Google terminated our business via our Google Play Developer Account

It also serves as a very unfortunate reminder of a couple of things:

1. Just how incredibly important it is for us to be able to use the platforms of the future as we see fit. We look at app stores and think well, this is good, right, applications are vetted and you can be sure that everything you install from one is fine. Except malicious applications still get through (see e.g. https://threatpost.com/google-play-removes-22-malicious-ligh... - not a singular incident), it's applications that could be a threat to Google's position or its business don't.

If users could download and install applications as they wish, as it was the norm twenty years ago, having a developer account removed wouldn't be much of a problem. Curating and reviewing applications may be a good way to keep malicious ones away from non-technical users, but who we trust to do the reviewing is equally important, and Google is about as shady as it gets.

2. Google's abysmal support (which is not limited to this particular case!) is no coincidence: small developers are too small to count, and, as applications became commoditized and got cheaper and cheaper, there are too many of them for the loss of one to be important in any way. Sure, Google's PR may insist they value every developer but their actions speak for themselves. Customer support, for any branch of their business, is so bad it makes PayPal look helpful by comparison.

3. Ultimately, that the standards of every company are the standards that its users hold it to. It speaks for itself that Google's "appeal" process (if one can call it that way) is so incredibly useless that the only way to actually appeal it is to produce enough rage that -- out of fear of bad PR, not because that's how you work with customers! -- someone will actually look at this.

I hope this gets sorted out real soon -- and that we all think twice about which platforms we support through our work. Both Google and Apple are what they are because mobile developers publish their applications there and not somewhere else -- both of them would be nothing were it not for the app developers' work, as seen in, say, Windows Phone. Granted, Android and iPhone are where the most users are, so it's where the big money is -- I'm sure no one writes Android apps because they're evil (ok, some people do; but not everyone). But most companies in this space could afford to invest in more free platforms, like the Librem 5, which would work in their own benefit, even if not right now.

Edit: oh yeah, one more thing.

I've seen Google trying to wiggle out of situations like these by saying that well, this was outsourced, so maybe the guys this was outsourced to did some shady stuff, it's definitely not Google's fault, they have no control over that.

Yeah, well, the outsourcing industry is older than Google is, and it's also responsible for virtually 90% of the applications on the Play Store (how else do you think applications end up costing 99 cents?). If a company can't come up with a review process that can accommodate the software outsourcing industry, in 2019, that's beyond laughable.

Do you have an alternative trust mechanism that can’t be subverted via, for example, algorithmic voting?

And yet almost weekly I read a new story about malicious apps being found in app stores. Like this one posted today:

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/02/googl...

Personally I trust things from app stores about as much as I trust random things from the web.