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I made an account just to reply to this. I had a similar hellish frustration with Apple's atrocious app store support.
My app, called Stack Wallet, an open-source cryptocurrency wallet does not store any user data. None. We have no servers. Everything, all keys, are on the device. There is no login, no account creation, nothing.
My app had been live for a while. Then, on one routine bug fix upgrade, it was rejected. Reason? It needs to have a way to delete accounts. I went back and forth with the same guy for days. There is no account to delete. There is nothing on our servers to delete. There ARE NO ACCOUNTS. Same copy/pasted nonsense from them. I must add a way to delete accounts to be compliant with their policy.
The only reason this didn't go on as long as yours is because I added this feature. To this day, if you download Stack Wallet on the iOS App Store, in the Settings, you will see an option called Delete Account. Upon opening this option you have the following message:
"There is no account to delete, but Apple requires that we have a way to 'delete accounts' in the app and will reject our app updates if we don't, so here it is. Clicking this will delete all app data (not from our servers, because never had it in the first place).
When you click confirm, all app data will be deleted" etc etc. It just wipes all data from the device and takes you back to the onboarding screens. It was accepted. There are no words...
Wow.......... thanks for sharing your story. That's just mind blowing. Maybe I'll add a report button on every page in the screen and say "There is no User Generated Content here but Anthony at Google wants this button here" 😂
I had a very similar experience with Google trying to get them to change a single Japanese character in my bank account name. This was about 14 years ago.
I got emails from various different people at the company at that time.
The repetitive copy and paste emails, the strong feeling that the other person is not actually reading your messages properly before selecting what to reply from some kind of drop-down menu, the notion that solving the problem would be much easier for them than sending all these copy-paste emails, and the uncanny feeling that you can't work out whether the person at the other end is a robot very much remind me of my experiences at that time.
I think the most irritating thing was when one of the various "penpals" twice sent me a message telling me that the problem had been resolved, complete with an exclamation mark, even though it clearly had not only not been resolved but they hadn't taken any actions at all, even as far as actually reading my message.
I think the 2nd (?) response was the key.. they want to see an option that says "report objectionable content". So just add an option that says this, even if it does the same thing as an option you already have. Just add another. Then remove it with another update later. These people are literally robots and have to reject a certain number of apps a day, or something. Just do what they ask even if it makes no sense.
This is what I saw too. Particularly this paragraph:
We confirm that your app has options to report and block abusive users but your app does not contain functionality to report objectionable content.
It may be worth explicitly pointing out to them that the "Report" button in the screenshot reports the comment, not the user (even though it is in the same menu as the Block User button). You may even consider changing the text on the button to "Report Comment" as even to me what is being reported isn't super obvious.
With all of that said, it is a serious that the reviewers are so reluctant to provide information on the problem. Even separating the custom message from the template, rather than sandwiching it between 4 paragraphs of copy-paste, would likely make it easier to understand their complaints.
Kevin Cox Agreed, when you tap on a comment is gives you the option to "Report" (the comment you just tapped) or "Block User" the user that made the comment. Maybe changing the wording is what they're looking for...? I'll try a few things but the guess work of trying to decipher what exactly they want is just infuriating.
Thanks for reading!
Kafkaesque performative compliance is an oft-used tool in maintaining monopoly and accordingly one of monopoly's worst side effects. Sorry for your experience.
Trial and error is your best friend here since it's often the performance of request and response that is required from you.
What you possibly need to do is add a button somewhere letting users report your content as objectionable (not the UGC, for which you have said features).
That's my best guess but yea perform or die I guess. Good luck swallowing the bitter pill.
It's really frustrating.
I can recommend incrementing the version number and making a new build of your app - you might get assigned a new reviewer and be more in luck.
Yeah I was thinking something similar. Resubmit the app and maybe have a dev change something ever so slightly.
I've gotten this feedback from a few people so far. I'm definitely going to give it a try and see what happens. Thanks for the tip!
Whouaw, such an adventure you had ahah.
I've been through similar issues with Apple before but never with Google.
The fact that you've never been able to speak to a single dedicated and efficient person after all those dead end conversations is astonishing. 🤯
I also know that many of Google and Apple employee may receive pressure or bad review if they take too must responsibility for a dev issue, they are not supposed to take too much time for any of other companies developer's problem. 👀
Anyway, I hope you find ways to deals with your policy compliances after all that struggle lol. 😬
(Super nice post btw, super cool to read 👏).
Thank you for the kind words! Yes, typically I have most of my issues with Apple, however the difference is Apple is usually very clear with me on what they want. It typically comes down to "Pay us 30% of your income or remove these features" with Apple haha. And yes, I feel bad for putting pressure on the people working the review team -- but that's exactly why I was trying to get it escalated to someone that could help me. They don't give you any option but to continue talking with them. Definitely a job I would NOT want to do.
I just finished my own exhausting battle with the Android Play Store review process. This morning my app update was finally accepted after much guessing on my part.
Like you, I believed that the stated reason for my rejection was erroneous. The email was warning me that I was making a permission request that I was certainly not making. My emails and appeals were ignored.
IMPORTANT: The eventual solution might be relevant to your situation.
It turns out that builds in every release track are scanned at the time of review. This includes Open Testing, Closed Testing, etc.
