I lost my Google Play dev account

This is such a common occurrence these days with tech platforms. I had a similar situation with PayPal when I opened a business account for the first time. Minutes after opening the account I was perma-banned and I was told there was no appeal. Of course, there’s always a way of appealing if you can speak to someone with the authority to fix things (as I was able to in my situation).<p>Unfortunately companies seem to be getting worse and worse at allowing you to speak to sufficiently empowered people to solve problems.<p>I hope the HN effect helps you out here and someone at Google decides to swoop in and rescue you.<p>If you live in America and you can’t otherwise resolve this, I’ve heard that filing a small claims lawsuit is an excellent method of last resort to get big tech to respond to you.

FYI there are two ways to keep the screen on at the native API level: a window flag (screen doesn&#x27;t turn off while your window is active) or a WakeLock (screen doesn&#x27;t turn off while your app is running, even in background). Neither of them affects any settings. Changing device settings actually requires a permission that you declare in the manifest that the user then has to manually grant.<p>I&#x27;m pretty sure the developer did absolutely nothing wrong. Google&#x27;s AI is just full of shit like it&#x27;s always been. This stuff happens all the time and the best way to resolve it is to know one of their developer relations people. Yes, they actually have employees whose only job is to talk to developers.

When your business model calls for scale so large that it&#x27;s infeasible to have humans involved in important processes (due to costs), this is what happens. The fact that they can _get away_ with this is a failure of government.<p>We have to realise at some point that these are no longer private companies in the traditional sense, and start regulating.

I was in a similar situation with Google.<p>I have a Chrome extension with 10,000+ users. At one point Google flagged my extension as malware and automatically uninstalled from all of my (paid!) users. Of course, they didn&#x27;t tell me why.<p>Nothing had changed in my extension in _years_. What could it possibly have been? This happened right after some well known extensions got busted on the webstore after being sold to shady people and the webstore got bad press for it. Google came out and said they were improving their security measures. I assumed Google was doing some kind of automated scanning and with that in mind I took a wild guess...<p>I wrote my own JavaScript minifier&#x2F;obfuscation build tool and figured it was probably triggering the automated system (likely due to compressed strings). I stopped using my build tool and compiled the extension with no minification or compression at all. However, I couldn&#x27;t upload it (me being banned). I created a second account, paid the developer fee and uploaded under a different category and I was... approved.<p>It&#x27;s still up there today.

You really need to put on your mercenary helmet when dealing with these platforms. I got my first Google Play account banned due to dubiously &quot;breaking&quot; their deception rules, and was literally told in an email: don&#x27;t create a Google Play account never again. Well, I created 4 more accounts that still exist. We are dealing with automated banning systems here, so keep pushing. You can re-publish the game under different email, account, id and name. If that doesn&#x27;t work, a game made with Unity can be converted to other platforms like Steam. I even have APKs uploaded to Itch.io . And if you need a revenue stream you can lean on Patreon and others.

&gt; I found a single line of code that could&#x27;ve been the cause of the problem.<p>Note that the OP <i>thinks</i> that was the problem. Google did not tell them a reason for the ban aside from the generic one.<p>Edit: s&#x2F;Google&#x2F;Google&#x27;s &quot;AI&quot;.

I don&#x27;t understand why google play really bad about developer relations. indie developers can&#x27;t memorize everything in 100s pages of policies&#x2F;rules etc. it&#x27;s not hard to warn &quot;don&#x27;t do this&quot; and ban accounts forever if repeatedly doing same thing.<p>you are already using AI for banning accounts, so it shouldn&#x27;t cause any more resource, just small adjustments.

Hello, BeefySwain. I&#x27;m the owner of the account of the Reddit post. Thank you for putting this for me, I just noticed when I was about to. If you have any news please let me know. Thank you kindly.

&gt; But in their initial mail they stated that, if I sent a new version compliant with their terms, they could re-enable the app. But I couldn&#x27;t send any new revisions since my app got completely deleted, my Google Play Console&#x27;s panel was totally inaccesible.<p>This seems like a very common pattern amongst google &quot;support&quot; - &quot;Hey just access the thing we just completely locked you out of and we&#x27;ll fix your problem.&quot;<p>It can&#x27;t be an accident.

This story, and it&#x27;s variations have occurred many thousands of times.<p>Yet some still wonder why people don&#x27;t have positive feelings towards Google and other similarly behaving &quot;Big Tech&quot; companies.<p>I wonder what it will actually take for these companies to stop treating people like shit?

I wonder why Google has single line API calls you cannot use without implementing a user interface flow, when the penalty is severe. At the very least the compiler should output warnings.

Well, with the important notice I do not know what&#x27;s happened, having read only one part, my take is simple: why people develop for walled gardens?<p>If Play Store, App Store etc became EMPTY because the only apps are from big tech they totally loose any customers appeal and fails quickly. Remember the old concept of the union who makes the strength?<p>Personally I do AVOID as best as I can any third party walled garden and even developing on their APIs because I know their are closed hostile ecosystems. We have to accept what freedom demand and simply go a step at a time toward a ban by laws of any closed software, any walled garden and so on. A step at a time means start not working on, so for, them today, explaining why as much as possible and inviting people toward open platforms. If you really want Android there is F-Droid as a middle-ground.

Speaking more to the comments than to the specific analogy on reddit, but a company that possesses both a frightening degree of control over your life, and absolutely no incentive to care on a granular level, will never end well.

On the positive side you just got another happy player. Thanks for making it available and accessible.

What a crock of shit.

Just open another one. not a big deal.

AI generated TL;DR<p>Ed, the developer of IdleTale, shares his journey of creating an idle RPG game out of passion for the genre. Initially launched on Google Play, the game gained support but was removed due to &quot;Malware or Deceptive Behavior.&quot; The issue stemmed from a code function keeping the phone screen on without user consent, violating Google Play&#x27;s policies. Despite appealing and offering to fix the problem, Ed’s developer account was permanently closed, preventing future app submissions. He reflects on the unfortunate situation and the significant impact of a small mistake, expressing frustration and disappointment over losing his project and the opportunity to share his game with others.

If I&#x27;m reading these, he got his notice from Google (changing device settings without user consent).<p>They don&#x27;t have time to go around with folks - you get I think one human look at things (maybe). If they&#x27;ve removed an app (rather than rejecting it or suspending it) then you absolutely need to figure out why and fix things before appealing or republishing?<p>They are explicit about that. Do not republish an app with a policy violation I think.<p>I think if folks slowed down the appeals and actually fixed things first they&#x27;d have better outcomes.