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Google terminated our startup's developer account – what do we do?
- itchyjunk 8y agoI guess the hope is to get on the front page of HN and hope someone in Play policy team sees it? Pretty sad way of handling it. I wonder if this was an automated action? I also wonder why that personal account was terminated.
- braydo25 8y agoFor others interested, we just had a sit down with the developer and asked why they were previously terminated. They disclosed years ago they had created an app, and then decide to rebrand it for other use cases - basically "templated" apps in the play store. They were then terminated for violating the "spam" policy.
- tyingq 8y agoAnd banned for life, apparently? Hopefully someone at Google that cares about avoiding antitrust action picks up this story.
- antonkm 8y agoThese are becoming quite common. If my account would be terminated my business would be dead. How is Google not handling this better?
- _Microft 8y agoI suspect that dealing with complaints or appeals does not scale well and therefore they just do not (or even can not) do it?
- ben_jones 8y agoSifting through valid and invalid complaints is hard if your goal is to please your customers, scale, and automate. Something has to give so vendors choose to optimize around one or two key metrics: * Customers with high volume/spend/influence * Loud/Viral complainers At the expense of: * Everyone else This is a difficult problem that requires massive investment and dedicated care. I earnestly think Google is trying, maybe they're hiring more people, maybe they're investing dev time in better tooling, but its not cutting it as evidenced here.
- j16sdiz 8y agoYou need to automate when your enemy is robot spammer. Email spammer, page rank spammer, scam apps...
- nukeop 8y agoIt's a matter of policy for them to never disclose anything but the vaguest possible details about the case if there's any suspicion of wrongdoing on the user's part.
- raverbashing 8y agoAnd by suspicion they mean "our algorithms see something weird that might be a signal of wrongdoing or not. So just in case we shut you down"
- Bahamut 8y agoThis does not just apply to shutting down accounts - this also applies to whether to refund money due to borderline fraud by Google. Google is hostile to all customers, I do not trust them when it comes to monetary transactions based on my own experience.
- j16sdiz 8y agoGDPR actually asked for a "right to explanation" in these cases. The actual implementation is different from one country to another.
- crooked-v 8y agoOf course, the actual practical translation of "matter of policy" is probably more like "way to save money on support staff".
- izacus 8y ago> These are becoming quite common. If my account would be terminated my business would be dead. How is Google not handling this better? After drilling down into these posts it's very common to find those developers stealing user data, using forbidden advertising techniques, infringing copyright or simply trying to scam around Google's 30% payment cut. Apple would kick them off the App store immediately as well (and even tell them directly that running to media won't help). If anything, Google is finally starting to clamp down on malware and developers abusing user data.
- freedomben 8y agoIf we stipulate that you are totally correct (which I sincerely hope you are), what about the effect that permanent blacklisting can have on an individual's life? And if somebody gets banned, apparently now they must become "unclean" and be kept far away lest they "infect" the company.
- rrix2 8y agoWhich one was it in this case ?
- mindslight 8y agoI've got to wonder if, after basic Twit-shaming becomes no longer scalable, Google support will basically end up taking the same essential shape as IRS support - if you receive a nastygram, you turn it over to your professional account/attorney/googvocate who's entire specialty is knowing how to "talk to" the organization.
- msds 8y agoThat's essentially what Amazon support has become - https://www.theverge.com/2018/12/19/18140799/amazon-marketplace-scams-seller-court-appeal-reinstatement https://www.theverge.com/2018/12/19/18140799/amazon-marketpl...
- rootusrootus 8y agoThat is not a great comparison. IRS phone support is actually pretty good. I would be ecstatic if Google could get even halfway there.
