Google banned me – open sourcing all my apps | Hacker News Reader

Google banned me – open sourcing all my apps

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181 pointslawgimenez49 comments

I can’t say I’m a mobile app developer, but early during Covid19 (late Dec/2019 and early Jan/2020) and out of self learning process, I made a fully functioning android app that provided a real time tracking for Covid cases around the world, the first of its kind (1) with other stats, I submitted the app in Jan/2020 to the play store, and after almost a whole month of “pending”, I got banned, the app got “suspended” not just rejected -as if I did something illegal-, my account got flagged and they said another flag and they will suspend my google account too, keep in mind it was fully free with no ads of any sort, so no monetization of any sorts except donations. It turned out later google (and other big tech incl twitter) were trying to suppress anything about covid, until the narrative shifted March that year.

Moral of the story: as a developer, you are always under the mercy of these app stores, and they can change policies anytime, with zero regulations to govern them. Other open source stores are good as long as you are opening your source code, if you won’t for whatever reason, good luck distributing apk/updating your users, and I’m not even looking at apple yet.

(1) https://files.catbox.moe/byur9j.png

Wow, that sounds awful. Any proof?

Proof it was suspended you mean? Sure, this is the email (1) I got after almost a month, as you can see the policy violation being "sensitive event" . And also this is their reply (2) after I tried to appeal it, since I wasn't doing anything wrong basically, the reply was just a repeat of that email with extra salt that we might suspend the whole account.

P.S. While digging in the email, I also remembered I submitted it to Amazon store, and while it was accepted, but few days later they deleted it for similar policy.

Twitter too, as I made a small bot that report the cases and tweet it in Jan/2020, they suspended my account _ I can try to find the screenshots of that too if you like- and blocked the tracker website from even being posted in a tweet, but later that year gave my account back..

(1) https://files.catbox.moe/lqjw8s.png (2) https://files.catbox.moe/84vme2.png

> It turned out later google (and other big tech incl twitter) were trying to suspress anything about covid, until the narrative shifted March that year

That's very interesting. Has this been confirmed from internal sources? What was the motivation behind it?

> It turned out later google (and other big tech incl twitter) were trying to suppress anything about covid, until the narrative shifted March that year

From the emails you posted, it seems like big tech sites had general policies about people capitalizing on disaster situations and they spelled that out clearly? Obviously, things eventually changed and Covid19 apps/trackers were deemed to not fall under that rule, but it seems a bit much to jump from that to "trying to suppress anything about covid".

For reference, text from one of the emails:

>Specifically, we don't allow apps that lack reasonable sensitivity towards or capitalize on a natural disaster, atrocity, conflict, death, or other tragic event.

OP says the app was not monetized, so this rule seems to be irrelevant.

> >Specifically, we don't allow apps that lack reasonable sensitivity towards or capitalize on a natural disaster, atrocity, conflict, death, or other tragic event.

Haha. Facebook, Twitter ? Even youtube capitalises from "a natural disaster, atrocity, conflict, death, or other tragic event".

Talk about hipocrisy.

Agree with you, but here are some points to consider:

- The app didn’t capitalize or monetize out of that event, it was just like any news app (in fact, that time news apps had ads too), except it’s a niche news, about covid.

- When I submitted the app, that policy didn’t exist I remember going through their policies, I guess during that month of “pending”, they were processing if they would allow such apps or not, as I am sure other submitted similar ones, keep in mind it was too early for big tech to digest the fast paced infos whether to allow or disallow it, you can notice even the app name (nCov- corona) and not (Covid19) as the name wasn’t even given to the virus by WHO yet, so immediately banning and suspending apps with no concrete policy in place gives you an idea how things works, ban first, then discuss later and even after discussing things won’t change.

Bottom line: Having too much power such app stores to a single private company is wrong, apple is worse in that department as you can’t even side load your apps yet (planned in next iOS release I believe), it’s not the case for webapps for example with all the flexibility you have as a developer.

Not surprised

"As someone else pointed out in a DM my implementation was pretty consistent with the official android developer docs found here: https://developers.google.com/admob/android/banner/anchored-...

"It's the exact same implementation."

So although Google banned him for breaking the rules on banner placement, he was following Google's own instructions on where to place the banner.

Source: https://old.reddit.com/r/androiddev/comments/13lf6jb/open_so...

Wow, does this mean he has a legal recourse?

This is a cautionary story for Android developers, but my main takeway is why these big behemoths should be split.

