Google destroyed our business. Because they can.
All of a sudden Google suspended YoCutie. This is how we went out of business.
Update
Tuesday June 16, 2020. YoCutie is back on Google Play. Yesterday we received the email that after further review, Google has accepted our appeal. Today YoCutie became available again on Google Play, so that it can be installed from there. It was “off” for more than 10 days and this is not acceptable — after all there was no reason to suspend us in the first place. And for a social app this can be the death blow. Google needs to work on improving its processes regarding the handling of Apps on Google Play. Now, you’re welcome to read the whole story…
With nearly 10 million installs, very good reviews and ratings and more than 5 years of being online, Google all of a sudden suspended the YoCutie app! There was no warning, no prior communication — just nothing. We are out of business now. Welcome to the closed garden of Google Play where Google has all the power.
YoCutie
YoCutie is a dating app which we offer for iOS and Android (read Google Play). It’s been online now for about 7 years. It’s different to other dating apps because it’s 100% free. And we really mean free. There is absolutely nothing that you can buy. We have an average rating of about 4 stars on both platforms. Most of our users love the app and especially that we offer an honest and fair dating experience without costs. I also have to mention that 90% of our users are Android users and that’s why Google Play is so important to the survival of YoCutie. Learn more about YoCutie here.
Suspension
Thursday June 4, 2020, is a day that I will definitely never forget because that’s when Google Play simply suspended the YoCutie app without any warning. It just disappeared. Users that had the app installed could still run it but nobody can find it anymore on Google Play.
It’s like a club (this is similar to a dating app) where no new people come in. Just the old people dance. What will happen to the club after a while? The same as for a dating app. It will die.
So what was the reason for the suspension? One picture with barely visible nipples was the reason to suspend a dating app with nearly 7 million users and millions of pictures that have been verified manually and by AI. All the other social sharing apps that actually show explicit content, seem to be okay in the eyes of Google. Conversely, YoCutie that really does care about that topic and does a lot to tackle it, is apparently not okay.
To me it seems arbitrary and largely dependent on the reviewer that has been assigned to your app. Furthermore, It would appear that the Top Apps with more than 100 million installs enjoy special privileges, exempting them from being suspended in similar situations to ours.
We have always been very cautious about the profiles and pictures on YoCutie:
- We approve every picture and video manually before it becomes visible to anyone
- We offer a “report” function so that invalid pictures and profiles can be flagged which we then check again
- We have a team of content managers working 24/7 on these tasks
- We use Google Vision API to get tags on adult and nudity pictures so that our content managers can more easily identify them
Google is killing start-ups and people’s businesses and jobs just because, it seems, they don’t care. They have the superpower here and as long as they have the users, they don’t need to treat the developers as well as they should. Also, there is really nobody that you can talk to at Google (Apple is totally different here with direct developer communication). What’s more, it seems Google has the app developers talking to bots which always give you the same answers. Here is a short list of posts where other developers and publishers had similar problems:
- https://blog.usejournal.com/google-wrongly-terminated-our-new-business-via-our-google-play-developer-account-5f5b7b742542
- https://medium.com/@julianinho/google-has-terminated-my-activities-and-google-play-developer-account-7a89e6699f07
- https://medium.com/@tokata/how-google-play-terminated-a-developer-for-no-reason-e4d760e9f472
- https://blog.usejournal.com/google-screwed-our-startup-because-of-the-faceless-systems-they-use-to-deal-with-app-developers-94ca199faaca
- https://medium.com/@mmathieum/google-just-deleted-my-nearly-10-year-old-free-open-source-android-app-7fbc52edc50a
Appeal and absurdity
After submitting an appeal it took Google 7 days (!!!) to reply on it. And the answer was devastating. They refused to put the YoCutie app online on Google Play and still think that we are in violation of their policies. But the picture and user account that they mentioned was already locked and not visible anymore? They even used the same screenshot as before as the reason.
And now comes the most shocking part. They suggested that we use the same YoCutie app as before and simply add a new app to Google Play with just a new identifier. Which means that we start again from 0 without any ratings, reviews, store positions etc. This is absolutely not acceptable and would most likely destroy our business entirely. In conclusion, one must wonder why Google is willing to let entire businesses fail for the sake of changing the name and identifier of an app?
Final words
Please share our story! We need to warn other developers and publishers and to wake up the whole Google Play team. Google’s developer relationships are poor and their arbitrary behavior is not acceptable. And last but not least, we want YoCutie back online!
Thank you!
Edin Bajramovic (Founder of YoCutie, App Fiction GmbH)
