Comment by missedthecue

About 5 years ago I made a little app as a side project when I was learning to program. My play developer account was terminated without warning for breaking intellectual copyright rules.

I appealed and received an (automated?) response that my account would not be reinstated because I violated the publisher rules. The rule they said I broke? I integrated Spotify's API, which has a login page with the Spotify logo in it, and you're not allowed to use another company's logo inside your app.

Ridiculous, yes but it was more of a bummer than anything. This wasn't a startup, I didn't have investors or a lot at stake. I lost about $50 and a few hours time (and a Google Play Developer account).

The silliest thing was that if I could just get on the phone with a real human at a Google for five minutes they would have seen how ridiculous my ban was and the issue would have been resolved, no big deal. But alas, no human to be had, only an algorithm with too much power. I did some research on dev forums and found that several people had successfully sued Google and got their account back over wrongful terminations, (Didn't sound too expensive or difficult, most of the time Google didn't even show up in court) but according to the ToS you agree to, you have sue them in Mountain View if you bring legal action over anything.

I get why app stores ban publishers, I get why they don't just let everyone publish whatever they want. I bet for every false positive ban like mine, they ban 1000 Russian bot accounts spamming malware. We don't see the mountains of avoided malware, just the auto-banhammer going rogue from time to time. But if Apple and Google just had the slightest bit of customer support this would be much less of an issue.