Would love to sympathize but I can’t agree with their “neighbour” analogy. A more apt analogy is this: If someone has illegal dealings in the past, and you conduct business with them in the present, the authorities are well within their rights to investigate you. If you didn’t know beforehand, the investigation should convince you to cease further activities. If you did know and still proceeded, it’s your own damn fault.
Tl;dr: Cut ties with the app developer, create a fresh google play dev account and deploy your app.
I do agree that Google’s customer support is sorely lacking. If they’re collecting 30% of every purchase, they need to hire real people to deal with these issues. That’s a big chunk of change to collect and not provide any service against.
Edit: While it’s tempting to play the victim, business in the real world also works this way. Businesses can end up tainted by association with sketchy parties or other businesses that act poorly. A good chunk of business is word of mouth and trusting the other party. No one wants to do business with someone untrustworthy.
In this case, this is the exact reason why Google charges for the creation of a developer account. Having them put the money towards manual review before termination sounds extremely sensible. Especially in this case, where it sounds like the apps were selling, and Google took a cut of that the entire time; it's not like they refunded it when they decided they didn't like that business anymore.
So we brokered this app acquisition. The seller (original coder of the app) sold the ownership to this buyer. After paying for and receiving the app, this buyer initiated a wrongful chargeback (we paid out the seller already, so we took the hit as the broker and escrow provider).
So in essence, since he "returned" the app to us, we now own it, and therefore, the app developer community now owns it.
The app was published many years ago by Whitescape, the agency we owned at that point. I was born in Russia 35+ years ago. But now I'm the resident of Canada. Google has never asked me about this.
But even that must not be the case: since then the Google Play account and it's payment profile are associated with Riders app Inc (the US Delaware c-corp) and our new bank account is with Mercury (Evolve bank and Trust)
I read an another thread where there were questions about legitimacy of the app. And here we are: we have 25k+ positive ratings, the app is unique, it provides value for tens of thousands of active users.
The full disclosure is: we've closed our previous bank account to open a new one. Google tried to send a payment to our previous bank account, it has returned, they instantly locked our payments profile and that's it, the whole story.
1. Some background process, probably part of Google Play services, installed the app. Users were not notified that the app was installed. Eventually the app, once already installed and running, would put up a notification asking if the user wanted to participate.
The app was intentionally subtle, in that it had no application icon, which would presumably make it very difficult for user to disable contract tracing if they had enabled it. If you managed to uninstall the app, it would get reinstalled silently again.
2. The lawsuit alleges that there was no legal requirement or court order. Even if there had been, the lawsuit argues that the conduct would still have violated federal and state law and constitutions.
It is really pretty shitty, and, IANAL, probably is/was illegal, with the caveats that (a) I'm not sure whether Massachusetts or Google or both should be considered responsible; and (b) they might try to argue that a user's acceptance of Google's ToS and privacy policy constitutes permission.
We has a small niche product in Google Play, worked 100% offline, so quite secure for the user privacy and so on, had ratings of about 3.7. The service had generated about $30.000 and would have generated another $30.000 in it's lifetime, unless Google had, quite unjustly, taken it out spring 2019. When we tried to discuss about it, we got what we understood was a threat to close our account. Obviously we talked to some person, I wonder if he had been told to treat us like sh or if there was some other reason. Obviously, for the next apps, we are thinking furiously on how to not be dependent on app stores.
There was an eventual copyright complaint and cease&desist which I had no intent to fight. I talked with a lawyer (friend of my family) who said I could probably win or find a settlement in court.
They only went after the app a few years after the show was in its prime (it was making ~40$ a month more or less) so I just removed the application from the Android Play Store as that was all they were asking for.
It never happened. Why are you telling outright lies in public? Obviously the download of that app is entirely voluntary, and just as obviously, Google has no clue about your status unless you disclose it to them.
>Hi,
We have reviewed your appeal and will not be reinstating your app. This decision is final and we will not be responding to any additional emails regarding this removal.
If your account is still in good standing and the nature of your app allows for republishing you may consider releasing a new, policy compliant version of your app to Google Play under a new package name. We are unable to comment further on the specific policy basis for this removal or provide guidance on bringing future versions of your app into policy compliance. Instead, please reference the REASON FOR REMOVAL in the initial notification email from Google Play.
---
So you spend time investing in their platform, learning their outdated toolchain, make them money, and they can just shut you down for no reason. It's no wonder the vast majority of mobile apps are side-projects. Who in their right mind would quit their job and join this crap-shoot.
Another question would be: If google gives me an app from their official playstore, on their OS, should they be considered responsible for any loss that it causes to bank accounts, or we have given up accountability for big corps, hope regulators are sleeping well
We developed a free social media application back in 2016 that cost us about $500,000 to build. We provided multiple safety filters including world filters, neural net pornography detection for profile avatars, etc. The application had a user profile search function. We had about 100,000 downloads in less than a year. I'm sure that 99.9% of user profiles did not contain any sexual material. Certainly less than Twitter has, where you can search for explicit porn. Google found a rare edge case that our ML model missed and removed the app from the Play store. With a single automated email half a million dollars was gone from my bootstrapped company. Is there anything I can do?
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