Google Suspended apps and Play Store Developer Account without sufficient warning & time after their new policy changes. And now they make us talk to their bots after that!!

This is an open letter to Google’s Play Store Review Team.
Two of My apps were compliant from 2012 to 2018(6 years 100000+ downloads) until Google’s new policy update came in on Oct 2018. My App Got suspended directly, without any prior warning or notification. Lets face it, not everyone reads the “updates to policy” emails and most of the time we interpret it in a wrong way.

Termination Notice

Here’s a reference to the policy update i mentioned at the start of article

The termination occurred following the suspension of the two apps below

com.Pangam_Gaurav.SecretVideoRecorderPro
com.Pangam_Gaurav.SecretVideoRecorder

For those who don’t know what suspended app means : Once your app is suspended you cannot update/modify/unpublish the app.

I filled the appeal form with text saying that

“The App was compliant at the time of publishing, i understand the addition of new policy changes. I would love to comply with it given sufficient time and warning.
I was not aware of the policy update, and would like to comply if the app can be moved to rejected status.
Also i would like to know what happens to my paid user base?.”

And i Got the most relative, expected and well known reply

Primary reply after appeal

As you see its a response from a well designed bot, who does not understand the context.

I replied to this with below email

And again got the well known reply

Now i know there is no use of talking further if the messages are not being read by anyone. So i thought i would write about it here.

Some days later my account got terminated saying terminated due to multiple violations. Well i had another app too, which got suspended for being a non commercial (adfree) fan base app for a online serial, because it had the serial name in it. So now since the number of app suspension had reached the count of 3, the account got terminated.

So what does a developer do in this case? whom should we reach out. Why can’t Google provide a human support to have a conversation and appeal to?.

I have seen the below article and now understand the pain of that person, https://android.jlelse.eu/google-just-terminated-our-start-up-google-play-publisher-account-onchristmas-day-5cb69a454da0 . I also have a startup with a different suite of apps which must be associated to me, just hope that Google’s auto system doesn’t terminate that too calling it as an associated account. Similar to this case https://blog.usejournal.com/google-wrongly-terminated-our-new-business-via-our-google-play-developer-account-5f5b7b742542

Help me out developers, Why are we treated like criminals? what do i do?. Please let me know the links where i can join others who have gone through the same hellish automated process. Hope someone at google notices this, and corrects their process of termination to a human process.

As a fellow developer said : If you happen to be a Google employee, please escalate this issue, share it among your internal channels, do whatever is in your hands to improve the Google Play platforms for us, the developers.

— — — — — — — — — — UPDATE JULY 11 2020 — — — — — — — — -

I lost hope after 3 months, i am sure that no one is going to listen to this, and i don’t even develop for android anymore.

Their message is pretty clear — “Developers are in great numbers who cares about you?”

I had written this story more than a year ago, i tried for 3 months after that but nothing happened. Things i tried

1. Connecting with Google employees through Linkedin
2. Sending emails and appeals to various service points of google.

Connecting with Google employees is easy, they will accept your request and then ignore you forever. Although there was one genuine guy who did reply to my message, but he couldn’t help and stopped replying later.

So what do you do now?. If your account is suspended because of your own apps, you won’t get your account back. Learn to live with it. If your account is blocked due to association to other accounts, there may be a chance.

I decided to move on to other Web technologies and ended developing android apps instead taught it to my colleagues. Never even tried to create other account or publish apps on play store. Although my startup’s account is still active, we barely update those apps or publish new one since we decided to close down our startup a year ago.

Thank you for reading the article and many thanks to ones who tried to help genuinely.

I feel sorry for everyone who is a victim like me. Pass on your expertise to someone, Learn new technologies and move on, expertise never goes wasted!!!