WireGuard was restored only because Jason Donenfeld has submitted a new version of the app which no longer contains a link to the donation page. As of yesterday Google did not contact WireGuard maintainers to bring clarity to the donation link policy of Google Play.<p>The issue is not solved and it remains as pressing as ever, Google has begun to crack down on open source projects which use an external donation platform such as Patreon, putting the livelihood of open source developers at risk.<p>Their policy affects several open source apps, most of which remain taken down, including andOTP.<p>It's worth noting that Apple allows open source developers to link to their external donation pages from iOS apps.<p>The initial takedown was discussed in this thread: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21268389" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21268389</a>
There is no amount of money you can pay Google for better support, like you could maybe Amazon or IBM for their products. You can say enterprise support is worthless, but if you're paying $1k a month or buy hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of licensing, you can bet their sales and support reps are going to at least make it seem like they're trying to resolve things.<p>How did this get resolved? Because WireGuard brought a lot of media attention to it. You can't pay Google for better support. Maybe they'd watch more carefully if your app brought in a lost of sales revenue or ad revenue, but now your app is all dependent on its popularity and maybe its monetary value. (and popularity still didn't save the Tumblr app from Apple on the other side of this).
This isn't a dupe even though it has been flagged as one...<p>Unrelated note:
The android app works great and for me (on the first pixel phone) it seems battery drain was vastly improved in the 20191016 version. Now it feels like I can have it on 24/7 without concern.