K-9 Mail removed from Google Play Store due to listing description
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As in an official rectification of the unofficial fork with microG in the middle?
(confused)
That being said, I think that Google did the right thing in this case. I know of and use K9, so I trust it. Google does not have this privilege. While they probably have more than enough data to determine if the app is trustworthy in the first place, it would be difficult to determine if a trustworthy app went rogue in a timely manner.
As for the issue, keyword stuffing is way to manipulate search results. In this case, keyword stuffing appears to have been used appropriately. Now imagine that people started stuffing in terms like Gmail or Outlook to benefit from brand recognition. Given the scales that Google operate at, it is unlikely that they could detect such transgressions effectively for all cases.
The immediate removal is problematic, but it is difficult for outsiders to understand how giving notice would impact Google. Some developers may simply put such warnings on the back burner, or even forget about it, if given advance notice. Others may manipulate the system by taking advantage of the advance warning (e.g. using it to stretch out their transgression).
A company whose AI powered app store can't even handle simple issues like this wants to build self-driving cars.
On topic: sometimes I feel k9 is a lost cause. With Microsoft and Google deliberately adding non-standard crap to their protocols I am surprised k9 had survived so far.
If I can get to work with outlook enterprise accounts I will probably switch.
Not sure how you fix this, other than Google apply some of their search smarts to the playstore that they have on the search engine.
Also the person who added that text to the description...probably about 5 years ago.
My only real complaint is that Google pulled the app with zero notice. It feels abusive to pull apps from the Play store for a non-malicious violation of the terms (that may well predate those terms) like this.
Even a 48 hour notice of "we will remove your app if you don't change the description" would have been pretty reasonable.
The solution is straightforward and the team is already on top of a resubmission with an updated description. This is absolutely not a hill I want to die on.
It's difficult to describe the stress of having to deal with what is presumably an indiscriminate algorithm, potential heuristic, or some new quota.
It's dumb, but it is what it is.