Android—and any OS for that matter—would be nowhere near as popular as it is without the great support of the many developers making apps for the market. However, Android developers are now claiming that Google’s behavior and policies for making apps are “ridiculously unsustainable.”
Developers on the r/androiddev subreddit report that the accounts of many indie developers are getting randomly banned by Google from the Play Store, without any warnings or proper explanations.
The key issue at hand seems to be that developers who may or may not have uploaded apps to the Play Store are getting banned, and the reason given seems to be “by association,” meaning that it was an automated ban due to some vague reason. You might think it was a copyright violation, but users without any uploads to the Play Store are also getting blocked and permabanned too. The users who appealed against the ban received a canned response, amounting to nothing.
In a post highlighting the issue, Reddit user u/inktomute7 wrote:
“We all read in this subreddit, and outside of it, many terrifying stories of developers accounts terminated due to unknown/superficial reasons, without any answer or solution. We all know that this is a big problem, and this is poisoning the open and healthy ecosystem that it used to be.
Many of us totally depends (sic) our income on the possibility to publish apps on the Play Store, privately or for companies. Imagine if your account, and all the associated one, will get terminated due to some Google mistake. This will exclude you from publishing an Android app ever again. This happened before and it can happen to anybody at any time.”
Another indie Android developer, u/someappdev, who was making a 4 digit monthly income of the Play Store, said that he was banned because his app contained a similar name to the popular app, Pokemon Go. He had made an app on the Play Store that offered evolution and IV calculations for Pokemon Go. However, he added that nowadays, there are hundreds of similar apps and all of them are still available to this day, but his account was not reinstated after multiple appeals.
Source: Reddit
