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Google terminated our startup's developer account – what do we do?

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Re: Google terminated our startup's developer account – what do we do?

#141

Post by ganeshkrishnan »

braydo25 wrote: post #89

I'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 stor…

The exact same ban happened to the startup I was working before but unfortunately we didn't post to hackernews or Reddit and they never got their account back.

Banned for the entire life of all the devs that ever worked in the startup because one dev had multiple sign-in enabled

Re: Google terminated our startup's developer account – what do we do?

#142

Post by lioeters »

noonespecial wrote: post #16

They 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…

It may be my wishful thinking, but I sense that there's a number of dominant players in various areas (I suppose some of the FAANG) merrily leaving a trail of burned customers, following a similar "geometric progression" toward some critical threshold of awakening, when it's too late to gain back the trust everyone knows they don't deserve.

Re: Google terminated our startup's developer account – what do we do?

#143

Post by freedomben »

ganeshkrishnan wrote: post #141
braydo25 wrote: post #89

I'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 stor…

The exact same ban happened to the startup I was working before but unfortunately we didn't post to hackernews or Reddit and they never got their account back. Banned for the entire life of all the devs that ever worked in the startup because one dev had multiple sign-in enabled

That is positively insane policy. I love Google but this completely violates the "Don't Be Evil" motto.

Re: Google terminated our startup's developer account – what do we do?

#144

Post by j16sdiz »

sangnoir wrote: post #83
deogeo wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They 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.

It's probably good practice to get the source code and assets from the partner in any case. You may choose to sign and deploy it yourself, or if you delegate that to the partner and they get the banhammer, you can republish under your own account.

Republish a banned app without modification under your account is the fastest way to get yourself banned -- it kind of make sense when you consider how spam app works.

Once your app is flagged as spam/scam, the only way to recover is get a human review from Google.

Re: Google terminated our startup's developer account – what do we do?

#145

Post by avinium »

everyone wrote: post #128

Is 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…

Even 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!").

Re: Google terminated our startup's developer account – what do we do?

#146

Post by j16sdiz »

ben_jones wrote: post #36
_Microft wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect that dealing with complaints or appeals does not scale well and therefore they just do not (or even can not) do it?

Sifting 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…

You need to automate when your enemy is robot spammer.

Email spammer, page rank spammer, scam apps...

Re: Google terminated our startup's developer account – what do we do?

#147

Post by philliphaydon »

yeldarb wrote: post #111
comboy wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was just rationalizing in my head that I only hear one side of the story, that surely there were some good reasons they were banned. Google has a lot of users, and I only hear about those worst cases and so on. But no, get to the frontpage and poof, it's solved. It really sucks for all those startups who didn't have luck getting their post viral.

Even if you do go viral there's no guarantee :-/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3803568 It's 7 years later and my company is still banned from Adsense and to this day they've never told us why. On the bright side, I should be seeing some of the class action settlement money any day now.. http://www.adsensepublishersettlement.com

I had about 30 domains at one point so I set them all up on Adsense as I wasn’t using them. I spent about 3 days setting it up. On the last day I went and checked all 30 domains to make sure I setup all of them. 2 days later I got banned. So I was on Adsense for 5 days total. But I’ve never cared to contest it cos I don’t care. But I don’t understand how Google can’t ignore my views to Adsense.

Re: Google terminated our startup's developer account – what do we do?

#148

Post by noonespecial »

TomMckenny wrote: post #75
noonespecial wrote: post #16

They 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…

Similar attitude toward employees and even customers is spread across companies: there are always a near infinite number remaining. It could be a perverse inverse manifestation of the 20/80 rule on an algorithmic or institutional scale: so long as we're only losing x% it doesn't matter because some in the excluded group might have been more effort to deal with. >become an existential threat to the play store. This wi…

To this comment and others. I don't actually even mean that the existential threat is people choosing to leave. I mean that the progression of banned accounts will spread like an actual pandemic because of the rule that any account that associates with a banned account will also become banned.

I mean to say that everything will seem fine and suddenly they will find that their algo has banned most of their users, like a play-store zombie apocalypse. It will seem instant and inexplicable to them, and the damage will be done.

Re: Google terminated our startup's developer account – what do we do?

#149

Post by jessaustin »

teddyh wrote: post #125
nikofeyn wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

turns out "don't be evil" doesn't scale.

Neither does “be evil”. Don’t anthropomorphize the paperclip maximizer.

Was 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.

Re: Google terminated our startup's developer account – what do we do?

#150

Post by jessaustin »

zentiggr wrote: post #52
nukeop wrote: post #6

So 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 se…

Sounds like F-Droid and/or self-signed downloadable .apks are the immediate alternatives, and perhaps if that becomes enough of a percentage of app installs, somebody in the Play Store command chain will realize they're shooting the golden goose. We can hope?

At that point, what's to say they won't lock down the OS to eliminate those alternatives?
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