- curun1r 8y agoThey’re actually fantastic and have a genuine desire to arrive at the correct number. I had one take over an hour on the phone to explain to me the logic behind the IRS’s position and, once it became clear that the problem was with a corrupted data import and the cost basis was incorrectly computed, took two more hours of his own time without me having to wait on the phone to arrive at the conclusion that the IRS actually owed me money. He could have resolved the call immediately by saying that he saw my position and that he’d cancel the correction and I probably would’ve accepted it. Instead, he went the extra mile and figured out the correct refund, costing the government hundreds of dollars and two more hours of his time. I suspect the IRS gets a bad rap because people don’t like owing money and the IRS is usually right when they send corrections, but my experience left me with nothing but respect for their front-line support. To remain as friendly and courteous as they were considering the rage that must be directed towards them on a daily basis is pretty impressive.
- JohnFen 8y ago
- nukeop 8y agoSo now anyone who has ever owned a terminated account is a Typhoid Mary and as Google refuses to provide any details about their bans and cuts all communications with banned accounts, it's like being exiled by a commandment from high above. People talk about possible future AI abuses but here we are with people getting abused by an AI system right now. Being banned from ever having a Google Play account is a death sentence for an Android developer, especially since anyone who ever comes into contact with you risks being exiled by association.
- freedomben 8y agoExactly. This is deeply troubling to me. I'm going to assume the best and apply Hanlon's Razor and think that this isn't their intent, but it will certainly be the outcome. I really hope they reverse course, and soon. They are creating a world I don't want to live in, and as someone who loves Google products and has a lot of my life wrapped up in them, I'm actually starting to worry about getting infected with Typhoid myself just through accidental association.
- jshowa3 8y agoThat's what happens when you build a store architecture where its the only way to release an app. When stores were introduced offering built-in DRM, not allowing native apps, and only providing a license to use the software, it was only a matter of time before these things happened. Having no control or ownership of what you put on your machine was a death sentence. Problem is, people love stores like Steam and frequently defend it when its nothing more than a Google App store. Despite having no ownership of their games, draconian return policy, and games permanently locked to your account.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- Lich 8y agoI own over nearly 100 games on Steam, mostly bought on sales. Despite the tons of titles I bought, I miss the experience of actually owning a copy of the game, along with the box and manuals that came with it. More importantly though, I think it's scary that Valve can one day decide to totally ban a user from their purchased game because they didn't like the behavior or actions of an account holder (e.g. cheating in a Valve game or account getting hacked).
- ape4 8y agoIts almost like they want to be regulated.
- techaddict009 8y agohttps://blog.usejournal.com/google-wrongly-terminated-our-new-business-via-our-google-play-developer-account-5f5b7b742542?_branch_match_id=561986868701905453&gi=afb9263ab1e8 https://blog.usejournal.com/google-wrongly-terminated-our-ne... story of another startup. And mine too. I had a small utility calculator app with some 100k download and play store suddenly deleted the account. The app was in partnership with someone. No reason nothing. No way to restore. Play stores auto termination policy sucks to hell. Update: I just saw the post back. Since it went viral google reinitiated their account to probably shut the matter (instead of fixing the main cause of issue it seems)
- gowld 8y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19124324 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19124324 They (potentially inadvertently) hired a dev team that was previously banned for malware, so Google terminated the account and banned these new partners of the malware team. Did your partnership have the same problem? What is missing from Play (or the ecosystem) is a way to ask if the people you just hired are on their ban list, before you register your app with Google.
- jayd16 8y agoIt seems like the full story is always less than reputable contractors. Set up fresh accounts yourself, people!
- deogeo 8y agoThey were banned for 'association' - that makes me believe that even if you set up a fresh account yourself, if someone that was previously banned works on it, and Google finds out, you could still be banned. Also, banned by Google != less than reputable.
- em500 8y agoSome form of 'association' is probably unavoidable, otherwise it would be trivial to game for truly bad actors. Big problem is that the current policy seems to insufficiently discriminatory between bad actors and accidental policy infringement. Perhaps they can start with short bans and rapidly increase ban length on recidivism.
- Animats 8y agoPivot to a product that doesn't require Google approval? All the top apps today come from big companies. Mostly Google, in fact. The era of the app startup is over. Why do you want to compete with Google while under the control of Google? If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — forever. - Orwell
- acheron 8y agoThis is Google, so the boot has ads on it.
