How Google destroyed our startup by terminating our Google Play Developer Account
First of all, anyone reading this post, I wish health to you and your loved ones in this tough time of the pandemic.
After seeing the above image it might come to your mind why would I attach such an irrelevant image. To clarify, This is a huge dustbin of google and that piece of paper includes some of the wrong fully terminated developer accounts, terminated startups, Terminated Dreams, and lives!
I decided to talk publicly about How google destroyed our startup. We’re a gaming-based startup. We have a small team of developers who produce state-of-the-art games and publish them in the play store. We Invested 3 years of hard work, blood, and sweat to produce 10 games and 4 of them are multiplayer games. 2 of our multiplayer games were very popular in the United States and European locations. We made investments of our hard-earned money for marketing purposes to make our games reach the right audiences. You can check stats of our terminated account in appbrain.
After a continuous struggle of 2.5 years, 2 of our multiplayer games have received tremendous amounts of love from users. Almost all of our games were rated 4.5+ stars. And downloaded a million times combined!
Everything was going well and we were working continuously to make our games even more interesting and fun. But suddenly on the early morning of 25th Sept, We’ve received a mail from google play developer support that our developer account 6ACE GAMES (sixacegames@gmail.com) is terminated for either prior violations in this account or any other associated accounts. Check below image
We got shocked seeing the mail, it was groundbreaking for us. Because to date, we’ve never received any type of suspensions to any of our games. As far as policy is concerned they have contacted us previously and we solved all of the issues to their satisfaction. This mail left me speechless. All my and my team’s dreams, hard work, everything is just crushed like paper and thrown into a dustbin. I initially thought that this decision might be in error, so I had appealed to them through a provided link in the mail. Please note here I have to appeal only in 1000 chars. How can you explain such a sensitive issue in 1000 chars?
They responded after 2 days that they reviewed and confirmed the association with another banned developer account Check the below screenshot for their answer.
I told them that something might have gone wrong because we don’t have any other play store accounts at all. But they denied it by repeating the same automated answer. In search of what to do next, I have found many stories similar to mine and the Internet is filled with their automated answer’s horror stories. After their reply, I tried contacting some googlers I know because of their hangouts sessions and other events. I’ve sent them a mail expressing my situation but no response. I tried contacting them, But no response. I tried tweeting to google play dev’s official Twitter handle in the hope that I’ll get human attention So that I can explain to them what is happening! But guess what they tweeted the same automated reply.
Their Responses,
After this, I’ve had a meeting with my entire team and we tried to figure out why this happened. We’ve been left to make wild guesses because no information is provided in google’s mails and they were repeating the same automated replies. We’ve concluded that the below 3 can be possible reasons why google thought that we have multiple banned accounts. Please note that here I have to think about what google thought and blocked our account and What’s their AIs thought before crushing our future, We have to do it because they do not provide any single information at all!
So here are some, Maybe/May not be reasons we found
Possible Reason 1: Unhealthy Competition Practices: Competitors using our ad ids and publisher codes inside their policy incompliant apps and violates policy knowingly to trigger associate accounts!
After our analysis, we came to know that there are some malicious practices used to get competitor developer accounts banned. One reason for wrongly found association can be any competitor/unauthorized user decoded our games or used our publisher code In their app-ads.txt or putting our ad ids in their policy incompliant apps knowingly. So because of serious violations, Google blocks/terminates their account and it misleads to our account as well. This can be a case as well. Internet is already filled with such stories, Here’s the onePossible Reason 2: Series of Suspicious Login Activities happened in our google Account on 11th of September and 24th of September,
SEP 9, 2021: Our Network got infected by a Trojan/RansomWare.
SEP 9 2021: Our AdMob account got logged in by an unauthorized user in the United States. [Also can be seen in Google login history].
SEP 11 2021: someone tried to log in to our developer account! Login Got Blocked by Google and also by us using two factors authentication.
SEP 24 2021: During a routine tech checkup we found out that our network is infected and we took necessary actions. Also, one of our manager’s PCs was compromised so we have wiped entire hard drives to be sure that there is no virus in the network!
SEP 24 2021: During this whole series of events none of our user’s data was compromised because it was stored in a separate unix server in the United States.
SEP 24 2021: In our manager’s pc the password was saved in the chrome browser for the developer account at the time of the attack. Because he was a responsible person to answer user queries received in mails and in-app reviews. All the chrome’s saved passwords were compromised because of the Trojan attack.
SEP 24 2021: We’ve received a notification from Google about suspicious login using the device “android 4.4” located in the United Kingdom with our password in our developer account, we blocked the login immediately. After some time our manager also got the same suspicious login notification to his personal account, device name “android 4.4”. Please note the password of his personal account was also saved into chrome as mentioned earlier. We changed all the credentials after such events.
