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The original was posted on /r/androiddev by /u/slash_paf on 2024-09-27 13:40:16+00:00.
Hey everyone,
I wanted to give you an update on the situation with Audio Forge and Google’s decision to remove it from the Play Store and terminate my Developer account. After digging into my app’s analytics, I found something truly astonishing.
Note that the app is not in alpha - current version is 1.0.45 and has been running fine on the Play Store (and the App Store) since five months.
Nevertheless, it turns out that as of September 6th, Google labeled Audio Forge as “deceptive” because they tested the version 0.0.1 of the app. This was a pre-alpha, experimental version that has never been released to the public. Only I and, apparently, the Google Play team had access to this build. In that version, barely the skeleton of the app was done, and it could hardly even play a file.
Why label it as deceptive? Because it didn’t match the current Play Store listing. Read that again. The pre-release, not-even-pre-alpha, not functional version of the app didn’t match the current Play Store listing.
Why label it as malware? Because, in their policies, “deceptive” falls under the same category as malware (the “Deceptive Behaviour” policy). So, they went ahead and notified my entire Android user base about the so-called “malware” nature of the app.
Here’s how I found out: on September 6th (the day they suspended the app) and again on the 9th and 11th (when they reviewed my appeals), there was a sudden spike in “users” recorded for version 0.0.1. These “users” were actually Google Play testers. It seems that Google based their entire decision on an outdated and irrelevant version of the app.
It’s beyond me how and why they would use a pre-alpha build to judge the app’s compliance, especially since we are currently on version 1.0.45 - 180 builds later. If this is how Google handles reviews, I can’t help but wonder how many other developers have been affected by such gross negligence.
I’ve sent this information to Google and can only hope they’ll reconsider their decision and, even more importantly, rethink their review process.
I’ll keep updating here as things progress, and I appreciate your support as we navigate this mess.
Thanks for sticking with me through this.
Slashpaf.