There's no reason why banning someone from an app store, for any reason, resulting in banning them from an totally unrelated online video site, password manager, locking them from 3rd party sites that use Google Auth, ... is acceptable.

Imagine being banned from a clothing store because you returned one item too many and then not being able to buy groceries from another, or not being able to get on a bus, or unlock your house.

This is ridiculous.

Yes, too many digital eggs in one digital basket.

A few years ago, my Microsoft account got suspended for a month without any reason given in the end. Probably tripped some kind of param with some kind of algorithm.

Anyway, in that month, I couldn't use Office 365, OneDrive, Skype, Microsoft Store purchases, my Xbox (all my games are digital), Microsoft Store developer portal, Outlook email address and calendar. There was probably other stuff too.

It pretty much stopped me dead in my tracks on both a personal and professional level.

Whilst a single corp providing so many services can be very compelling, it's a disaster if for any reason you can't access your account.

A little after Microsoft had bought hotmail and was revamping and syncing the UI with outlook, I was travelling and hadn't logged into my account for a few months. The account, my oldest email account, had become my secondary account ever since the launch of gmail.

I logged in to discover that they had wiped all my emails due to those months of inactivity. All my correspondences through high school and college. Hilarious and thoughtful messages from some who had died randomly way too early.

I was so enraged I was rendered speechless. I couldn't even bring myself to try to complain helplessly. It was as if someone just walked into my house while I was on vacation and burned the whole place down with all my life's letters stored in my desk.

As far as I'm aware, it was the first time a large email provider pulled some shit like this.

A few years later--before all those cops playing Taylor Swift songs--when I uploaded a video I made from a wedding to FB to my small network, it was insta-removed due to the music playing in the background.

These motherfuckers will keep stealing yours memories. Because in this era once you record your memory, it is no longer yours -- it's theirs. It's said that Native Americans believed that taking photographs of them would steal their soul.

They were right.

Now, I use a Docker container to backup and version my Gmail. My assumption these days is that at some point, it'll either go bust, be deprecated (ala Reader et al), get hacked, they'll have irrecoverable data loss, or my email client will get a bad update.

I'd host my own mail server, but the deliverability is generally a nightmare, and completely sporadic. Feel like a lot of our digital life is hostage to major corps.

Open standards, interoperability et al should be mandatory for major public services.

There are various options between big-corp-controlled-emails and self-hosting-your-own-server. An example is Migadu.

Migadu certainly sounds good, but even their biggest plan seems a little on the smaller side. We are big fans of actionable email notifications that can be responded to, e.g., GitHub, Gitea, Active Collab. A response via email gets put into the respective platform/server, so we would very quickly chew through the in/out, and we get a huge amount of spam, and customer support emails.

The same thing happened to me, but with my Yahoo account. It was my first email ID, something that I made when I was 11 years old. The memories of my first emails, when my friends and I were discovering the internet in the mid 2000s, were completely wiped out.

I was affected by the same hotmail wipe. My hotmail account was from 1998, and Microsoft decided to wipe it.. All my memories gone. Fuck them I've never used MS crap for anything of value since then.

There probably needs to be a database of such bans faced by independent app developers by the platform app stores on the lines of the public CVE (common vulnerabilities and exposures) database.

Over time, it should act as a reliable source for a class action suit and further research into monopolistic behavior.

At the very least, it should help counter the propaganda narrative by the platform providers.

There probably was one.

In an app that for some totally honest reason had to be disappeared for our safety.

Stories like this make me think developing native mobile apps is for fools.

These app stores are like Chinese knock-off dollar stores too.

I always laugh inside when I think about the “App Store Nordstrom comment.”[1]

[1]: https://twitter.com/TechEmails/status/1631352764247977985?la...

I don't think Google Play is available in China.

But that email kind of makes me appreciate Phil Schiller. It also shows that app stores are hard to run well, and that one of the reasons they are the way they are is the constant flood of bad actors trying to game the system.

> Bans should not be for all products for life. Please reconsider this approach, adding a navigation bar to a mobile app should not result in someone being unable to monetise free educational content they produce on Youtube.Likewise if I had received a developer account ban, my personal account would have been banned by association removing all access to other apps which use Google SSO. That is also a grossly unfair practice which could be improved upon.

^ This right here is also why friends don't let friends use Google's password manager.

Just another "individual's life crushed by faceless corporate machinery" story.

> Suggestions to improve the developer experience:

> • Offer a paid support model where we can speak to a human.

