Tell HN: Trivially bot banned from Google Play Store twice in a year

by giorgioz on 6/17/2022, 5:39 PM with 4 comments

How you can help: If you know someone working at the Google Play Store tell them to add warning emails 1 month before bots remove apps!

Story: It's the second time in a year our Android app gets removed from the Google Play Store by bot without warning. 1 year ago we got removed because the Amharic title for the app was not confirming the store guidelines. (Our app is translated in 40+ languages). It had been the same for 4+ years but suddenly someone wrote a bot to just remove all apps that didn't pass that guideline without any email notification. We modified the metadata, appealed and resubmitted and our app was re-added with reviews with a 7 days downtime costing us thousands of dollars in revenues. The level of stress was VERY HIGH. Yesterday again our app was removed. This time the culprit guideline is not providing email/password for the reviewers to use. The app has been the same for 9 years. Someone added that to the guidelines 2+ years ago. And then now someone wrote a bot to enforce that. The bot just removes the apps without any warning.

Let's be clear. I'm not against the guidelines. The problem is there are 100+ pages of guidelines and they get updated all the time. Engineers at the Google Play Store need to STOP IMMEDIATELY this kill-bots that ban straight away without an email notification. Please build in a grace period where you notify developers 1-4 weeks before you are going to remove their apps.

BUT WE WARNED YOU IN THE GOOGLE PLAY STORE CONSOLE... We don't check the Google Play Store Console very often and pretending millions of developers to be on the edge all the time reading manuals of dozens of pages updated monthly and checking compulsively UIs warning that matters once a year is just a cruel dystopia.

Please stop the killbots and add the warn-bots followed by killbots. This bots have seriously damaged the brand of Google in my eyes and have forced us to change marketing strategy from the app stores to SEO/content marketing to be less dependent on the whims of bots developers.