My seven years old Google Play Developer account has been terminated

UPDATE:

My appeal was accepted and I got my account back after 16 days.

TL;DR
My seven years old Google Play Developer account has been terminated, and all my apps have been removed from the Google Play Store.
I have submitted an appeal and am currently awaiting a response.
In the unlikely event that someone at Google is reading this, my ticket number is 1–4856000034797

Long version:

I have been publishing Android and iOS apps since 2016. I have developed many apps, both free and paid. Some of them are moderately succesfull.
It’s not my daily job, but I dedicate almost all my free time to creating and improving apps.

Last Friday I received an email from Google Play about one of my apps:

Your app has been suspended and removed due to the policy issue(s) listed below.
Issue found: MALWARE, BEHAVIOR TRANSPARENCY AND MOBILE UNWANTED SOFTWARE

It’s not the first time that Google removes one of my apps for a policy violation, and I guess this is a common experience for an Android developer.
When you receive such an email, you are required to submit an appeal if you think they are wrong, or to fix the issue and upload a new version of the app if you know they are right.
Sometimes Google is kind enough to give a you a grace period before removing the app, but most of the times it removes it immediately.

This time, however, it was different. One minute later, I received a second email:

This is a notification that your Google Play Developer account has been terminated.

Please note the term used: terminated. Not suspended, or frozen. Terminated.

I could easily verify that, yes, my developer account was terminated and as a consequence all of my apps, to which I had dedicated so much time and effort over the past seven years, were removed from the Google Play Store.
This reminded me the scene in which Thanos snaps his fingers, causing half of the creatures in the universe to disappear.
Unfortunately, Google was not as merciful as Thanos and snapped its fingers twice over my apps.

I tried to stay calm and analyse what could have happened.
The app that led to account termination is built with Unity, as all my other apps, but it’s the only one that uses a particular asset that I bought on the Unity Asset Store.
I use this asset to launch the web browser in full screen, linking to an online webpage that I created, featuring a very simple paint program written in Javascript.
Given that the issue found by Google was “malware”, the first thing I thought was that my webpage had been hackered and injected with malicious code.
I checked that, but my webpage was intact. I also checked it with Virustotal, no detections.

My second thought was that I updated that app a few day ago to upgrade the target API level to 33 (this is required by Google, otherwise apps are not visible to new devices) and in that occasion I also updated the aforementioned Unity asset to the latest version.
Could the Unity asset contain malicious code? So I checked that one too with Virustotal, and again, no detections.
Finally I checked with Virustotal the aab package of my app that I published on Google Play Store. No detections.

So, at least for Virustotal, my app does not contain malicious code.

Unfortunately, as some of you may know if you have experience with publishing apps to Google Play Store, the email that Google send you for such situations consists in a copy and paste, absolutely unhelpful, generic descripition of the problem.
If you have done something so terribly wrong to cause your account to be terminated, and to remove all your apps, you would expect at least an email properly written by a human being, with evidences of the mistake you have done.

Instead, this is the the copy and paste email I received:

App Status: Suspended

Your app has been suspended and removed due to the policy issue(s) listed below.
Issue found: MALWARE, BEHAVIOR TRANSPARENCY AND MOBILE UNWANTED SOFTWARE

Your app is not compliant with the Deceptive Behaviour policy. We expect app functionality to be reasonably clear to users, and we’ve determined your app includes hidden, dormant or undocumented features.Additionally we’ve identified your app falls into one or both of the two categories below:

Your app contains code that could put a user, a user’s data, or a device at risk, and/or

Your app does not deliver on the promises made to the user.

The email continues with links to Google documentation.

Please note the abundance of “or” and “and/or” in such email.
Does my app include hidden features? Or dormant? Or undocumented?
Does my app put user’s data at risk? Or is device at risk? And/or it doesn’t deliver the promises that it makes to the user?

Unfortunately there was no evidence of such wrong behaviour, not a single screenshot, nothing.
Google doesn’t tell you exactly what you have done wrong. It’s impicit that you perfectly know what you have done wrong, because you are bad person and you did it on purpose.

The only positive aspect of this story is that I didn’t create apps for someone else.
Had I been developing apps for paying clients, it would have led to significant legal complications.

My guess is that big companies publishing on Google Play Store may not face such abrupt actions from Google.
May be Google has so many hobbyist developers and small companies trying to publish apps, that it can’t even handle them anymore, and terminating their accounts is a winning strategy for saving resources.
The fact that Google only charges a one-time small fee for a developer account, in contrast to Apple’s $100 annual fee, might contribute to this.

In my seven years of experience, I’ve never encountered such issues when publishing on the App Store. Apps may be rejected before publication, but once they are published, they remain there. I would gladly pay Google an annual fee for Apple-level support as a developer.

In my humble opinion publishing on the Google Play Store is suitable for:

• Hobbyists creating apps for fun, not as a business.
• Large companies that, I suspect, receive respectful treatment from Google and don’t experience mass app removals.

For anything in between, stay away.