A reasonable compromise? IMO this growing category of perfectly avoidable injustice should be brought under legislative control, with something like a right to adequate non-algorithmic support where automated (or "rubber stamped") livelihood termination is concerned (IANAL as if you couldn't tell.)

If companies can't provide human decency "at scale" voluntarily, they need to be brought to heel by regulation.

There’s a better and quicker solution: stop developing native apps. Make mobile webapps instead, wherever possible.

That is a workaround, not a solution. The issue is much wider than app developers.

Apple offers "Technical Support Incident" credits that you buy as a pack of x quantity. The idea being that devs can talk to a real human being. The support sucks. Frequently given non-answers and non-solutions, and have paid for the privilege of being given boilerplate copy-paste without them having actually read and understood the problem.

It's especially poor when you consider that publishing apps on Google Play means a one-off fee for your account, but publishing apps on Apple's App Store requires an annual subscription, with TSI credits on top of it.

At least you can say with Google that you get what you pay for in terms of support and experience (not much—it's passable), can't say the same for Apple.

Hence the need (in both cases) for regulatory teeth.

Not really, you get 2 TSI credits included in the annually fee and I've only needed to use them once in 10 years for a really obscure problem I couldn't figure out. My experience with Apple support is that sometimes can be slow and frustrating but it works, unlike Google support.

Similar to Apple, I'd happily pay a yearly fee for better support with the Google developer program

It really depends what you're doing. If you're working on developing hardware with a companion app, you're probably going to have a rough time with support, and assuming an iOS update every year, you'll probably need more than just those two TSI too.

I think the worst support thus far is probably Facebook/Meta for Facebook ads, and likewise, Twitter, for their respective ad platform. What a terribly broken and unreliable system Twitter has, even pre-acquisition. Breaks in all kinds of strange ways.

He shouldn't take this personally. Unfortunately all the behemoths such as Google, Meta or even Fintech "neo-banks" adopted this approach of banning-first with no appeal. They have to deal with so many users that they don't care anymore.

One of the solutions is to be aware of this and develop your own ways to circumvent their processes. Harder to do for banks (and I wouldn't do it) but necessary for other situations.

I live in different foreign countries that they decided to consider as high-risk clusters (Vietnam, Thailand etc.) and learned this the hard way (got banned from Meta Ads my first week arriving in Vietnam) so now everything is isolated. I only login to banks on a specific VPS in a "safe" cluster. And all my Google Ads accounts are also on separate isolated VPSes.

>He shouldn't take this personally

Yes, but that makes it worse, not better. There's no reason behind it, it's just suffering for no reason. It's "Brazil" and not "1984", and I don't think that's better.

An alternative is to not use Google Ads, suscriptions are more reliable.

I also got banned randomly for no reason at some point.

I recently discovered Google does have a way to speak to a human and have your B2B issues heard and responded to promptly.

https://cloud.google.com/support

You can subscribe to the support without using GCP itself.

This is why we need independent marketplaces. Today’s options are really google or give it away for free (and the same for apple).

If only there were other app stores for Android - perhaps one from Amazon or some other competitor?

F-Droid

+1 for this idea, I personally got rid of the idea to be a mobile app developer since my prototype app was removed for no rational reason, at least for websites/webapps, unless something is illegal, no one can take it down, and you have the flexibility in hosting it in other countries too if it was the case.

There are independent marketplaces.

However, the problem is that Google makes it very, very difficult for them to reach users. You will not be able to, for example, get your alternative marketplace Android app on the Play Store.

This makes them effectively not available for anyone but "hackers".

This needs regulation. Marketplaces above certain size should provide right to appeal with ability to arbitrate for losses.

Unfortunately people like, Google's current CEO are not introspective enough to identify and solve issues like this.

This is how cooperations die, their custodians focus more of abracts things like cashflow.

And ignore the multiples cracks that form in different products such as these. When the cracks reach a certain threshold that the the custodians notice it is usually at an irreversible stage.

Google is sinking.

It sounds like Google Play is already run by evil robots.

This time there was at least a reason: Author made changes to the app and navigation ended up too close to the banner ads.

(Obviously this kind of issue should not cause permanent ban for developer with long history)

There has to be another way of distributing apps for android and apple phones that doesnt use the play store (or whatever apple uses)

There's f-droid

Thanks for that info.

What about a simple download apk button in a website?. I was raised during the DOS,Windows times and installed software in MY PURCHASED computer without any stupid third party dictating what I could or couldn't do.

> open sourcing all my apps > posts on github

this is not open sourcing, this is giving code to microsoft

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