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Appeal accepted: Google removed my ads-free app for “deceptive ads” (purpleleafsoftware.com)
218 points by jeremydeanlakey on March 26, 2019 | hide | past | favorite | 84 comments



Jeremy says he wrote "something very close to" the following for his appeal, how would you have written it?

> "Mommy Saver Plus was removed for 'deceptive ads' which is a little silly because there is no ads in the app. The attached screenshots have nothing to do with Mommy Saver Plus."

I think it would be a bit too easy for someone a google employee reading this to go 'he's saying he doesn't consider them ads, and ranting about the screenshots out of frustration'. That's not a reasonable thing for the google employee to do, but it is a possible one. I think I would prefer something like

> The evidence attached for removing "Mommy Saver Plus" are screenshots from a different app by a different developer. "Mommy Saver Plus" was removed for having "deceptive ads", but unlike the app in the screenshot "Mommy Saver Plus" doesn't have any ads, so clearly this was done in error.

> Please see the attached screenshot of "Mommy Saver Plus" for comparison.

> Thanks,

> <Name>


I agree. I included my wording specifically because of this.

My response email to the rejection today was very clear. Unfortunately, it was also passive aggressive.

Hopefully I'll learn to clear my head before reacting next time.


I can't really blame you, people do all sorts of stupid things under anger/stress/etc... and that email, while not ideal, wasn't that bad. I've sent worse.

I actually posted this hoping to spark some useful conversation on what a good email to send would be, unfortunately all I've got are upvotes instead


> unfortunately all I've got are upvotes instead

I wouldn't call that unfortunate. You pretty much nailed it and no one has much to add.


I mean, this way I don't learn anything. I'm sure there are people who would have written it differently, and I'd love to see how.


Sure, you can learn from this, but let's be realistic: I think you had every right to feel the way you did. While letting yourself cool off before replying is a good strategy, it's also useful to give yourself the opportunity to vent.

As with the sibling poster, I was tangentially following this because of the absurdity. I don't think I would've handled it as well as you did.


I made a habit of sending replies the next day when composing them in anger. On more than one occasion I didn't send the reply or reworded it considerably.


Been following this all day. Glad to see it worked out. This probably wouldn’t have happened if you had only used Pony [0], email that sends once a day!

[0] https://www.pony.gg


You're being downvoted because you're plugging your own product without even the tiniest disclosure that you're the founder.


It’s in my profile. Genuinely thought that was enough. My bad, and thanks for explaining.


>>> This probably wouldn’t have happened if you had only used Pony

I tried to look at the page of Pony and I can't imagine how it could have helped in this situation.

You can promote your project when it is truly related (a disclaimer in the comment is nice), but in this case it seams to be completely unrelated to the problem.


Thank you for your feedback and sorry for the confusion. Clearly I did a bad job with this post.

With Pony there is no "send" button. As the developer, I've been using Pony myself for a few months and I've already had countless times when I've put something in my Outbox, only to realize the tone was wrong and needed to be re-worded. Having no "send" button and only one pickup every day gives you time to pause and reflect and change your message until it suits its purpose.

Does that clarify? How could I clarify the home/about page to make that clearer?


Update: Google's reversed their decision and the appeal is accepted.

I wrote a passive-aggressive email. I posted this. I tweeted at them (first tweet ever).

I'm not sure what worked, but something got through. Thanks all for the support.


Wow, I've never been able to get a real person at Google to review a case of supposedly breaking ToS. My Google account got suspended for "traffic pumping". I didn't know what "traffic pumping" was at the time but after looking it up, it looks like they thought I was a bot for a phone carrier trying to commit fraud: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_pumping

For reference, I haven't ever used the Google account for anything like Google Duo, Allo, Hangouts, etc. There was an appeal system linked in the message saying "You broke the terms", but when I filled it out, about 24 hrs later I got a response saying "You can't appeal if you broke the terms", which seems inconsistent at best.

