Jan "Jenkings" Škoda - blog

I really hate the process of publishing and managing apps on Google Play.

If you are able to fill in dozens of forms and agreements when starting a new app, go through many rounds of updating the forms to meet the guidelines and updating stupid little things in the app to meet the criteria, and feel really good when you finally push the app into production, it does not mean you have won.

Funny is also the "support" and the process of solving the problems with terms and forms. Especially the "appeal process" is a lot of fun. If you fill in something wrong in one of hundreds of entries on dozens of forms, you get a notice, usually within a week, with some paragraph number and letter that you missed. It does not tell you what is wrong, just that you have not met the requirements. If you have absolutely no idea what is wrong, because it is a generic notice, you try to appeal, asking kindly for help and advice on what should be changed. You will usually hear back within a week or two. It looks like someone "alive" has replied to you, but in fact you get almost the same answer as before, that you have not met the conditions of paragraph XX letter YY. Really helpful. However, by trying many solutions you finally get your app into production....

And after some time, like me today, you get an email that your app has just been removed without any notice...

So I did some research and found out that I did not meet some family standards... I have checked the forms and I have found that my game is suitable for children aged 13 and over. So my violation is that the app shows an ad after each game, and the game is more than 5 seconds long, which can be "harmful to young people" (Great, so ban all children from watching TV that consists of 10 minutes of film followed by 15 minutes of ads...). The funny thing is that the ad is served by Google's AdMob service, which has also been informed about the age limit of its users. In other words, Google is violating its own terms and conditions, which is why my application has been removed. Thank you Google.