Google Terminated Our Google Play Developer AccountWith No Reason or Warning Thanks to It’s Faceless Bots
If you’ve ever wondered why antitrust laws exist or why monopolies are bad, just read the hundreds of articles by developers whose accounts have been terminated by Google without warning. This week, it happened to us as well.
We received the gut wrenching email below from Google. The worst part about this (besides the whole destroying our livelihood thing) is that we received ZERO previous emails about any violations. So @GooglePlayDev Google B2B Team Google Developers, what exactly did we do wrong? And why does the email from Google say previous emails were sent when no emails were sent?
This is a notification that your Google Play Publisher account has been terminated.
REASON FOR TERMINATION: Prior violations of the Developer Program Policies and Developer Distribution Agreement by this or associated accounts as outlined in previous emails sent to the registered email address(es) of the Publisher account(s).
Google Play Publisher suspensions are associated with developers, and may span multiple account registrations and related Google services.
You can visit the Developer Policy Center to better understand how we enforce Developer Program Policies. If you’ve reviewed the policy and feel this termination may have been in error, please reach out to our policy support team.
Do not attempt to register a new developer account. We will not be restoring your account at this time.
The Google Play Team
About our startup, which Google is trying to destroy.
Our company is Flamingo and we are a resident engagement platform. We provide branded white-labeled apps to apartment buildings that residents in those buildings can use for everything from rent payment to booking a maid.
We have spent the last 4 years building a solid business that our customers love and in one faceless automated bot-sent email, Google is trying to destroy. Our team has spent the last few hours tryin to figure out exactly what Google Play policy we could be violating and cannot figure it out:
- Is it because we provide branded templated apps? No, that can’t be the case because there are many companies like Mindbody or Virtuagym who also provide branded templated apps. And these companies have hundreds of templated apps.
- Is it because one of our team members with account access to our company Google Play Console has a personal account that was terminated? Nope, we have checked and none of them have personal accounts.
- Is our app missing some key functionality or user privacy issues? No, we have thoroughly check and we are following all industry best practices.
So what’s next?
We have sent an appeal to Google and reached out to them on Twitter but have yet to receive a reply. From what I have heard from other developers, we are most likely to get a response from a bot instead of a real person.
But we will continue to press this issue until we get reinstated because no decent company should operate like this where they simply ruin your business using a faceless bot.
For anyone that can help, please help us with advice or by tweeting or sharing this article.