned fear about how Google loves to kill off products/services.
If they don't do that, they will never stand a chance competing with Amazon or Microsoft in cloud. They'll be a far smaller, permanent #3 in the US market, best case scenario.
I am too afraid to use it even for staging.
It could be a perverse inverse manifestation of the 20/80 rule on an algorithmic or institutional scale: so long as we're only losing x% it doesn't matter because some in the excluded group might have been more effort to deal with.
>become an existential threat to the play store.
This will require a viable alternative and a wide spread reputation that they are a regular business killer.
I mean to say that everything will seem fine and suddenly they will find that their algo has banned most of their users, like a play-store zombie apocalypse. It will seem instant and inexplicable to them, and the damage will be done.
Unfortunately when there are realistically only 2 app stores, and considering Apple devices cannot use the Google Play Store it doesn't matter. Google can do what it wants, just like Apple can do what it wants as for there is no real consequence. There will always be another developer willing to take a dollar less for the same thing and abide by the 'rules'. We absolutely need diversification, but until these companies are split up it will never happen.
No, that's ridiculous. There are real people making real fortunes here. If they're not ethical, it doesn't take a conspiracy theorist to point that out.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrumental_convergence#Paper...
I suspect the IRS gets a bad rap because people don’t like owing money and the IRS is usually right when they send corrections, but my experience left me with nothing but respect for their front-line support. To remain as friendly and courteous as they were considering the rage that must be directed towards them on a daily basis is pretty impressive.
My state's revenue department is the one I truly fear.
Never dealt with the state of ND, but my one dealing with Illinois makes me think its not confined to the tax department. I detail my problems with their DOT in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5521011#5521345
But the comparison is still appropriate due to the sheer gravity of both situations. If your issue hadn't been worked out over the phone (say it required more subjective interpretation), you likely would have hired someone. Nobody wants to get walked on by an 800lb gorilla.
While some aspects of interacting with the IRS may be refreshingly easy compared to expectations, they are not setup to be universally so. See the steep after-the-fact penalties for getting some types of things wrong (as opposed to simply just preventing them in the first place), as well as the prohibitive fees associated with "private letter rulings".
Your appeal to the individual people working there is fallacious, as it would preclude any criticism of organizations as a whole. I have no doubt that the individuals working there are all trying to do a decent job, just as at Google. The problems are at higher levels of complexity. A program segfaulting is not an indictment of the transistors.
Fees for private letter rulings don't seem like a problem to me, because people always have the option of arranging their affairs in a simple and straightforward manner. In order to deter gamesmanship, there needs to be a substantial cost to running close to the edge.
Dirty dealing in the $175 billion Amazon Marketplace
After drilling down into these posts it's very common to find those developers stealing user data, using forbidden advertising techniques, infringing copyright or simply trying to scam around Google's 30% payment cut. Apple would kick them off the App store immediately as well (and even tell them directly that running to media won't help).
If anything, Google is finally starting to clamp down on malware and developers abusing user data.
* Customers with high volume/spend/influence
* Loud/Viral complainers
At the expense of:
* Everyone else
This is a difficult problem that requires massive investment and dedicated care. I earnestly think Google is trying, maybe they're hiring more people, maybe they're investing dev time in better tooling, but its not cutting it as evidenced here.
Email spammer, page rank spammer, scam apps...
Submit a demo app to the Google Play store using your developer account, your offer will be contingent upon app approval.
These companies are omnipotent and untouchable. They have these automated systems in place because they have determined them to be the most cost effective way of dealing with these issues. Even if there are specific cases that seem ridiculous, or clearly harmful to the company itself, in aggregate this is the system that works for them.
I learned this very early. For example, while in high school I had a (very) small business buying things locally and reselling on ebay. Despite having 100% positive feedback, a scam artist one day claimed to Paypal that I shipped him a brick when it was supposed to be a cell phone. The scammer had a brand new account with no feedback at all, and I had no previous issues, but Paypal decided to trust the scam artist over me with over 5 years of positive feedback. I refused to pay back the negative balance that Paypal claimed I owed them, and lost access to my account for over 15 years. During that time, I started a successful e-commerce business doing annual revenue of $5-10 million. I'd have used Paypal to process all customer payments had my account not been banned. Instead I integrated with Stripe, and Paypal lost out on upwards of $500,000 in processing fees (and counting).
