My Android app (1.6M dloads, 4.5 rating) was suspended from Market

When I clicked on this headline, I expected to be disappointed by some ugly Google shenanigans.

When I read the article, my initial reaction was, "Oh yuck. That's just vile. I'd definitely give his app a single star, uninstall it, and complain to my friends. Not sure how I feel about Google yanking it, though."

But the more I thought about notification advertising, the more it reminded me of the dark days of Windows XP before the SP2 security fixes. Every other computer, it seemed, was infected with adware, and users loathed it. The cried, they yelled, and they even bought new computers in a desperate attempt to make the ads go away.

So upon reflection, if Google is going to pull anything at all from their Market (besides obvious scams, and so on), they should definitely start with applications that make users feel powerless and angry about their devices.

(I'm a previous APNdroid user)

Putting ads in the notification area is remarkably antisocial. This is not what the notification area is for. It's selfish, violates the user's trust, and quite rightly causes the red mist of rage to descend.

It may sound harsh, but your app deserved to be removed for this.

Your app is used once in a while, so regular ads wouldn't make much money, eh? See, that's not fair to bother users regularly with ads if they use it just sometimes.

I find notification ads (or just constant notifications) to be really, really annoying. Free Power Widget does this, constantly telling you to buy the paid version every time you turn on/off wi-fi or anything else you put there. There has to be a better way to do this.

I hope this is Google beginning to ban Notification ads.

Just had a revealing little chat with an Airpush sales rep via their Live Chat system: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2493047

You seem to have a standard monetization strategy (ads+paid version) yet the app is released as GPLv3? Has no one simply recompiled the app without the ads and put that on the market?

Serves you right. Pushing advertisements in the notification bar. Thumbs up for Google quick reaction. And thumbs down to you and your low grade methods.

Notification ads are bad , it not like a full screen TV ad but more like a banner which plays during your favorite game, no one will like it , it was a stupid move to do this. "With great power comes great responsibility"

[update] I have the app available back in my hands, but unpublished. I am not going to put it back right away, because of all your feedback. Thank you all for the opinions, I've got my lesson.

Camera 360 started doing this and I uinstalled it. If I knew an app was going to have this I would never install it in the first place.

Why? For me it gave the sensation of an additional app installed along with the app I wanted and this additional app was malware. I had to dig around to figure out what app had started doing this.

I don't know what route you took to decide that this form of advertizing is "the best" for the user. Do you really think that waking me up in the middle of the night to look at an advertizement is good for me as a user?

You contrast it to TV ads. With TV ads, I know what program the ad is sponsoring. My TV doesn't click on at random times to show me ads just because I have something saved on my PVR that I never watch.

I'm very glad your app got yanked, and I don't say this lightly, I am still divided on the idea of a moderated app distribution channel at all.

Its probably 4.4 of the Android Market TOS..as far as a violation.

Or someone else has a copyright claim against you. In that case I think they will send you a copy of the DCMA if that has occurred.

The advantage of an app store app over a web app seems rather thin to me.

The marketing required to get an app high enough in an app store for a user to notice seems no different from the marketing required to get a web app noticed.

However, with a web app only customers get to decide whether or not they use it. There is no corporate intermediary that would, for whatever reason, decide to not let customers choose your app.

And, as this story illustrates, the risk of being abruptly booted out of an app store without knowing why is real.