BIGCASH removed Again from PLAY STORE on groundless claims
UPDATE: MY APPEAL HAS BEEN ACCEPTED BY GOOGLE & THE APP IS BACK ON PLAY STORE. THANK YOU GOOGLE
So, you put years of work into perfecting your app, coming up with original ideas to stand out, hiring engineers & designers to continuously improve the app & lastly, hiring a support team of 20 people to help out the users immediately and then one fine day, google suspends your app on violation of spam policy which doesn’t even make sense. Several years of effort reduced to 0 in a split second.
A little about my app
My name is Nayan Jain. I am the founder of Bigcash app (com.bigcash.app). Here is a little description of my app:
Bigcash is a money making app where users complete some tasks like playing games, completing surveys & for each task they complete they get coins(points). Once they reach 2500 coins they can exchange for $15 PayPal cash or whatever gift card they want like amazon, google play, etc
I developed this app in 2017 as I was also a victim to many scam apps on play store that never paid out to me. Moreover, some apps were rigged to never let the user reach the minimum threshold to cash out.
I ensured the payouts to the users should be fair enough and should never be cheated out.
Most of my users use paypal to cash out & some users cash out using amazon.com cards.
The app has over 1 Million downloads & a rating of 4.7. During the COVID-19 situation my app was hope for many people to make money from home when large number of people were getting unemployed. The app downloads almost doubled during this situation. We were quite happy that the app was indeed helping such people make some money.
I have paid over $100,000 in payouts to users over the last 12 months.
INCIDENT NO. 1
I received mail on 6th April 2020 that my app has been removed for violating their spam policy.
I immediately read their spam policy guidelines and was sure that my app didn’t violate any of their spam guidelines. I have already filed an appeal but I would like to make a public appeal directly to google so that a real human from google can get in touch with me and not a bot.
Here are the concrete reasons why my app doesn't violate their spam policy guidelines:
1. My app doesn't violate “Message Spam”
The app doesn’t even have any permission to send SMS, email on behalf of the users. We only accept an email address from user when they want to cash out their coins and we just use it to send their gift card. We never spam them with any promotional offers. NEVER.
2. My app doesn’t violate “Webview and affiliate Spam”
The app has been natively developed on android studio and is no way using a webview to display some other site without permission.
The app’s main purpose is to never redirect the user to make a purchase on a site. They can just do daily check-in, watch videos & use scratch cards to earn 2500 coins and then cash out.
Moreover, we don't even have offers that force users to buy anything. We mostly have game offers from our advertisers that they can play without giving out any information.
3. My app doesn’t violate “Made for Ads”
My app doesn't spam users with full screen or banner ads when they enter, exit or navigate within the app. The only time it displays ad is when the user clicks the daily check-in button.
4. My app doesn’t violate “Repetitive Content”
This answer will be a long one as I will be covering each and everything from how I saw the problem in other apps & came up with a solution in my app & how my app is different & original from the existing ones. I developed this app in 2017.
4.1 FEATURED OFFERS SECTION Of BIGCASH
The first featured I implemented in Bigcash was the featured offers. This feature ensures that the user gets their coins in exactly 1 minute of the usage. To date, no other reward app offers this feature & this is the most loved feature by users.
HOW DID I COME UP WITH IT?
My research included reading the 1 star reviews of the top money making apps & till date those apps have new reviews saying they don't get credited for completing simple offers.
Here is a screenshot from some of the reward app’s 1 star reviews.
4.2 GENEROUS INVITE BONUS
The app gives 20% coins for each hot offer (games, apps, surveys) an invited friend completes. Let's say you invited 1 friend and that 1 friend completes a game offer worth 3000 coins. So, you get 600 coins from him/her. Now, when they complete other hot offers you still get 20% coins for each hot offer they complete. The more friends are invited the more a user can earn.
This was another feature that was original & wasn’t in any way copied from existing apps.
HOW DID I COME UP WITH IT?
All the other apps just gave a referral bonus of around 100 points when their invited friend completes any 2 offer or on similar lines & on top of that the minimum points to cash out are much higher like 5000 points. Here is a screenshot from one of the existing apps vs bigcash to support my claim
4.3 GENEROUS POINTS TO CASH OUT RATIO
The app requires a very low amount of coins to cash out which is just 2500 coins = $15 any gift card or paypal cash. My app was released in MARCH 2017, and it quickly rose to top keyword ranking because of this feature.
HOW DID I COME UP WITH IT?
During 2017, the app store was filled with apps that offered very high points to cash-out ratio. The majority of the apps required 1000 points for $1 which is so disrespectful for the number of hours a user puts in.
In comparison to current existing apps here’s how my app stands. This a direct comparison with one of the existing money apps on play store.
So, if a user decides to use just the daily check-in in both the apps they will reach the minimum cash out as follows
For this app:
The user will earn only $5 in 350 days.
For Bigcash:
The user will earn $15 in 250 days (100 days earlier). (3x better earning rate)
4.4 EXCELLENT SUPPORT TEAM
Now the high paying game offers required you to reach a certain level in the game. For eg: “play king of avalon & reach stronghold level 17 & get 3000 coins”
It might happen that the user completes this action but a completion response is never sent from the advertiser’s game to our servers. In that case, we have to manually reach out to the advertiser, then the advertiser approves and then we manually add points to the account.
To make this happen as fast as possible & credit the missing coins within 12 hours, I started a 24 hour support team to take care of it and credit the missing coins as fast as possible. I started with a team of 2 support member and now there are 20 support members to support the large user base.
HOW DID I COME UP WITH IT?
The same going through 1 star reviews of other apps. There were apps that took as long as 1 to 2 weeks just to respond while some didn't even bother crediting the users their points. This problem still exists in those reward apps till now.
Here is a screenshot from some of the reward app’s 1 star reviews.
4.5 TECHNICALS
=> The app uses material design which makes the navigation nice & clean.
=> It supports the majority of the lower end devices & runs smoothly on them.
=> The app has 99.96% crash-free devices
=> App has around 40% Day 7 retention. I don’t have a screenshot as google is blocking the access to this data as the app is suspended.
GOOGLE PLEASE RESPOND
It is very unfair of google to take down a very well thought app on the basis that the app was a copy of other apps which in reality it isn’t.
I feel so abandoned & lost. Even when you are doing the right thing, you are still kicked out by their erroneous algorithm.
You develop the product with so much blood & sweat and it is removed on baseless claims is such a disgrace from them & what hurts the most is that they are saying that the app is of low quality.
As usual, the human email contact in the CC is not bothered to reply.
At this point in time, my company, several engineers, designers & support staff’s jobs are at stake. Moreover, 100k plus user’s efforts are at stake.
It is extremely discouraging for honest developers who really want to contribute to help the society at this point in time.
It would be really helpful if any human from Google can get in touch with me and sort out the issue.
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