Brutal, the frustration is palpable. Forgive my mobile engineering ignorance, but does developing on Android pose similar risks or is control less centralized to Google?
I mean if you're so popular/useful that users will seek you out independently you might be okay but there are a lot of shops where the store is their only marketing funnel.
> there are a lot of shops where the store is their only marketing funnel.
Any business that only has one "funnel" is a business at risk, whether the Play store is involved or not.
If that's what you call it, but business have had their paid Google Apps accounts nuked, and critical data lost. Publishing on Play is basically mandatory to get users.
Being on Play is an enormous advantage, there's no question. Whether or not it's mandatory probably depends on what sort of app it is, though.
There are successful apps that aren't in the Play store. But being successful without being in the Play store requires a larger marketing effort.
(And plenty here on HN for a decade now.)
Recently, hundreds of people had their entire Google accounts banned (with that ban upheld on appeal) because they were sending a lot of emotes (By request!) to a streamer's chat.
These people lost everything. Emails. Everything in their Google Drive. Over totally normal behaviour.
Using a separate Google account to do your app development doesn't help, because they ban accounts they suspect to belong to the same person as well.
So yes, the danger exists for Android developers too, and is much larger in scope.
I’d say then it’s time to start migrating everything to any kind of trustworthy entity. Google is the opposite as they’ve shown time and time again.
Use offlineimap; make backups.
To ban people flippantly and then hide behind automated customer service is inexcusable.
Developers in particular have nowhere else to go. Backing up your code doesn't help if you get locked out of one of the 2.5 app stores on planet earth. Your skills are worthless.
"Make backups" doesn't quite cover it - not even for consumers. How do you keep up-to-date backups of your Google Docs & Sheets? How do you restore an Android backup including all your purchases after getting banned by Google?
The principle of "either party can revoke consent" is based on the assumption that both parties have other realistic options. But that is no longer the case. This market has become completely dysfunctional.
I know a small team of 3 devs who were developing along just fine. Their app on the play store was mildly popular (relative to a new app) and gaining traction and then their accounts were shutdown without warning.
They received no meaningful response from Google that wasn't effectively "We looked into it" and they just kept them locked out. No explanation why.
They came up with the theory that one of the devs had worked at a company that after he left was associated with some scummy practices where they would buy apps and turn them into spyware. They figured google somehow associated that company's apps / acts to that one developer and then it was guilt by association from there. Sadly that company was still active under new names and the 3 devs who weren't associated with them couldn't get around their ban.
For the record I personally can't confirm any of this except to say I do trust the folks I know that were involved.
https://medium.com/@tokata/how-google-play-terminated-a-deve...