duanem

I am posting: 1. to ask for advice or help, if you know someone at Google 2. in the hope someone at Google will see this and help 3. and to raise awareness.

Yesterday we got an email saying Flowx was removed from Google Play because of "Misleading Claims" on our store listing. Flowx is a weather app with weather model data from weather agencies like NOAA and ECMWF. From what we can gather we violate the following:

"Apps that falsely claim affiliation with a government entity or to provide or facilitate government services for which they are not properly authorized."

We have since added a clear statement that Flowx is not affiliated with these government agencies. We submitted this for review and appealed the removal but Google says it might take up to 7-days to review this.

I am a solo developer and this is our livelihood so this is quite stressful. I've had a user email and ask why they couldn't buy Pro.

We have been on Google Play for over 12 years and have been awarded Google's "Editors Choice". We don't believe we've violated policy in terms of "Misleading Claims". Or if we did, then most of the other weather apps in our app category, including the big boys with 100x more users, are in violation too.

I wonder if this removal was part of an AI process. If this is the case, it is not fair without a chance to fix it. Google, if you're listening, at least give the developer a chance to fix issues before removing it from the Google Play.

Thanks for listening and for any help.

Hi all,

I've spent the last 2 years porting the Flowx weather app from Android to Apple using Kotlin Multiplatform (KMM). It's in beta testing on TestFlight and I've included a public link [0] for testing below.

If you want to get an idea what Flowx is before installing the TestFlight version, check out the getting started help page [1].

The reason I'm posting this now is that the pro data is still free in the testing version and when I submit to the App Store in the next week or two where this data will be behind a paywall. I would also appreciate more tester to catch those rarer bugs.

The app doesn't have feature parity with the Android version but it is still useful for daily general weather. I use it daily. The Roadmap [2] outlines for future developments.

Enjoy.

Cheers, Duane.

[0] https://testflight.apple.com/join/31UK0kRE

[1] https://flowx.netlify.app/help/getting_started

[2] https://flowx.netlify.app/help/roadmap/