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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?

#151

Post by bitL »

comboy wrote: post #101
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…

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.

As someone who wrote a Deep Learning-based anomaly detection pipeline used in real world I doubt they know precisely what the issue was. It could have been a simple flagging slightly over whatever threshold they set to their system, maybe ticking off a tiny majority voting of their "suspicion" detectors. Not having humans involved, nor having clearly human-interpretable results will be always an issue at scale.

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

#152

Post by Razengan »

opportune wrote: post #105
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…

More proof google support only works if you manage to get publicity... otherwise you are SOL

Many 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?

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

#153

Post by maccard »

binarymax wrote: post #104
mark-r wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This has happened often enough in the past that they probably have a procedure in place. It keeps the internet from blowing up in their face but it doesn't solve the underlying problem.

They probably have a bot that monitors Reddit and HN and flags to a human if the story gets enough upvotes

Or they have humans who work there who see these threads and message a friend saying "hey what's going with this?"

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

#154

Post by SallySwanSmith »

freedomben wrote: post #143
ganeshkrishnan wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Scarlet letter....

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

#155

Post by ganeshkrishnan »

freedomben wrote: post #143
ganeshkrishnan wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

We all love Google until we get their boots on our face with absolute no customer support whatsoever.

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

#156

Post by ganeshkrishnan »

comboy wrote: post #101
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…

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.

Good reasons for being banned? I know developers who have been banned for

1) Reselling their pixel devices (https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/nov/17/google-su...)

2) Using paypal and not Google wallet (when it launched)

3) App being too similar to other popular apps

4) Related account that has a ban using multi-sign (This thread)

5) Invalid traffic to adsense

6) For expired credit cards or invalid charges in Google wallet

7) For bank account switching problems even if there is no fraud (https://www.reddit.com/r/google/comments/3ki65d/warning_to_a...)

8) For attempts to avoid buying apps or too many refund requests (https://www.reddit.com/r/tifu/comments/8kvias/tifu_by_gettin...)

Some unlucky people had all their google accounts purged including Drive and Gmail (Especially with monetary issues like invalid adsense clicks, invalid charge on wallet, too many app refunds)

Keep in mind that the ban is LIFETIME and any account that you multi-sign at any point in your LIFE will also be banned AND there is zero customer support. Some users have been banned for multisign issues even after 8-10 years.

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

#157

Post by ganeshkrishnan »

Razengan wrote: post #152
opportune wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More proof google support only works if you manage to get publicity... otherwise you are SOL

Many 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?

The 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?

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

#158

Post by ganeshkrishnan »

techaddict009 wrote: post #10

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 a…

The playstore termination happened to me too. I happened to chance on some forums where you can pay money to people who can use multiple accounts and IPs to get your competitors banned by repeatedly hitting report and then copyright/infringement.

After a certain threshold, google bot bans your accounts and then sends you an automated email.

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

#159

Post by Wowfunhappy »

ganeshkrishnan wrote: post #158
techaddict009 wrote: post #10

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 a…

The playstore termination happened to me too. I happened to chance on some forums where you can pay money to people who can use multiple accounts and IPs to get your competitors banned by repeatedly hitting report and then copyright/infringement. After a certain threshold, google bot bans your accounts and then sends you an automated email.

Whoa! Where can I read more about this? If there aren't any news articles on the topic (in which case, this is a prime story opportunity for some enterprising journalist/blogger), can you link to the forums?

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

#160

Post by ganeshkrishnan »

godzillabrennus wrote: post #23
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…

Google 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.

Our startup has $30k free credits from Google cloud but I would have to be crazy to put our production website on Google and their ban hammer + "charming" customer support.

I am too afraid to use it even for staging.

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