About the last Google Play warnings

As you should already know, Google sent emails to most of our beloved Mobincube publishers at the beginning of September, reminding them to honour GooglePlay’s policies in terms of personal data protection. Google gave publishers 30 days to make sure that their apps follow Google’s privacy rules in order to avoid app cancelations. Most of you have been asking us about this matter, so here’s our official answer to all of you.

Some of the SDKs that Mobincube apps include for different purposes (monetization, analytics, etc.), might collect some data from the device, therefore it is very important to let the final user know through prominent privacy policies.

If you followed our recommendations on March 2017, your apps should be safe already, since they should be showing our standard privacy policies dialog at app launch. You already know how accurate and precise Google is when redacting policies (just kidding!). They always leave room for a big uncertainty. Our goal is to reduce the chances of your apps to be cancelled as much as we can.

During September we’ve worked on reinforcing the way our apps face Google’s guidelines. We’ve edited our standard privacy policies and those changes should be visible already in your apps. But we’ve also made some changes in the source code and that’s the most important thing. Because of that, we strongly recommend you to re-publish your apps ASAP to avoid Google cancelling them. Do it before the next October 5.

There’s also a second warning from Google regarding some path traversal issue, which has to do with some vulnerability that they detected in their own Android’s source code. They’ve also sent an email this week to almost all publishers regarding this issue. In this case, there’s no such rush, since the deadline to fix this issue is January 2018. We need to develop some workaround on Mobincube to solve it. At this moment you shouldn’t worry about that, we will inform you as soon as it is fixed.

You will earn more money after republishing!

Yes, that’s right. By republishing your apps, not only your apps will meet Google’s terms, but they will also benefit from an important update: we’ve removed a controversial ads SDK. That update will probably make your apps perform better. In case you didn’t know, Mobincube works with 3rd party ad networks so that you can earn money monetizing your apps. One of those networks was one of our best ad providers for years. But, in case you didn’t know, most antivirus applications used to consider that apps including that network’s SDK are some sort of virus and that has some impact in the number of downloads. We kept using that network because the CPM was great (the highest, by far), so a lower number of downloads and impressions was compensated by the highest payouts. But those days are gone: that network’s CPM has sunk, being equal to other networks that we work with. So it no longer makes sense to keep using that risky SDK.

During the last few days some apps have been republished without that SDK. We’ve seen an important growth on their number of downloads. So that’s such a motivation for you to republish your apps.