Google Bans Developer for Life | Hacker News Reader

Google Bans Developer for Life

medium.com

18 pointsanonymous19837 comments

You get an app banned and it doesn't occur to you that maybe you should pull the other apps that couple violate the same nebulous terms? The "I grew up in the 70s/80s and it was cool to defy authority if you didn't agree" argument is a canard. If you claim to be a professional developer then act like one. Getting in a pissing contest with Google will not end well.

Expecting Google to act like a sane company for one developer in a garage is naive.

Guy makes a bunch of spammy apps that clearly rip off third party trademarks, gets banned from Google Play. While I think this could have been handled better from Google's side (such as a way to let him post a new app in the future, with appropriate review, if he agreed to knock it off), I'm not sure what else you'd expect. He even acknowledges ripping off the app icons.

I agree that he did violate one of their terms of service, and, like you, I believe it is unfair and too extreme to ban him from ever submitting an app to the Google Play store again.

The author links to a few other people who have also been banned. It's amazing that Google does not provide some way for developers to get reinstated in the Google Play store. Google basically owns the Android app market space and a ban for life is too severe.

It is possible to be reinstated, but very difficult - I signed up for a Play Developer account a year ago, and didn't end up using it at all. A few months later, I got an email saying my Play Developer and Wallet accounts were banned. I emailed their appeals system once and got an autoresponse saying it wouldn't be reviewed. I emailed again and got a personal response saying they couldn't tell me why they banned it for "security reasons". I pushed them, and they finally told me it was part of some sort of auto-ban on a Play Developer account that had also banned all other "associated" accounts. I only have one account. I asked them to investigate further, and got told it wouldn't be reviewed. I finally managed to contact someone at Google Support who helped put me through to someone on the Google Play team, who finally confirmed it was a bug in their system designed to automatically find associated accounts when banning a particular account. Someone else had been banned, and I was caught up in the sweep.

I finally got my Play Developer and Wallet accounts reinstated, and I promptly shut down my Play Developer account so that I wouldn't risk having my Wallet account accidentally banned again due to someone else's actions. Now I just develop for iOS.

1. The author chose to blatantly ignore clear signs of a problem.

2. Then proceeds to make all sorts of insane and stupid reasoning to defend what is obviously his problem for ignoring the issues.

3. Even after the lifetime ban came in, he chooses to ignore the problem was with him and what he chose to do, and instead still holds his innocence and expects someone on Google's end will realize their mistake when in fact it was his.

I believe a lifetime is a bit too harsh. But I also believe that when someone makes a mistake and doesn't bother to realize the problem themselves and instead continue to cry innocence like a dunce, they probably should remain banned until they get a clue.

Also the argument that others got away with it is NEVER a good argument for why you should be allowed to do something (not saying thats what he said) or that it should be okay for you in any way (something he did say).

While I think this guy was more than a little ignorant and probably should have been more careful, Google's policy here is just ridiculous. Banning someone from literally everything and offering no real process for contacting the company is more than over the top.

I lost my Google AdSense account a while back because I forgot to update my address when I graduated from college. There's no way to get it back, and if you create a new one it immediately recognizes you and tells you to use the old one. There's no customer support you can talk to.

If Google wants to stick by their whole "Don't be evil" mantra, they really need to look into their customer support policies in general.

Like others here I'm a little short on sympathy for the author specifically, if Google bans one app, I think I'd be upset about it enough to not just let it go under the assumption I was innocent - obviously someone or something at Google disagreed.

However I do think that banning anyone "for life" over three apps is a bit much. Ban the developer account, fine, but Google has gone to such great lengths to entrench people in their own ecosystem that a more widespread ban (like Wallet) can have repercussions far more punishing than the crime.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com