Google banned me – open sourcing all my apps
I can’t say I’m a mobile app developer, but early during Covid19 (late Dec/2019 and early Jan/2020) and out of self learning process, I made a fully functioning android app that provided a real time tracking for Covid cases around the world, the first of its kind (1) with other stats, I submitted the app in Jan/2020 to the play store, and after almost a whole month of “pending”, I got banned, the app got “suspended” not just rejected -as if I did something illegal-, my account got flagged and they said another flag and they will suspend my google account too, keep in mind it was fully free with no ads of any sort, so no monetization of any sorts except donations. It turned out later google (and other big tech incl twitter) were trying to suppress anything about covid, until the narrative shifted March that year.<p>Moral of the story: as a developer, you are always under the mercy of these app stores, and they can change policies anytime, with zero regulations to govern them. Other open source stores are good as long as you are opening your source code, if you won’t for whatever reason, good luck distributing apk/updating your users, and I’m not even looking at apple yet.<p>(1) <a href="https://files.catbox.moe/byur9j.png" rel="nofollow">https://files.catbox.moe/byur9j.png</a>