But still, Paypal succeeds, and does not care.
Another example - I was an investor in a small dating app a few years ago that was doing quite well. Despite successful ad campaigns on Google, and in Apple's app store, Facebook just decided to one day block the advertising account, permanently and without reason. Despite vast effort (spanning multiple years!) to at least figure out why we were banned, no explanation was ever offered, and the app eventually was starved out due to inability to access a prime advertising channel that our larger competitors were able to access.
There is simply no way around this kind of thing. My advice is to never build a business that relies on one of these platforms - use the web to your advantage, don't get stuck behind someone else's walled garden. Try to make apps only ancillary to your business, not the main component. Be able to diversify advertising channels. Own your core competency - don't let someone else steal it overnight.
And finally the reason for the throwaway account, I believe there are rogue employees at these companies who can just shut down accounts for personal vendettas, bribery schemes, or just the lulz. We suspect that's what happened to us at facebook. So I do not want to jeopardize any current businesses I am running or investing in that is personally tied to me.
if you are entirely dependent on a single supplier or a single customer, your business is very much at risk.
I run a very small e-commerce store and we process Paypal (I'm no fan) but have the option of a 2nd merchant too for direct card charges.
The obvious answer is to save money. Maybe they reckon the Play Store is saturated so it doesnt really matter if 5% of devs say meet an impassable roadblock ,it wont affect their revenue.
Have you ever tried contacting them? It's all offshored to India/Phillipines. They refused to honour their GSuite free credit offer, then hung up on me when I insisted they escalate the problem. The difference between their outbound sales lines and their inbound support lines are laughable.
I assume it's better when you're pumping hundreds of thousands through them every month. Even so, it inspires zero confidence in Google as a customer-facing organization.
As far as I'm concerned, Google gives zero fucks about individual paying customers. It's obvious why this is so - their search ecosystem is leagues ahead of competitors, and it's so dominant that it's a licence to print money. They don't need to offer you good support, because you need them.
It's also why I don't hold out much hope for Stadia - an ecosystem that relies on developer goodwill needs excellent front-facing support, and Google just doesn't do that.
As a side note, I truly believe Amazon is well positioned to invade search and dethrone Google (though it would be a case of "The King is dead. Long live the King!").
I'm on DDG for my primary search engine too, but
(a) I fall back to !G for at least 50% of my queries. (b) You and I are a tiny, tiny minority. DDG users are not even a fraction of a rounding error in the global search userbase.
DDG is nowhere near being a serious threat to Google - it may well in future, but right now, Google still rules the roost (Facebook being the only other equal). You only need to look at their respective financials to confirm it.
All the top apps today come from big companies. Mostly Google, in fact. The era of the app startup is over. Why do you want to compete with Google while under the control of Google?
If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — forever. - Orwell
Honest question: what do you pivot too? Apple has different but equally bad risks of having your hands tied or just being barred. What's a safe platform to build on these days that actually has a market?
I had to look it up so I think others might not know it too.
There is likely some causation there but not necessarily in the way you are implying. Some companies GET big because they have a top app that is making a lot of money.
Properly separated individual google accounts for phone, personal email, work email, youtube, drive, etc
PITA but better than being SOL...
So their company account was closed as associated to that one.
I don't know what got in that guy's head when he created that account, google is very strict when it comes to terminated devs trying to republish apps.
Perhaps some simple form of exponentially increasing penalty (start with 3 months, double/triple/quadruple at every next ban).
You don't need a lawyer, emails will hit the bot wall, just call them , and keep calling them, and it that doesn't work, go visit them. Got to fly to CA, then do it, turn up at their door and talk to them.
https://gsuite.google.com/support/
Good luck!
I really hope they reverse course, and soon. They are creating a world I don't want to live in, and as someone who loves Google products and has a lot of my life wrapped up in them, I'm actually starting to worry about getting infected with Typhoid myself just through accidental association.
Then they nuke your whole account.
Fortunately, with Android, the Play Store is not the only way to release an app.
We can hope?