I had an old APK in the "Closed Testing" track that did indeed make the permission request mentioned in the rejection email. Once I updated the APK in that track and resubmitted - my app was accepted.
Crazy that I had to guess that for myself, after two weeks of begging Android for answers.
I hope this helps. At the very least, please know that I feel your pain. If you want to form a pitchfork mob and storm Google HQ I will join in.
I created a new account to comment here; and found that Ross explained the exact same experience that I wanted to add.
Recently I faced a situation where an app update was rejected for an issue that didn't even exist in that build. Tried pushing another build, tried appealing, no use, the response was the same.
Later I realized that there was an old APK file in the "Open Beta" channel which was uploaded 2 years ago, which had the mentioned problem. The beta channel was still open, but nobody knew that. I deleted the Open Beta and then resubmitted, it got accepted.
The problem is, they never mentioned anything about which specific APK in which track has this problem. Just like Ross said, they must be combing all the latest APKs published in all active channels.
Wow, I don't think this is the issue I am currently experiencing, but this is VERY valuable information to have in my back pocket. Thank you for sharing your experience! Hopefully if enough developers talk about this process more, we can all figure out how to navigate this easily without it being so much of our time. Same to you Vishnu Haridas
Hey it might be worth checking the information you submitted on the declarations under app content. Particularly the one called content ratings.
Thanks for the advice, I'll check that out!
I'm in hurry. So I just made a Tweet (twitter.com/H13dev/status/15930621583757393..) about your topic. It's unbelievable what is happening to you. Wish you the best and hopefully will it be solved soon.
Thanks for sharing!
I know this pain all too well. I've been dealing with Google Play store myself for around 8 years and had my fair share of face palm moments. Typically their rejection notice has very little information related to the issue, and they never provide anymore context so it turns into this convoluted riddle you have to solve. Like others have noted, sometimes you need to push redundant updates to get things moving.
Yes I think a big part of why this time frustrated me so bad was because I was busy with... you know my everyday job. I didn't really have time to build things that didn't need to be built so I was just trying to bypass that by saying "Hey, I don't think this is really necessary". Didn't think it would turn into this -_-
Good luck! I know this pain too well... When I was in situations similar to yours with their awful compliance robots I would start changing stuff that looked like what they want and after they approve the app change it back. It's so frustrating... Wish you all the best.
Great idea, might have to try this one 🤔. Thanks for reading!
Just this past week, our app got the boot too. The reason was that the app was in violation of "user privacy". May be it was strings.xml that angered the Algorithm, may be it was the user reviews, may be it was something on our website... Then, magically, the app came back up. It turned out that as we were migrating our domain name to a new DNS provider, the cache entries pointed to an IP address that didn't exist, and hence the privacy policy web page was 404.
Downloads form our website for the app went up by 2x, but that number dwarfs in comparison to installs from the Play Store. What can I say, we are slaves to The Algorithm. At least until Google decides to properly staff up its support centers for developers.
At this point, I'd rather Sundar hired Steve Ballmer to run Play. If nothing, at least that man cared a bunch about us.
As someone who has dealt with a similar issue in the past, what I used to do is keep resubmitting the same app until they approve it. Used to work!
I'm hearing this a lot through all the comments on reddit... Apparently people are saying incrementing the build number and adding release notes saying "We added the exact feature you asked", without editing any of the actual functionality works a lot of times. 🤯 The more you know...
Google apps team is crap and they are almost never helpful. But the author is an even bigger idiot. It actually inspired me to open an account to just write that.
They quite literally explained to you that you need an option to "report objectionable content", the fix is probably as simple as just renaming the report button label. And then you went on to basically harass the Play Console support because they couldn't help you, even after they explained that the support chat is only for Play Console-related issues and not policy issues.
You could have avoided this with half as much effort as you put into writing them emails and writing this blog and made your life easier, instead you chose to moan about it. Frankly you come off as a self-righteous asshole.
Thanks for taking the time to read my blog and make a profile :) Follow me on here for future things I say that you can belittle me over!
Paypal can and will do the same thing to a business account whenever they want. I had to shut down a business because of them
That's awful to hear. I'm sorry you went through that :( Hope you got back on your feet by now!
Maybe Anthony is working in his side hustle and a chat bot talking with you that he made with his shitty python skills 😵💫
Hahahahaha yes little did we know Anthony was much smarter than we all thought and working multiple jobs 😫
This is such a wholesome read!
Never had such experience before, i find it really interesting that devs have to go through all this.
Definitely sharing!
Something kind of similar happened to me when I asked google for help when I integrated Google Pay. Guess what? They banned me when I asked them for help. My story: medium.com/@andrei_r/why-you-probably-dont-..
As a veteran google policy violator I have many stories of anger and frustration I could regale you with, however the only really useful information is that you should just submit a new APK. 90% of the time, it works every-time.
The appeals process is fundamentally broken, it is not just you. It takes forever, no-one actually reads the emails, even when you have an account manager that can prod from higher up, it will still take an age only rarely actually getting the sensible response.
It is always easier and quicker to just rebuild and resub.
I'm waiting for a day when the rejection reason will look like this "There is little commercial demand for this type of content. " :)
Very good article
and some people ask why do we need sideloading... surely a creator of a hobby project solving mostly their own issue would go through all these hoops to maybe help few dozens of other people, right?