I managed to track down a Google support employee and basically told him "Hey, it should be obvious that I'm a real person and not a bot for a phone carrier". His response at first was "The appeal should work, let me know if it doesn't". I told him that it didn't work, and his response was "Well we're not allowed to help you if the automated system says you broke the terms. You must have broken the terms."

Happy for you getting anything out of them other than a brick wall, at least.

EDIT - To pre-empt some questions that may come up: I was using a unique, randomly generated password for my Google account. Plus, you have to be able to login to the account to see the "You broke the terms" message, so the password was definitely not changed.


"Trust The Computer. The Computer is your friend!"

We're descending into the parody dystopia envisioned in this game.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paranoia_(role-playing_game)

In the early 90's, if I were to tell people that a mega-corporation would seek to take over all the world's information, and they would subject users to this Kafkaesque bureaucratic nightmare treatment straight out of the movie "Brazil," they'd think my brain was taken over by "Paranoia" the role playing game.


I'm sorry. Knowledge of that website is limited to citizens with Ultraviolet access, and I see you only have Red. Please report to your nearest Computer station to discuss next steps.


Unfortunately, most still would believe that.


I have half a mind to run a Paranoia game over lunch.


You know you can get anyone's google accounts banned by going to their website and setting up a bot to click their adsense. Or going to their playstore and clicking report. Or going to their youtube and clicking report.

You can pay to get your competitors banned permanently. That's what probably happened to your account and to my colleague's account as well.


But... It's a personal account, with no business value whatsoever. The only thing I could think of is someone trolling, but someone would really need to hate Bionicle video game speedruns, because that's pretty much all that was on my YouTube account.


Sorry man, you know how it is; competition is brutal in the overcrowded space of Bionicle video game speed runs. I had to do it in order to get the views.


"you must have broken the terms"

Is this attitude prevalent in Google: pure trust in automated systems? Engineers should know better than any that software is not perfect and it's insane to have blind trust in it.


I can totally understand it in cases where the alleged offense is something like uploading copyrighted content to YouTube, where there is clear evidence and an audit trail saying "Here's what you uploaded, here's when you uploaded it, and here's the point where the rights holder registered it in ContentID, etc"

But this is a case where they thought my account was a bot. And I contacted the guy, as a very real person. At that point it's pretty much just sticking one's fingers in one's ears yelling "NANANANANA"


> I can totally understand it in cases where the alleged offense is something like uploading copyrighted content to YouTube, where there is clear evidence and an audit trail saying "Here's what you uploaded, here's when you uploaded it, and here's the point where the rights holder registered it in ContentID, etc"

Probably not the best example. There are countless reports of ContentID falsely claiming copyright violations. I personally had a gaming video muted for violating some copyright by some company I never heard of when the only thing playing were ingame sound effects (no music).


> something like uploading copyrighted content to YouTube

Even that ain't clear cut. For example, if I upload a song to YouTube that's a remix of another song, and someone else uploads their own remix and registers it with ContentID, there's a risk that my remix will be flagged as "infringing" upon the other remix even though it is not a derivative of the other (and the other does not hold the copyright on the shared samples that triggered the ContentID detection).

I happen to know this because one of my own songs got erroneously flagged for this exact reason. Thankfully I was able to reach out to the company that submitted the ContentID registration on behalf of the "original" author, and they were able to rescind it (uploading remixes of songs to their ContentID management platform was in violation of their terms of service, so it was an open-and-shut case); else, I would've had to risk my own account getting flagged to death, since going through YouTube's appeals process would've been the only other option.


I've had copyright claims against Creative Commons music before. The automated systems are trash.


I've had staff at an unnamed $10B tech company in CA tell me that they 'trusted their system' and that 'the data never lies' after one of their staff members made a process mistake by failing to log some information a few minutes earlier at a support kiosk while we were getting our passes set up. The practical result of the failure, if unremedied, would have been that I was out $3,000 and a week of my life was burned.