- pinewurst 8y agoAnd camera and microphone in the sole.
- IOT_Apprentice 8y agoDon't forget the GPS in there as well.
- itronitron 8y agoif it's a sandal, then the sock could have ads on it
- freedomben 8y ago> Pivot to a product that doesn't require Google approval? Honest question: what do you pivot too? Apple has different but equally bad risks of having your hands tied or just being barred. What's a safe platform to build on these days that actually has a market?
- stevens32 8y agoYou could pivot to a PWA and rely on others channels to get the word out
- 8y ago
- noonespecial 8y agoThey seem to think they have plenty of developers to burn through like this as if they were some sort of consumable. But if every developer who has been banned can get other developers banned just by association, this will start slow and then move like an epidemic. They don't know it yet but unchecked this will seem to them to instantly become an existential threat to the play store. There's nothing like a geometric progression to make you think everything is a-ok just before it all goes to hell.
- godzillabrennus 8y agoGoogle is already established as a god awful vendor partner. It’s reflected in their cloud divisions performance. Anyone sane is using someone else if they can.
- josteink 8y agoI literally know zero people using Google Cloud. Everyone is on Amazon or Azure. I can count the times google has burnt my hand though...
- alasdair_ 8y ago>I literally know zero people using Google Cloud. Everyone is on Amazon or Azure. Snapchat uses Google Cloud. So does Pokemon Go.
- Someone1234 8y agoThey have a dozen or more "hero companies" that they advertise. The big question is are those organic customers or attracted onto the platform for big discounts in order to be adverts?
- gcbw2 8y ago> Pokemon Go The poster child of unplanned outages and scalability issues. Ouch.
- 8y ago
- dreamcompiler 8y agoThis won't help you in the short term, but long term, this is where I'd probably go. https://puri.sm/products/librem-5/ https://puri.sm/products/librem-5/
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- basicplus2 8y agosmart people learn from their mistakes, and Really smart people learn from other peoples mistakes and stay away from Google
- aeternus 8y agoThe new final step of company interview processes for Android devs: Submit a demo app to the Google Play store using your developer account, your offer will be contingent upon app approval.
- on_and_off 8y agoTLDR : The guy that opened the company's account had got his own account terminated years ago. So their company account was closed as associated to that one. I don't know what got in that guy's head when he created that account, google is very strict when it comes to terminated devs trying to republish apps.
- crooked-v 8y agoI'm not comfortable with the idea that Google can effectively dictate the employment prospects of all Android developers forever, regardless of past behavior.
- em500 8y agoLifetime bans are pretty harsh, but some form of time-based penalty is probably quite reasonable to keep out truly bad actors and recidivists. (Even with the current measures, the Play store was/is teeming with malware and scammers.) Perhaps some simple form of exponentially increasing penalty (start with 3 months, double/triple/quadruple at every next ban).
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- _bxg1 8y agoBodes well for that new gaming platform they just announced.
- kazinator 8y agoWhat do we do? Put an .apk file up for download on a website you control.
- JohnFen 8y agoThat's viable. You can also use any of several alternative app stores. There are lots of people like myself (although we're the minority, obviously) who don't use Google Play at all anyway.
