Unfortunately companies seem to be getting worse and worse at allowing you to speak to sufficiently empowered people to solve problems.
I hope the HN effect helps you out here and someone at Google decides to swoop in and rescue you.
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.
It might take a few decades but sooner or later these platforms will bleed away all their customers.
So... what did you do that got you banned?
I know it's popular to hate on PayPal, but they're not in the business of banning people, they're in the business of facilitating payments. Banning people for literally no reason doesn't serve that cause.
Almost every time, when you pull on threads from this sort of story, it unravels into high-risk accounts receiving unusual payments from unusual places all within a limited timeframe where PayPal (or any payments processor for the matter) doesn't have time to evaluate your legitimacy.
Your story might be the one out of a thousand that was on the wrong end of a rouge bot or something, but I have serious doubts.
PayPal processes billions of dollars of payments annually. They don't do that by banning everyone for no reason. Did you use a VPN to deceive them on your location? Did you try to open a business account in the US despite being a UK citizen? Something you did tripped their system into believing you are/were not legitimate, and it's likely you would have also been banned from other similar-tier payment processors, such as CyberSource, Authorize.net, etc.
To this day I have no idea why (and it wasn’t clear to me that the complaints people even knew), just that something flagged in their automated system.
There are always false positives with this kind of thing, and you can only hope that you don’t become one. I’m lucky that it was possible to fix my issue but as automated decision making becomes more common there will be increasingly large numbers of people who are just arbitrarily denied access to services with absolutely no recourse.
It is better if you submit your passport and other data, but still far from painless. Their automatic systems flag transaction and then you are stuck, sometimes for ages. If you use browsers that prevent tracking or VPNs (legitimate and needed in many cases), then it is even worse.
It takes half a year for the new account to become more trusted and be less flagged.
Internet is full of stories how PayPal blocks people and they can't find why or appeal.
Until there’s legislation prohibiting this, it’s just going to continue and the broad brushes will likely broaden.
It’s even easier to just not release anything officially on the Play Store and go 100% into sideloading apps. Cut Google right out of the equation.
Now I know this is partially end user incompetence but both platforms sold her the MFA option without a backup leaving her in the mire.
Having been burned with my gmail account being hosed a number of years ago I keep everything separated, portable and backed up offline these days as well.
I also use multiple yubikeys -- worth double checking time to time as my longtime key in my wallet died while I was out of town (lasted 8 yrs tho)
Right now this person needs to get lucky and find a real human to speak with to possibly reverse the automated decision. That possibility would be completely erased by taking any kind of legal action.
See: https://www.engadget.com/how-small-claims-court-became-metas...
We have to realise at some point that these are no longer private companies in the traditional sense, and start regulating.
Larry Page said it very clearly: “Find the leverage in the world, so you can be more lazy!”[1]
Not having support, for users or devs, not even escalation, is a great example of being lazy. And Google demonstrated for its entire existence that it can get away with it. Who in Congress is willing to speak for the indie devs getting their accounts banned?
[1] https://fortune.com/2024/08/19/larry-page-google-advice-be-l...
They don't have time to go around with folks - you get I think one human look at things (maybe). If they'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?
They are explicit about that. Do not republish an app with a policy violation I think.
I think if folks slowed down the appeals and actually fixed things first they'd have better outcomes.
Given most of these enforcement steps are automated - it's usually worth checking what is going on.
Then I guess they'll just have to find the time. I do believe they just lost an antitrust suit in the US, and the EU is on the warpath. This kind of stupid behavior is why that stuff happens.
At larger enterprise levels there is more support.
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't tell me why.
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...
I wrote my own JavaScript minifier/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'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.
It's still up there today.
you are already using AI for banning accounts, so it shouldn't cause any more resource, just small adjustments.
You need humans for good CS, and humans are both non-automatable and expensive. Google does have some humans in CS (I think), but they try to automate as much of it as possible, hence the prevalence of boilerplate responses from them.
Because these are the lowest effort and cost actions they can take and there are no consequences to doing it like this.
I am certain that if there are any developers that care about policies, it's the indie ones. And there are still too many rules for them to follow, and invisible lines they're unaware they can't cross.
The developers at Big Tech don't get banned from Google Play because Google isn't going to de-list Netflix, Spotify or Microsoft.
It is exactly “the things an app can do that a web page can’t do” that are (1) frequently user hostile (a reason the user is usually better off using a web site instead of an app if it possible) and (2) heavily regulated to manage but not mitigate this harm.
This seems like a very common pattern amongst google "support" - "Hey just access the thing we just completely locked you out of and we'll fix your problem."
It can't be an accident.
Most people handling support have zero tech background, and are trying to match your questions to an internal search engine with answers. They literally know nothing, have no experience with the platform, and have to pick an answer after searching and getting 20 to choose from.
In my case, backups weren't working, and in an attempt to avoid doing anything, they attempted to convince me a 10 year sms/mms history backup fit in 200kb.
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?
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.
The vast majority of consumers aren't even aware that alternative app stores exist - and if they ever become even remotely popular it's pretty much a guarantee that there'll be scare campaigns from BigCorp because they're full with "malware". Heck, who's going to install some random third-party app store just to install a mobile game?
Play Store / App Store have essentially become a monopoly. If you don't have an app on the official app stores, your company might as well not exist. Everyone knows this, so everyone tries to get their apps published on the official app stores. Google and Apple are very much aware of this too, and they just don't care about small apps because it's not making them enough money. Unless you're big enough to have your own account manager, you might just as well not exist at all.
F-Droid is a novelty for an extremely small niche of users. You can't reach most users, and you can't charge them money through the app store. You have to figure out payment processing and licensing yourself.
No, F-Droid will not replace google play for most users, nor developers who want to make money.
Now if most understand this a stop any update, retire their apps from the Play Store for how long Alphabet could possibly keep Android up?
Note that the OP thinks that was the problem. Google did not tell them a reason for the ban aside from the generic one.
Edit: s/Google/Google's "AI".
"My guess is that they deleted the account because I broke another rule: uploading a rejected app twice."
Its confusing, but this seems a more likely reason for the ban than whatever they did to keep the screen turned on.
Yet some still wonder why people don't have positive feelings towards Google and other similarly behaving "Big Tech" companies.
I wonder what it will actually take for these companies to stop treating people like shit?
I'm pretty sure the developer did absolutely nothing wrong. Google's AI is just full of shit like it'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.
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 "Malware or Deceptive Behavior." The issue stemmed from a code function keeping the phone screen on without user consent, violating Google Play'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.