What ensued was an hour long debacle with staff yelling at my girlfriend until she broke down crying. She was accused of stealing, defrauding them, ruining the event. It was not pretty to the point that I had to physically restrain a friend of mine from starting an altercation.

I repeatedly, politely, and calmly asked them to speak with the support staff member who handled our issue to see if there was an issue. The manager told me "he's an idiot. His opinion doesn't matter. The computer isn't lying."

Eventually, after a lengthy period of time in which the manager insinuated I was a laundry list of undesirable things, relented. He went to go speak with the staff member and in doing so saw that our passes were literally sitting on his desk in plain view. They hadn't been logged as out of circulation, so our new passes weren't working yet.

He returned, told us he fixed the issue, did not apologize and walked off. A day later the company suffered one of their biggest PR gaffes to date while the manager in question sat in the front row aghast.

Turns out nerds (and I use that term with the greatest affection) can be stupid too.


It's cheaper that way--for them. So what if a % are banned by mistake? It would cost $xxmillion a year to lower the false positives but that's a lot etc etc...


You don't get paid $300K without being a true believer.


Having previously worked at Google and seen how they communicate internally - yes, many people absolutely do make that kind of money there without agreeing with everything they do, and while objecting to much of it. However that doesn't mean that the people making internal objections always get to overrule the people making the mistakes. Clearly not.

To be clear, at Google there are cases where internal objections do affect what Google does; but nowhere near always.

(Note I haven't worked at Google for almost 4 years now and am not speaking for anyone other than myself in this comment.)


without agreeing with everything they do

Yeah I didn't say this.


I meant that many Googlers, even ones with such high compensation, aren't true believers.


Essentially they provide no meaningful non automated support of any variety and only respond when people post stories on social media.

The logical solution is to depend on them for nothing important because any service you depend on to make money may be withdrawn at any time with no notice of any kind.

Continue enjoying excellent services like search and maps while continuing to block the adds that may or may not contain malware.

The fact that this means google has no opportunity to derive any meaningful revenue from this sort of relationship isn't your problem. When they want to earn money they can figure out how to have actual support.


A unique random password doesn't matter much, as a lot of hijackers use password obtained using malware or phishing. Practically no account is hijacked through brute-force attack nowadays - in most cases it's impossible, and even when it's possible, it's unnecessarily costly and time-consuming for hijackers.

What you want is u2f (hardware security key), and if you don't want u2f for some reason (e.g. cost or usability), use some other 2-factor authentication methods. No amount of "randomly generated" password will make a difference for malware or phishing, which account for majority of account hijacking.


"If an item does not appear in our records, it does not exist."


> I wrote a passive-aggressive email. I posted this. I tweeted at them (first tweet ever).

A totally repeatable and transparent process indeed.


generally, that has been the way to get google to notice - kick up a shit storm online.

If you have a business relationship, this shouldn't be the way to get support. But it is. :(


Damn. I wonder if someone should make a website dedicated to this? What if someone isn't lucky enough to have their post percolate on HN, or doesn't use Twitter, etc.?


Doubt such a website would ever show up in Google search results...


I'm going to guess some googler saw your post on HN and gave you the special treatment through their internal mailing lists


The thing that worked was getting your story to the front page of HN yesterday. Without that, no amount of tweeting or email is going to do squat.


Good to hear!

Social media is an excellent tool for publicly shaming companies, but it's sad it has come down to this.


> Social media is an excellent tool for publicly shaming companies

It's not though, a few rare cases get enough publicity to be dealt with and for every one of those there are a thousand left with no recourse.


Social media is an excellent tool for publicly shaming companies

I don't think we should seek to become a society running on public shame. Didn't we used to identify that kind of society with "The Crucible" and "The Scarlet Letter?"

"How did you know about that? A little bird told me."


Sadly, some companies have removed all other options besides shaming them (or spending enough money with them that they listen to you).


