My Google Play Developer account has been terminated

> If you have done something so terribly wrong to cause your account to be terminated, and to remove all your apps, you would expect at least an email properly written by a human being, with evidences of the mistake you have done.

This is precisely why I have zero interest in developing anything for Android or iOS.

I simply don't understand why anyone would spend countless hours of their life developing apps for platforms which are happy to completely annihilate all of that effort in an instant, without even an inkling of justification for doing so, and no way to appeal.

That's pure insanity to me.

If you gonna put anything on Play store be careful about open sourcing your apps because the bad guys will take your code and package them with malware and will upload them under different names and icons. So then Google in their full wisdom will flag anything that contains that code, including your benign, clean and original app

Sorry, but something is fishy there.

The guy has a medium account named RT. Usually people use their real names in medium. He has exactly 1 post and that is this post here.

He doesn't really explain what the app does, only that it's called draw and relax. A quick search reveals, nothing. If it was on the play store there would be some reference to it.

Idk what is going on but this is quite sus

The most important information seems to be missing from the article. The author says that all his apps are built similarly, except the one that led to the account termination which

    uses a particular asset that I bought
    on the Unity Asset Store

So which asset is it?

If that asset contains malware, then we know the reason for the ban.

There's at least one support thread for this issue that links to a troubleshooting tool: https://support.google.com/googleplay/android-developer/thre...

The use of the unity asset to launch a web browser to load code to run a very basic drawing tool seems like a very likely reason that Google says this policy was violated.

Such an app could easily include the source files for such a basic web app or could have actually just been a web app.

There are two possible explanations for implementing a web app like this. One benign inexperience/laziness/incompetence and the other is a malicious intent to target specific users with a different payload in certain circumstances.

While this developer isn't being malicious, removing this sort of app does appear to be the right call by google.

The problem here arises from how the lack of transparency impacts people who are trying to learn. We need gatekeepers, but we also need those gatekeepers to be sufficiently transparent that we don't keep out newbies but educate them.

It's funny to read comments here after just reading the piece on Critical Ignoring. "Low-quality and misleading information online can hijack people’s attention, often by evoking curiosity, outrage, or anger."

So many commentators taking this and every other Play Store complaints at face value with zero critical thought/analysis. Don't let yourselves be highjacked by low quality information. The linked article has few details.

> The name of my app was “Draw and relax”.

So you can still find the apk here:

https://apkpure.com/draw-and-relax/com.raffaeletasso.paint/d...

Uploading it to Virustotal indeed does not trigger anything, however, the sandbox execution shows plenty of weird domains and URLs. Those all might be harmless, but still, I guess if just one is fishy, this could be enough to get your app banned? I guess most of that stuff is related to ads, but who knows...

I'm confused, isn't the whole idea of an app that just loads and displays a website a security issue already? You can just swap out the content on the page to something malicious at any given point without going through store approval yah?

I'm not familiar with app store development, is this a standard way that people develop apps?

I'm a little confused about why you need Unity to launch a web view in full screen. It's been a minute since I've written an Android app, but isn't this like... less than a hundred lines of Java?

Using Virustotal to check for malicious code seems like a good first pass but no guarantee. That asset could easily contain some naughty tracking code that isn't considered malicious enough, or is new enough not to be detected. We can surmise that Unity likely scans assets with commercial solutions, so if malware makes it through to the asset store, we can assume Virustotal wouldn't detect it.

Seems to me Google is trying to discourage free apps by making the process so painful that only people making money off them will jump through the hoops.

Having to upgrade the target API, mentioned in the article, is a good example. If you have 50 apps, just updating that is quite an effort. I started updating some of mine, but after the first few I hit one that required quite a bit of effort. At which point I just said "I'm done". My apps can expire from the store. I'm focusing more on web apps instead.

The reason I picked Android over iOS, and probably the same for a lot of people, was that it was the more open and free (as in freedom) platform. But Google is eroding away at any such advantages it had in that area.

I've seen this tale too many times to believe it. Nine times out of ten, the "asset" will be something that is shady at best. (Especially when it's from a completely new HN account)

I agree this sucks. But why not create a separate account for each app? I know some ios app developers do this so if they want to transfer ownership of an app, it’s a lot easier if you have a separate account.

On the other hand, yes I know that there are some things that you are allowed to do between applications if they are all owned by the same entity.

If I were a customer who contracted out development of a mobile app. I would insist on owning the Google account and having the source code. He said what if this had been work for a client.

Similarly, when I worked for a startup that was positioning itself for an exit (acquisition), I pushed through taking our AWS account out of our MSPs organization and us owning it even at the cost of volume discounts

All my apps have been removed from the Google Play Store

Has anyone gone to arbitration over this?

This type of post has to appear here at least a few times a week. People have got to get wise that google are actually the bad guys here and stop basing their lives and businesses so tightly on their services.

It is also likely Google themselves has been compromised. Those reviewer accounts could have been hacked and thus this kind of spurious behavior. Think of it similar to website defacing, instead of deface, you get random suspension or termination of random app developers. You don't always hear about Google being hacked, but it had happened in the past way more frequently then what were reported. Google biggest issue they have near non existence of customers support engineers there (probably not a glamorous job / career). They rely too much on automated responses with a bunch of if-else like their Diagflow (perhaps now upgraded with Bard). Don't depend on Google store. Support HarmonyOS and Samsung store. Give alternative a stronger support to force Google from monopolistic behavior to market competition. Microsoft over the years demonstrate this is possible. Rely on market and not some dont-do-evil mantra.