Google cancels our Google Play publisher account and ends my family’s source of income

Open letter from an Android developer to the Android community and especially to Purnima Kochikar, Director of Google Play, Apps & Games at Google.

Introduction

I have been developing applications for Android for almost 7 years. At first, I started developing applications as a hobby to learn this wonderful world and later, I became part of a company where we teach people to create their own applications and create their own app business.

I think that Google Play is the best application distribution platform of all time, but I also think that it fails in something very important, such as customer service for developers.

Developer Support:

There are other Google services such as Admob and Google Ads and for example if I have a problem with Google Ads I can contact them and they quickly offer me support. To try to improve advertising campaigns, you don’t even have to be the one to contact them, but they themselves send you an email saying that they are at your disposal. In fact, on one occasion I had a conversation with a very nice woman on Google Meet. On the other hand, if I have a problem as a developer on Google Play, things change, I only get a text form and always answers from templates, so I can never get “Human” support when I have a problem with my developer account.

It is possible to think that with applications there are usually no problems or that these happen very rarely, but the true is that problems arise more frequently than we might expect. When you have a problem with an application, the support team send you an email saying what the problem is, you correct it, you send an update and they review it to verify that everything is fine; however, on other occasions the application is removed and in this case it is when the problem gets worse for the developer since while the application is removed it stops earning revenue from advertising and you must republish it.

But everything does not end here, it can be even worse. For example, as it has happened to me, you could receive an email that says:

“Termination of your Google Play publisher account”

I think that as they say…. “A picture is worth a thousand words”, so here I show an image of that email.

Yes, my “personal editor account” was deleted on December 2021:

It say that “If you think this termination may have been in error, please contact our policy support team”.

Well, “contacting the support team” consists of filling out a character limited text field called “Reinstatement Appeal”

I completed that field asking for a more detailed explanation, and despite the fact that they say that they will respond within 7 days, that was December 21 and today is January 31 and they still have not answered.

Has the story already finished?

No, there is more, my wife and I are both developers and she has her own developer account. 4 days after I received the email her “Christmas gift” arrived. On December 25 my wife found the dreaded email. For my surprise, it was the same “Account Termination” email template

This ruined Christmas with my family

Of course, my wife appealed and 1 month and 4 days later, that is, yesterday, January 28 (remember they said that they answer within 7 days), she received a response. First it was an email saying that they were going to review it and, a few hours later, she received the cancellation.

Searching in Google I have discovered that this same thing has happened to many other developers and they are receiving precisely the same template responses.

We have tried to get help through other channels such as @GooglePlayDev but it takes us to the same appeal text form.

We are very disappointed and wonder…..How does Google allow this to happen? How can you get to this point of making such a critical decision without prior communication? Who is “sahilbansal”, the person who is copied in one of those emails and Mia the person who signed the reply? Are they really human? Are they bots? Are they responsible for the decisions? Do they have a minimal understanding of what it means to develop and publish an application?

We have lost everything

On my developer account I had some apps that were doing very well with quite a few active users and 1 million downloads and my wife’s account had two apps that were starting to catch on.

This means:

• We have lost everything we have worked on in these 6 years, reputation, downloads, positioning in the store….
• We have lost the income that our applications generated us with the ads, which were our only source of income
• Our users will not be able to get future updates and will never know what has happened
• We have probably lost our job since they in their emails say….”Do not try to register a new developer account. All new accounts will be closed and the developer registration fee will not be refunded. We recommend that you use an alternative method to distribute your applications in the future.”

Are autoresponders good?

Google pays a lot of attention to ensuring quality, user experience, and security for its billions of customers, and I think that’s PERFECT.

What seems wrong to me is how it is handled, especially the fact that the responses received when asking for clarification on account cancellation appear to be coming from templates or automated response systems.

I think that just like my wife and I, the other people who are going through this situation would like to know…

Who decides that an account has to be cancelled? Are the accounts only canceled at Christmas time? (Because I have seen that many developers have had their accounts terminated around this time). And since it seems that the appeals are worthless… They never make any mistakes?

At this point, the only thing I can do is to alert Android developers and tell them that Google Play can terminate their accounts at any time without notice and without giving any valid explanation. That is what I have been able to verify after seeing that it has happened to many more people.
I think that to solve the problems that may arise, we as developers deserve and need more transparency and an adequate communication channel with human interaction.

The reason for writing these words is to give visibility to this problem and make it reach the people who can solve it.

If you’re a Google employee, please share this across your internal channels so I can reach people who can figure it out.

From the point of view of a developer, I think that Google Play is not working as it should and the only one who can help us is Google itself.

We find ourselves in a somewhat complicated situation seeing our business thrown away after so much time and effort that it has cost us to build it.

Best regards.
January 29th, 2022, Badajoz, Spain
Roberto Carreño