Also sadly, some of those same companies seem to be enabling this shaming culture. (Twitter banning random users for just using the LearnToCode hashtag, while not banning journalists who called for the doxxing and harassment of a minor. Also: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wAIP6fI0NAI )


the issue is that you have no idea if you won't encounter another stupidity around Google Play in the future.


I had to do the same thing recently for my app when it was blocked from the MS App Store... We were eventually excepted again and I'm about to go through the gauntlet again and try to release ...


>I'm not sure what worked

front page on HN, aka public shaming


Bad PR is the only form of communication the "tech" industry seems to understand. Chances are they wouldn't have lifted a finger if you hadn't made noise on forums and social media sites.


It's mostly like that with telecom providers too, where there is not a lot of competition between the big players.


Congrats on getting back but it's sad that this story had two be on frontpage of HN twice before they took notice and accepted their fault.

Chances of this happening again are very slim for the next guy who falls prey to their faulty moderation (ai).


As I posted about recently - big organisations need to have an ombudsman - a way to resolve problems when the company's ordinary support mechanisms fail to resolve issues.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19092039

It's silly that the only way to get big companies to resolve crazy failings in their normal processes is to take the problem public on social media.

Instead they should have a built in process that operates outside their normal systems - an ombudsman who has the power and authority to instruct other areas of the organisation to make different decisions.


I'm not sure how you square that against the reality that many companies specifically and obviously do not have humans backing up these things. Do you think Google has never heard of human support? When you have hundreds of millions of people clamoring for your products, ignoring several million -- regardless of what the issues might be -- is easy. These things literally do not show up on their radar, which is why stupid shit like posting to HN about it is required to get a basic level of service and fairness out of the system.

Their organization and priorities absolutely do not leave room for support for everyday people. There is zero evidence that they have any intentions of changing this, just like every other one of the past 20 years.


Big companies simply shouldn’t use Google services until they resolve these issues with their awful support. I know this is about Apps and you can’t really avoid google if you make apps, but the story is the same throughout their services.

I’d Azure breaks I have a direct hotline to Seattle. Granted we’re enterprise and spend a lot of money on Microsoft products, but I can still call Seattle and they’ll work on it and give me hourly status reports until my issue is resolved. If our google cloud breaks I can talk to a chatbot.

Maybe having fewer support staff saves google money on the budgets, but I’m not convinced it’s a very good long term strategy if you want enterprise to take your services seriously.


Wasn’t this, in theory, one of the selling points for upgrading to a paid Google One account?

https://techcrunch.com/2018/11/02/google-finally-adds-consum...

I’d be interested to hear if anyone’s tried to take advantage of this, I’m upgraded to One for more storage but haven’t had a reason to test out their humanoids (yet).

[edit: I’m definitely not suggesting Google One would have helped with this particular Play Store publishing predicament, for the record!]


Having access to a Google employee won't change anything because even Google employees can't fight erroneous takedowns of their own content, or get abusive/inappropriate ToS-violating content taken down off of YouTube or Google News

Source: me


So if I get this correct, the app ID of com.mommysaverapp.plus is correct but the screenshots they use to justify their app removal are not from that app?!


So far as I can tell, yes.

I googled the app in the screenshots and it shows in google but now it 404s, just like Mommy Saver Plus. So it seems they removed the correct app also.


Do apps have a GUID or some other actually unique identifier they can use? It seems a huge oversight to not have or use such an ID, even if it's something as simple as a cryptographic hash of the binary(ies).

(Not an Android developer. Thought of starting but never did --- for mostly different reasons, however.)


The app ID is a unique identifier. Once you claim an app ID, it's yours forever.


I tried tweeting at them now. My first tweet ever. (Please someone tell me if I goofed it in any way.)

https://twitter.com/jeremydeanlakey/status/11106845016659968...


This is the only thing I use Twitter for also. Trying to get support from a business.


