Our Google Play Account is Terminated — Leaving our Team Helpless in the Middle of the Pandemic
Open letter to Google Play Team and Purnima Kochikar, Director at Google Play, Apps & Games at Google.
Our 4 years of sweat, pain and hard work has been wrecked.
Our Google Play Developer Account has been terminated without any prior notice. Our years of hard work, our entire organisation and the career of 30 people depend on that one app.
On May 4th 2021, we received an email from Google Play Support citing our account has been terminated due to violation of ‘Developer Program Policies’ and ‘Developer Distribution Agreement’.
However, we were never intimated about any such breach or violation ever before. This email came like a bolt from the blue.
We responded with an appeal to restore our account as it was suggested, citing our reasons why our account should not be terminated but it all went in vain. Apparently, we were communicating with bots so every effort was leading to a dead end.
The reply that we received was again the one-size-fit-all mail. We could not find the answer to our questions. Maybe, if we were warned of any violations beforehand, we could fix them and avoid this situation. Shutting down our account without any heads-up will impact the lives of so many people. Our business is completely dependent on the Android app.
After trying every possible way in the last two weeks, here we are writing an open letter to the Google Play team.
We are a legally registered Private Limited company. In our four years of business, we always complied with legal terms and regulations. We never associated ourselves with any fraudulent or illegitimate activities.
There’s a lot at stake with this termination.
We have more than a hundred thousand users on our platform, actively using the app. We are getting no support from the Google team and feel so helpless. We are a start-up that supports 30 families directly and a thousand other families indirectly. With our account being suspended, their lives would come to a standstill in the middle of the pandemic.
Like any other start-up, we also owe a lot of our success to Google no doubt but this episode was a huge shocker.
We have our app on IOS as well, which is running glitch free without any compliance issue.
We would request Ms Purnima Kochikar and the Google Play team to look into the matter. Kindly, reinstate our Google Developer account and restore our app or the least we expect is:
- The exact reason for our termination. What exactly do you mean by ‘association with other accounts’? What sort of association?
- Tell us about the associated accounts so that we break ties with them if they are violating codes.
- Even if we are associated with other accounts, what breach have they committed that leads to our termination?
- How can we fix the issue and get everything back on track?
Permanent termination of our Google Account means we’ll have to shut down our start-up. Breaking this news to our teammates while they are already fighting an emotional battle with the pandemic, will shatter them completely.
We request you to provide us with human support from your team and help us reinstate our app.
Updated on 17th May, 2021
After trying every possible way to get human support from the Google Play team, we tried our luck on twitter. We tweeted @GooglePlayDev quoting our grievance and seeking help.
Yes, we received a reply. They left this ‘Sorry’ message in our inbox, yet again shattering our hopes. Well, we can’t expect empathy from bots. They can’t understand the plight of our team.
Dear Google Play Team,
We respect your terms of use and policies. We understand you have to cater to millions of users like us. We do not want to spam you or force you to reconsider our request to reinstate our app. We don’t want it to be reinstated if that’s against your policies. No problem.
We just want to know the detailed reason about the association and its violation.
Kindly look into the matter and reply us with a descriptive reasons stating
- What exactly do you mean by ‘association with other accounts’? What sort of association? How you associated it with us?
- Even if we are associated with other accounts, what breach have they committed that leads to our termination?
You know there is no default distribution channel other than Google Play. Atleast, give us a chance to re-deploy our app with the fix that we have violated unintentionally.