- dustingetz 8y agoIn 20 years, tech monopoly = government
- throwaway28883 8y agoUnfortunately, this is the way things go. If you are going to build a business on top of something offered by Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple, etc, you will never rest easy because you should know your app can be killed at any time for any reason, right or wrong. These companies are omnipotent and untouchable. They have these automated systems in place because they have determined them to be the most cost effective way of dealing with these issues. Even if there are specific cases that seem ridiculous, or clearly harmful to the company itself, in aggregate this is the system that works for them. I learned this very early. For example, while in high school I had a (very) small business buying things locally and reselling on ebay. Despite having 100% positive feedback, a scam artist one day claimed to Paypal that I shipped him a brick when it was supposed to be a cell phone. The scammer had a brand new account with no feedback at all, and I had no previous issues, but Paypal decided to trust the scam artist over me with over 5 years of positive feedback. I refused to pay back the negative balance that Paypal claimed I owed them, and lost access to my account for over 15 years. During that time, I started a successful e-commerce business doing annual revenue of $5-10 million. I'd have used Paypal to process all customer payments had my account not been banned. Instead I integrated with Stripe, and Paypal lost out on upwards of $500,000 in processing fees (and counting). But still, Paypal succeeds, and does not care. Another example - I was an investor in a small dating app a few years ago that was doing quite well. Despite successful ad campaigns on Google, and in Apple's app store, Facebook just decided to one day block the advertising account, permanently and without reason. Despite vast effort (spanning multiple years!) to at least figure out why we were banned, no explanation was ever offered, and the app eventually was starved out due to inability to access a prime advertising channel that our larger competitors were able to access. There is simply no way around this kind of thing. My advice is to never build a business that relies on one of these platforms - use the web to your advantage, don't get stuck behind someone else's walled garden. Try to make apps only ancillary to your business, not the main component. Be able to diversify advertising channels. Own your core competency - don't let someone else steal it overnight. And finally the reason for the throwaway account, I believe there are rogue employees at these companies who can just shut down accounts for personal vendettas, bribery schemes, or just the lulz. We suspect that's what happened to us at facebook. So I do not want to jeopardize any current businesses I am running or investing in that is personally tied to me.
- rajangdavis 8y agoJust asking out loud, if you were a developer that was experimenting with building apps and you accidentally violate some Play store terms of service, would Google removing your app be a permanent black mark or how can you show that you were acting on good faith?
- eecc 8y agoDoesn’t it amount to mobbing to terminate all accounts related to companies associated to a previously banned individual account? What’s that individual to do? Turn to horticulture?
- kerng 8y agoGoogle is automating things to a scary degree, with no way to appeal or ever even talk to a human. Unless you are a big corporation and have an account manager things can be tough. Similar with GCP, countless horror stories over the years. I wonder if Google ever plans to address these issues or if in grand money scheme of things it just doesnt matter.
- mark-r 8y agoThis has been the way Google has worked from the beginning. Stories like this need to be shouted from the rooftops every time they happen, just to warn people. Google got to where they are today by building absolutely everything with a mind to scale, and justice doesn't scale.
- nikofeyn 8y agoturns out "don't be evil" doesn't scale.
- teddyh 8y agoNeither does “be evil”. Don’t anthropomorphize the paperclip maximizer.
- jessaustin 8y agoWas the greatest trick that Page, Brin, and Schmidt ever pulled, convincing the world that they don't exist? No, that's ridiculous. There are real people making real fortunes here. If they're not ethical, it doesn't take a conspiracy theorist to point that out.
- nikofeyn 8y agoi have no idea what that means.
- dcbadacd 8y agoThis game explains the paperclip maximizer: http://www.decisionproblem.com/paperclips/ http://www.decisionproblem.com/paperclips/
- lgleason 8y agoThis is why I don't use Google Cloud and steer other people away from it as well. Google is not a reliable service provider.
- braydo25 8y agoI'm not sure what specifically caused it, but a representative from the Play policy team just reached out to us and has given a thorough review of our developer account and reinstated it. We are extremely grateful to anyone in this community that may have played a hand in having a real person at the Play policy team reach out, as well as the ongoing conversation here to improve overall relations between the Play store and it's developers.
- opportune 8y agoMore proof google support only works if you manage to get publicity... otherwise you are SOL
- Razengan 8y agoMany companies are like that. What happens when your outlets for complaints are blocked as well? What if HN, Twitter, Reddit mods, etc. were asked by the company to stifle any dissent against it, and obliged, where would you go?
