How Google complicates the migrants lives in Russia via termination the Google Play account without reasons.
If you represent a small company or a start-up you can lose everything in two shakes. You will never know the reason for the termination and, what is more important, you can’t do anything to change the situation cause Google won’t let you connect with the Google Play Team, except Google bot.
We’re looking for Android Community’s support in order to show Google that our problem is not a solitary instance and Google policy with respect to automatic termination of Google Play accounts must be corrected in favor of developers, users and the society at large.
2 years ago me and my colleague have realized that a lot of migrants in Russia have problems with adaptation, work etc. We started to conduct research of the migrant’s needs and their problems in 2016. Generally, migrants in Russia are builders, drivers and improvers, people who seasonally come here to work in order to feed their families in their homelands. We thoroughly studied this market, established and developed approaches to work with this audience.
Imagine for a minute, that a person who finds himself in a foreign country can get all relevant information from a single application: from obtaining the necessary work permits to finding a suitable employer. In 2017 we were ready to start the app’s development and selected the company which could help us to implement our idea. We used behance and freelancer to consolidate the best designers and experienced developers for our app. We were really happy because we could find appropriate partners and they entered upon designing the app.
We realized that migrants wait for the iMigrant release and, finally, after large number of tests, corrections of bugs the app iMigrant was released in April 2018. We conducted A/B testing and improved the app for our users, they expressed their opinions about interface, functionality. Our users helped us to be better. We also realized that our users don’t speak English and they’re not fluent in Russian, that’s why we made for them the versions in Tajik and Uzbek languages.
The app wasn’t advertised. The iMigrant was found by users through Play Market without PR campaign. We’ve recently started to manage our pages in social networks.
Without words, our app represents like a social product, the commercial part is secondary.
We had been wasting all the funds to develop and improve the mobile app, we got positive feedbacks via Play Store and were happy about it.
I had been informed of the termination via email on 8th December 2018 and we realized signing in to the account is no longer possible. When I clicked the link play.google.com/apps/publish I just saw 403 error
We were really puzzled by this termination. We even couldn’t imagine what’s wrong with our account. We sent a message to Google Support to get the information.
I got an email from the Google Play Team much faster than 72 hours because the sender was just a bot and the answer was very rough and it didn’t answer the main question: what is the reason of the termination?
I couldn’t believe what I was reading — my account had been terminated because of an ‘associated’ account. But our account definitely can’t be ‘associated’ cause only me and my app developer had the access to the account. Moreover, the app wasn’t advertised and we didn’t use Google Ads, we were connected to Firebase but we didn’t do any activities here. That’s why I was still confident the situation would be resolved quickly, and we sent a message through Google Play Developer on-line chat explaining there must have been a mistake unless our account was fraudulently used without my knowledge. We also asked for a contact that we could speak to so that we could resolve the situation.
We were told that our question is about Google Play Policy Team and they can’t assist us. We can’t believe that associated account Firebase led to the termination of our account and it ruined our business totally since our audience (migrants) use only Android devices.
We sent an email back to the Google Play Team with an explanation that it might be an error, unless our account was fraudulently used without our knowledge. We asked for the contacts that we could speak to so that we could resolve the situation.
My request for the contacts was completely ignored and on 14th January 2019 we received the email and we were happy about that, but our joy was gone after read the email.
And the answer was : «After further reviewing, we have confirmed our initial decision and will not be able to reinstate your developer account.»
Our anxiety has become unbearable. The app and the business are lost due to loss of cross-platform functionality. Contacting someone from Google is impossible to solve our problem. We contacted @googleplaydev via Facebook and received the following response when requesting contact information for someone who can understand our business:
We started to search on forums for help and there were countless developers who had posted about similar situations they had been in and none of them were able to get their situation resolved. We quickly started to lose all hope when we came across an open letter from an app developer who had managed to get his rejected appeal overturned and his developer account and apps reinstated.
We wrote about our problem on Reddit, the Google Play Help Forum, Toster. We even sent a letter to the Google representative office in Russia, Moscow (tracking number 63009929212883, 63009931277023, 63099230986658).
And here are some appeals:
[6–3660000024850] [7–4690000024452 [2–9991000024439]
[6–5932000025138] [7–7280000024806] [5–4676000025586]
At the moment our problem isn’t solved. That’s why our only option is connecting the Google employees to find out if they would look into our case. As of February 25, 2019, we received no further replies to my emails to Google Play Developer Support or Facebook messages, we even haven’t received the response to our official letter, which we sent to the representative office in Russia (7 Baltschug St., Moscow, 115035).
I have received no further responses to my emails.
We have no strength left to comment the lack of customer support from Google. So how can Google terminate an account without verifying the reasons for its termination? We just were terminated. Probably, it is easy and better for Google to accuse 1000 innocents than to find the one guilty.
We can’t believe that a lot of migrants in Russia are deprived of the opportunity of using our app. The migrant’s integration problem is topical all over the world. They need to find a job to know the law and to live comfortably in the receiving country. How Google can take away from them this help without charge or trial?
We refuse to believe that this is Google’s policy today.
We’re counting on your help. We’re counting on those who read us now, please leave a comment, share the information, because this is our common termination’s problem. We strongly believe that the Google Play Team will take the first step to meet us and restore the account.
After all, we did a great job and improved the app and here is its new description for the Play Store.
Thank you for your support!
Dear Google Play Review Team & Google Play Policy Support Team please review our app and the account, we have amended the app and made new description to be even more useful for Google Play users.
I strongly believe that Google will positively respond to our team and in turn, we will do everything in our ability to make the lives of migrant workers on our planet better.
By the way, I’m Maksim, the Head of the iMigrant project.
