Just this past week, our app got the boot too. The reason was that the app was in violation of "user privacy". May be it was strings.xml that angered the Algori

Just this past week, our app got the boot too. The reason was that the app was in violation of "user privacy". May be it was strings.xml that angered the Algorithm, may be it was the user reviews, may be it was something on our website... Then, magically, the app came back up. It turned out that as we were migrating our domain name to a new DNS Nameserver, the cached DNS entries probably pointed to an IP address that didn't exist, and the privacy policy web page was therefore 404 for a brief while. Downloads from our website for the app went up by 2x, but that number dwarfs in comparison to installs from the Play Store. What can I say, Android developers are slaves to The Algorithm. At least until some other Algorithm at Google decides to properly staff up its support centers for developers. As a contingency, what we do is: - Sign our own APKs. - Bake in a custom update mechanism as an escape hatch (this is against ToS, but whatever...).