SEP 25 2021: Early morning we got a notification that our play developer account is terminated for the association of other banned accounts.
Check Below Screenshots of suspicious logins,
This can be the reason. Someone might have tried VPNs or other malicious software for logging into our account, and god(and google as well) knows how many banned accounts were opened with that networks/VPN server’s IP address. This may be a possible reason for Google’s AI flagging us for having multiple accounts.
Possible Reason 3: We recently shifted our office to a new location because we were affected by covid situations! some other developers may have used our old location’s network to publish their policy incompliant apps in the play store.
We appealed again to google for all these possible reasons for our wrongful termination.
It is so sad that a developer has to make wild guesses to appeal for why his/her hard work is being wrongfully terminated. As you might see in all possible reasons we have nothing to do with any associations found.
And we received the same automated reply again, denying our appeal and confirming the association.
I don’t know why Google suddenly thinks that we’re associated with multiple banned accounts. I have personally attended so many GDG conferences they organize in my city. I opposed the spamming in many of those conferences and this is the reward I’m getting for being so honest! Our entire startup is at stake. We invested 8 years of our lives to learn this platform of google, to develop something unique and fun. Everything is gone!
I never felt this helpless. I’ve tried all the possible ways to reach out to them but I end up getting no response or a bot’s response. Isn’t it unfair!
You might left with some confusions after reading this post, Please pardon me i should have attached more about our background info first
ABOUT US
First of all sorry for my bad English. It is not my first language so. You might got some questions like
Q: Who are we?
A: We are simply a india based gaming startup. We had 8-10 games published on our playstore account.
Q:Why do we mentions address of UK on our tweeter handle?
A:. According to google policy we have to provide a physical address if we want to use in-app-purchases. This physical address is visible publicly on our games pages.
Reason providing our uk address is we have a representative living there who can reply to any type of physical communications such as letters on behalf of us. He also can reply to various other stuffs like GDPR and different other policies. For ex. You can send a latter to the given address to get in touch with us! Please note that google’s policy is just for communication address they don’t particularly need the business address!
Q: Where can i find your games incase i want to see them?
A: You can find it on apk pure. let me provide you links,
- https://apkfab.com/developer/6Ace%20Games
- https://m.apkpure.com/developer/6Ace%20Games
- https://appgrooves.com/publisher/6Ace+Games/6ace-games
Q: Where to check details about your Play Store account?
A: You can click on this app brain link to verify. Please note that you may not find all our games details because of account termination app brain will delist the apps as well. Make sure you check all the apps shown in timeline section!
Q:How we monetized our games?
A: Through admob and in-app products. Nothing shady!
Q:Our games was providing gambling?
A: No, It's just simulations. You can't win money or bet money, Not at all!
Q: what about your domain 6acegames.com?
A: Yes, our domain 6acegames.com is new. The reason behind it is very silly you may find it funny but still let me tell you!, at first we have bought domain sixacegames.com(you can check reg. details) thinking it will help in seo and all because we didn't want to include a number "6" in our domain. But later after our games got popular user started searching for 6Acegames that's why we bought this domain as well in may 2021 just to build the presence on google search.
Q: What about social media?
A:we are not very active in social media. As you can see in our tweeter handle we have 0 followers. The reason is simple we never promoted it to our users. Although we have some followers on our Instagram handle, but they follow us because we provide free perks occasionally to our audience.
If you’re reading this and believe that this is wrong then please share it so that I can get the attention of any human inside google who really can check all the details! Your one share/post/tweet can save us from being destroyed!
UPDATE:
08 OCT 2021,
Finally, Google has reinstated our account. In this tough time of ours, few good hearts helped us tremendously. I’m thankful to all Android Developer communities who helped us and shared our story. And especially to Mr. Artem Russakovskii, the founder of androidpolice.com and apkmirror.com.
Artem shared our story on various platforms, I’ve never met such a selfless person in my lifetime. I was not known to him until I saw his tweet from past raising his voice against the wrongful terminations by Google’s AI.
After seeing his tweet of the past, I sent a message to him seeking out help, He suggested presenting all the facts publicly and let the people know about this injustice. I did the same. And he also shared our article with his social media communities. Some people also wrongly accused him, I won’t blame all those people because in today’s time no one would believe that such a selfless person still exists.
Because of his support, many lives has been saved, I and my entire team are thankful to him till the universe exists!
We were also accused of many things, but as they say, love always outperforms hate!
All those accusations have been proven wrong, Here’s Google’s reply:
Peace✌!