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Comment by techaddict009 | Hacker News Reader

https://blog.usejournal.com/google-wrongly-terminated-our-ne... story of another startup.

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)

View on HN

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19124324

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.

It seems like the full story is always less than reputable contractors. Set up fresh accounts yourself, people!

They were banned for 'association' - that makes me believe that even if you set up a fresh account yourself, if someone that was previously banned works on it, and Google finds out, you could still be banned.

Also, banned by Google != less than reputable.

Some form of 'association' is probably unavoidable, otherwise it would be trivial to game for truly bad actors.

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.

Side note: this is basically what the hypothetical "private police" would look like, except it would be people and not apps that get removed...

It's probably good practice to get the source code and assets from the partner in any case. You may choose to sign and deploy it yourself, or if you delegate that to the partner and they get the banhammer, you can republish under your own account.

Republish a banned app without modification under your account is the fastest way to get yourself banned -- it kind of make sense when you consider how spam app works.

Once your app is flagged as spam/scam, the only way to recover is get a human review from Google.

Google is a bitch to deal with, and that they put up layers and layers of barriers to actually talking with a human being is infuriating and a massive risk to anyone doing business through them...

...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.

Can't reinforce this enough.

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?

You can make any move seem reasonable if you make a sufficiently bad analogy.

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.

> A more comparable analogy would be one where the hypothetical security company isn't told who of their staff is banned

That's what background checks are for. If you're hiring someone, it is your responsibility.

A background check for having once owned bitcoin? (To go with the previous metaphor)

And not reporting your gains to the IRS?

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.

Maybe its ok for some infractions to be automated but for things with huge penalties like life-time ban of developer or removing an app that took months of work... there should be a panel of real humans or some kind of human process.

well, to start with the power of monopolies should be limited. Google with play store on Android is the MS with IE on Windows 20+ years ago.

No it's worse. Yes Microsoft used their market share and deep pockets to drink other companies milkshake, but they didn't use control over the OS to prevent uses from installing competitors software.

As a friend said 10 years ago, this is the end of general purpose computing.

Oh, that is definitely not true.

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.

Perhaps you're referring to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DR-DOS#Competition_from_Micros... ?

Yes, and it mentions SuperStor, ugh.

Having ‘Stacker’ flashbacks.

The playstore termination happened to me too. I happened to chance on some forums where you can pay money to people who can use multiple accounts and IPs to get your competitors banned by repeatedly hitting report and then copyright/infringement.

After a certain threshold, google bot bans your accounts and then sends you an automated email.

Whoa! Where can I read more about this? If there aren't any news articles on the topic (in which case, this is a prime story opportunity for some enterprising journalist/blogger), can you link to the forums?

It's called flagging which youtube made it more prominent by "youtube heroes". https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/pavyp8/youtube-co...

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

Thank you for this.

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