It actually works better than many other methods of reaching support for many companies, and that's a real unfortunate reality.


I guess hacker news is the only place where google gives their customers support.


I don't think they care about HN. It's too niche. I posted multiple times to reinstate my account but never got it reinstated.


I should have stated the front page gets you support :)


They also deliver support on the front page of Reddit


There is no excuse for Google mistaking one app for another. They have literally all the data, so they know which app is which better than any other party in existence. It's their Play store!

It bothers me greatly that not only can they shut down your app, but they can shut down your Google account (and any future accounts they might deem as being related...)

What are the chances that they might accidentally (human failure or algo failure) believe one Google account is related to another "bad" account and close the good account? It certainly seems possible given that obviously Google does not have complete control over its systems.


Context: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19487506


It would be nice again to question why must Google control everything and whether that's a good or bad thing.


No no, you got that all wrong. When you have an iOS device, it's Apple who controls everything. See? No monopoly!!!111


The frequent lack of due process by the app stores is another reason I've been trying to do Web-first, in some startup ideas I've been tossing around.

I did ship a complex HTML5 Offline app for a client, and it was more pain than it should've been, but I made it work. (Tip: the two big mobile platform owners seem to have an obvious disincentive for HTML5 Offline to work well.) If I do something Web-first, it'll be handheld&desktop responsive, and I'll be keeping a smooth path to HTML5 Offline in mind as a possible alternative to the app stores.


Not an app developer. But isn’t a big reason for native apps just to harvest more metrics and data about your customers? (Not implying anything bad about that in this context btw)


> But isn’t a big reason for native apps just to harvest more metrics and data about your customers?

I've been a native app developer for ten years, I've worked on dozens and dozens of apps, and I know a tonne of app developers and entrepreneurs.

I don't think I've come across a single case of somebody saying that they want an app for those reasons.

The closest I can think of is a loyalty card app, and they got the usage data through use of the loyalty system, not by spying on your phone, and it didn't matter whether you used the plastic card, the website, or the app.


Google can be very difficult when it comes to approving add-ons for their add-on store as well. They approved my add-on that blocks porn ads on a certain website, but won't accept a trivial update on the grounds that it is too NSFW.

They make you provide a screenshot to submit an add-on. I used a screenshot of the website it works on with the porn ads it blocks heavily pixelated. I can't think of any other way to take a screenshot of what my add-on does. So I guess users will have to do without the new update.


"This part scares me:

'... repeated violations can result in the suspension of this app or your Google Play Developer account.'"

Learn the lessson not to make yourself dependent on a despot.


I’m curious, you redacted something but don’t talk about it. What was the alleged “disguised app” you redacted, and why might they have thought you were disguising it?

And why did you redact this fact?


It's in the screenshots in the previous post. The app on the right whose name is covered in a purple box.

It's redacted because that app has nothing to do with OP.


Your mistake was writing a "two sentence appeal" and expecting it would do anything.

Appeal again. But this time, put some real effort into it. Spend more than 2 seconds on it. Really make it clear that your app does not contain ads and the screenshot is not your app.


I've never worked in customer service but this seems wrong to me. I would expect that you would be able to communicate more effectively by saying the single core thing you need to say, because the more words you add, the less likely they are to miss that part, or even to not read anything in your message at all.


If a message is really really important, then you don't make it short and you don't pad it with fluff either. Instead, you say the simple thing you need communicated, over and over again in different ways, together with supporting evidence. Then, anywhere their eyes land on the page, they'll understand your message.


The job of customer service people is to actually respond to customers. You can't expect your customers to be perfectly clear every time they communicate with you and it is entirely your job to figure out what they really mean before blithely dismissing them.

Seeing yet another one of these stories hit the front page of HN is making me want to double-down on removing Google from my life entirely.


I agree that the message was too short to be 200% clear (sometimes 100% clear is not good enough).

gpm wrote a comment with an alternative hypothetical redaction that I like: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19497131




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