The purge of Google Play

We are experiencing a crazy thanksgiving week. All our users are worried for what is happening at Google Play. We are worry too and we are trying to avoid Google Play causing problems to our users. Let us explain what is happening…

At the beginning, Google Play had one mission: have more apps in Google Play than Apple has in App Store. Some months ago they reached their goal, but some people criticised that they did it by allowing a bunch of bad quality apps to be published. So now, it seems that the goal of Google Play is to get rid of all that short of low profile apps, no matter if that’s against the basic Internet principle that they always defended: people’s freedom to access any content they want.

Google Play is taking serious action against all those apps that violate some of their terms and conditions.

One of these conditions says that apps can’t make use of some device ID. Most of the advertisement SDKs used that ID. And our apps had some of those SDKs (Smaato, Revmob, AdColony, Inmobi, etc.) that we used to help our users make more money. Last Sunday, Google started warning all apps making use of those SDKs, so all apps created with Mobincube received that policy violation warning from Google. We rapidly removed all SDKs and updated those that offered a new version. Revmob guaranteed that their new version agreed new Google Play’s terms and conditions, so we decided to keep the Revmob SDK to allow our users have more alternatives in case they don’t want to monetize with AdMob. So we tell all our users to republish their apps quick. But after they republished their apps, they kept receiving warnings from Google. It seems that the new SDK from Revmob still doesn’t fit GP policies.

So another decision from our side: now we’ve removed ALL SDKs, so that problem shouldn’t happen again. Users are republishing again and it seems it’s working. We know republishing is quite a boring task and we are really sorry that you have to suffer from this kind of Google decisions.

But the problem with the Google Play’s purge is not only regarding that AD ID. They are trying hard to get rid of all those apps violating copyrights. Some of our users are creating that kind of apps. So Google Play decided to cancel their apps, regardless of the use of that AD ID. But users are confused and think that Google found their copyright violations because of that ID think. And that’s wrong. If you create apps with illegal content, you should be aware that Google is fighting hard against that these days.