After 2 months of providing all of the required docs and getting auto-declines, I've talked to their support and they just answered (quote):
"I have consulted our specialist about your account. Our specialist team has determined that this profile must stay suspended due to violations of our Terms of Service. We’re unable to discuss the specific circumstances of this or any suspensions.
Our Google Payments Terms of Service states that Google Payments Corp. reserves the right to change, suspend, or discontinue any aspect of the Services at any time, including availability of the Services, or any Service feature, without notice or liability."
The app has nearly 25k of positive ratings and currently one of the most popular apps for action sport participants.
I frankly don't have any idea what to do, that's super sad.
Whitescape also lists a location in Estonia, which obviously isn't a problem, but if Google doesn't know about that (or thinks you're misleading them) then you might still be screwed.
But even that must not be the case: since then the Google Play account and it's payment profile are associated with Riders app Inc (the US Delaware c-corp) and our new bank account is with Mercury (Evolve bank and Trust)
These are the things I would personally look for in an investigation to determine if "Riders app Inc" was a corporation of convenience or the actual owner of the app.
Specifically, article 4 covers termination of service, and the rules around this. Most tech giants seem to be unaware of this regulation, as it's inconvenient for their "computer says no" model.
The full disclosure is: we've closed our previous bank account to open a new one. Google tried to send a payment to our previous bank account, it has returned, they instantly locked our payments profile and that's it, the whole story.
There were issues with getting our Mercury account validated with Google Pay.
Was you previous account Russian based? When was it closed?
If you changed it after the war began I can see how Google would notice a Russian associated company (Whitescape) moving to a new bank account just before/during the sanctions and see it as an attempt to evade them which should obviously be blocked.
It seems this is a lesson to move your company to a more stable country (Canada) as soon as you can. Not to wait until the the leader does something the whole world condemns.
(the substantive nature of this comment is that Google acts like an autocrat and hopefully this provides introspection for relevant stakeholders that can eventually influence Google to be more collaborative)
Pursue justice.
In your letter, point out that any sufficiently-dominant corporation is indistinguishable from a government, and do they really want the competition?
Be frank about your concerns and seek resolution of the subject at hand.
If you have a lawyer that can assist you in writing such a letter (yes even an informal letter) that wouldn't get you in hot legal waters with Google even better.
Be careful and don't forget to change the dev name https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30811297
This is a lie. They're not unable, they're unwilling.
I'm rather sick of implausible legal scenarios being imagined to excuse corporate behavior. At least let their PR department come up with the excuses, don't do it for free.
This sounds like splitting hairs but I think it's a meaningful difference. Powerful people and companies use Bullshit as a means of obfuscating their motives and actions. They hire armies of lawyers and PR flacks to message everything in a way that absolves them of responsibility. You can't just take stuff like this at face value.
They just murdered a business partner's company and won't even tell them why. It is possible that he's lying to us and was doing some shady shit (shady people almost never tell you they are being shady), or it is possible that he just got crushed by a Kafkaesque bureaucratic machine.
Why is that not an option?
Has someone documented the process and all the options in hosting your own app independent of Google Play?
What are the drawbacks?
Furthermore, even if they somehow understand how to do it, Google chrome and Android OS work together to make it extremely scary sounding for end users.
The combined messaging is akin to:
"you're about to infect your own baby with HIV, press [ok] to cancel or [cancel] to abort operation and report as malware to goggle."
This isn't anticompetitive, is it? Gargoygle is only trying to keep you safe by preventing you from running what you want on your own device. There are no other possible solutions to protect people from malware, dummy! /s
Capitalism seems pretty effective compared to tested alternatives, but it sure does encourage a lot of counterproductive and nasty stomp-and-screw-the-little-people behaviors.
Because the vast majority of android users only download apps through the play store.
Have faith, Google is a defunct business. All law sees Google has disregarded property real-rights many, many times. All parties will receive proper reconsolidation.
It is inconvenient though-hang in there!
-- Carl Sagan, probably.