- ganeshkrishnan 8y agoThe difference is I give zero shits about twitter, reddit, HN , facebook. Google has absolute monopoly on mail, maps, android, play store, apps, dev, drive. Is being banned by twitter the same as being banned by google?
- comex 8y ago> What if HN, Twitter, Reddit mods, etc. were asked by the company to stifle any dissent against it, and obliged, where would you go? Huh? Why would you expect any of those entities to oblige such a request? Other than perhaps some Reddit mods, depending on the subreddit.
- shakna 8y agoAn automated DMCA system could be abused to stifle dissent. Like JetBrains recent DMCA to shutdown the /r/piracy subreddit [0], not for all the probably illegal stuff, but for "Asking about JetBrains Licensing". [0] https://www.reddit.com/r/bestof/comments/b2xslo/reddit_legal_sends_a_dmca_shutdown_warning_to_a/ https://www.reddit.com/r/bestof/comments/b2xslo/reddit_legal...
- smileypete 8y agoSounds like there's almost a case for setting up 'mini silos' Properly separated individual google accounts for phone, personal email, work email, youtube, drive, etc PITA but better than being SOL...
- taneq 8y agoOr... NON-Google accounts for phone, personal email, work email, and don't log in to YouTube.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- everyone 8y agoIs there some reason Google has zero support for developers? Any of the other big corps I've had to deal with as a dev usually have some option to email support to resolve issues. Some of them have amazing support, with live chat. But Google is an impenetrable blank wall. The obvious answer is to save money. Maybe they reckon the Play Store is saturated so it doesnt really matter if 5% of devs say meet an impassable roadblock ,it wont affect their revenue.
- avinium 8y agoEven Adwords, their supposed jewel in the crown, has the worst customer support I've ever experienced. Have you ever tried contacting them? It's all offshored to India/Phillipines. They refused to honour their GSuite free credit offer, then hung up on me when I insisted they escalate the problem. The difference between their outbound sales lines and their inbound support lines are laughable. I assume it's better when you're pumping hundreds of thousands through them every month. Even so, it inspires zero confidence in Google as a customer-facing organization. As far as I'm concerned, Google gives zero fucks about individual paying customers. It's obvious why this is so - their search ecosystem is leagues ahead of competitors, and it's so dominant that it's a licence to print money. They don't need to offer you good support, because you need them. It's also why I don't hold out much hope for Stadia - an ecosystem that relies on developer goodwill needs excellent front-facing support, and Google just doesn't do that. As a side note, I truly believe Amazon is well positioned to invade search and dethrone Google (though it would be a case of "The King is dead. Long live the King!").
- everyone 8y ago"their search ecosystem is leagues ahead of competitors" Not sure what u mean, but if u just mean Google.com I dont believe thats true anymore. I switched to DuckDuckGo a while back and it seems basically the same except u will get less 'sponsored' results garbage, and also I feel a little bit less en-bubbled when using it.
- avinium 8y ago
- hutch120 8y agoHi, Looks like you've put a ton of effort into building this app, so now time to put some effort into the business side... pay for a support contract and call them on the phone . You don't need a lawyer, emails will hit the bot wall, just call them , and keep calling them, and it that doesn't work, go visit them. Got to fly to CA, then do it, turn up at their door and talk to them. https://gsuite.google.com/support/ https://gsuite.google.com/support/ Good luck!
- amarshall 8y agoThis isn’t about G-Suite, though, so I’m fairly certain the support plan you’ve linked will not be useful for a Google Play dev account.
- taneq 8y agoOnce more for the people in the back: Do not base your company on the goodwill of an external entity with whom you have no real communication or recourse!
- DanAndersen 8y agoTo any Google employees who read HN: please raise this general issue in your internal groups and try to push to change this culture of faceless algorithmic decision making. Companies should not have to rely on getting to the HN front page to have a human being actually look at these issues. You have a voice internally and if you don't use it, in some way you are complicit.
- fakoresgfd 8y agoAnd this lbtgabc type of action suprise somebody ? Please wake-up and leave google