I woke up one morning in June and checked my inbox. Four e-mails from Google informing me of various apps being suspended, and then a fifth one: “This is a notification that your Google Play Publisher account has been terminated”. I froze — this was really bad news.
The day before I had received a bizarre mail from Google Play, where they suspended one of my recently updated apps for linking to sexually explicit material. I make apps for kids, so I am most certainly not linking them to any dodgy websites. I checked the app in question, and the only thing I could find was that I linked to my Facebook page. I appealed the suspension, and even joked about it with some fellow devs:
Dev: “ So…. your Facebook page is covered with sexually explicit material? :)”
Me: “ Yeah… exactly… maybe says more about the reviewer since the ads on fb will be based on his / her browsing history :(”
The day after I sent in the the appeal, I got the response: It wasn’t the app itself that contained the link, it was the app description in the Google Play store. Unfortunately it was too late to take any action by then — four other apps had already been suspended for the same reason, and the account terminated. I couldn’t even open my Google Play dev console any longer.
This was disastrous. I quit my day job in February to go all-in as an indie developer. Google Play is by far my most lucrative market, and I rely on its revenue for running my one-man company, which in turn feeds my family. And all of a sudden my account is terminated and I’m seeing my downloads, IAP sales and ad-revenue flatline completely.
So what happened? Years ago, when I started making apps as a hobby, I registered a domain name with simple website for my first app: PegPuzzleGame.com (NSFW!). As my portfolio of apps grew it didn’t make sense to have a domain name associated with a single app. I bought a different domain, moved all the content over, and let the old domain registration expire. In the process I forgot clean up all my app store listings on Google Play, which seems pretty innocent. For a handful of apps and languages I was still linking to the old domain name, which at worst should lead to 404 page, right?
Nope. As it turns out some enterprising person bought the domain in late 2013, filling it with gambling and girls in bikinis:
Time for action. If I did not get my account back, I’d have to quit making apps and get a ‘real’ job after only 3 months as an indie developer. The first order of events was to appeal the termination, now that I knew what had caused it. Google gives you exactly 1000 characters in an appeal. After a tense hour I had condensed my reasoning into exactly 987 characters:
On 1 June my app se.appfamily.pegpuzzle3free was notified and then immediately suspended for violation of the sexually explicit material provision.
This made no sense to me. I reviewed the app itself and the only direct link was to my Facebook page. I appealed (reference [8–6229000007242]).
*Before* receiving a reply to my appeal, you suspended 4 more apps for the same reason and terminated my account.
When I did get your reply, you clarified that the link was in my Google Play *metadata*, not the *app* itself. However, since my account was already terminated, I had no way of taking corrective action.
The violating link is “http://www.pegpuzzlegame.com/?page=soundcredits". I owned this domain until June 2013, at which point I allowed it to expire since I had a new domain. It appears someone in China bought the old domain and filled it with bad stuff.
I am deeply sorry, but it was an honest mistake — I forgot to update metadata when I let the domain expire.
Send. Next on the agenda: Make the most of the situation. I redirected 50% of my in-house cross-promotion traffic to a dev buddy of mine, and 50% to another dev with whom I have a revenue share. That way I’d at least make the most of those users who already had my apps installed.
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For the rest of the day I didn’t have much else to do, other than pace around the apartment thinking of various scenarios that might play out: Account restored, account restored but certain apps permanently suspended, account not restored… Needless to say it was a tense day. Every time my phone played a notification sound I scrambled to check if it was a mail, and if so, if it was the judgment from Google.
Finally, around 10pm, the e-mail I’d been waiting for arrived:
We appreciate the opportunity to review your appeal of account’s termination. Upon further internal discussion, we’ve accepted your appeal and have conditionally reinstated your account. You will have this one opportunity to maintain this account, so we ask that he please be careful with future apps that are published and remove all the links! Please note, however, that any new policy violations may result in your account’s permanent termination from Google Play.
Yes — I was still in the game! All my apps were still suspended, and I had 7 days to resubmit them. Time to get to work.
After getting access to my account again the first thing to do was to clean up the store listings. In Google’s mail they had linked to all their policy documents, and strongly encouraged me to read them all. During my 5 years as an app publisher there were a lot of things in their policies that I was not up to speed on. Some examples of Google Play policies that have come about during the last few years:
- Don’t list your other apps in your metadata
- Don’t use push notifications to promote other apps
- Don’t incentivize reviews
- If you use ads, you should make it clear to the user in the metadata and in the app itself (even stricter policies will apply from September 2015).
I cleaned everything up and resubmitted my apps. With 20-odd apps, and 20-odd locales per app, it took a while…
If you enjoyed this article please hit “Recommend” so I feel good about myself and keep writing more articles like it. Cheers!
