7 main reasons why they block applications in Google Play and AppStore

Surely, lately I have seen a lot of scary stories about how applications are blocked in Google Play and the AppStore. All this is connected with attracting a lot of attention to the information security of applications, and more precisely, to the fact of its absence.

Often, public hysteria on this issue rises completely groundless and is associated only with the illiteracy in this issue of individual individuals and their unexpectedly soaring posts in well-known forums, which often entails additional publicity in the media, bringing the absurdity of the situation to a critical moment when the company I have to give official comments and explain on my fingers why and why certain actions were taken on her part.

I think, at least once, but I had to deal with the post of the form: “Oh God, if telegrams do not include encryption, then it does not work !!! It’s just a security collapse! ”

Most often, the continuation of the story (the official response of the company, a refutation, etc.) is not remembered by people, we all remember only the negative side. So even if the company was essentially not guilty of anything, public opinion has already been formed, ratings are rolled into the plinth, and PR managers are shedding dragon tears.
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Of course, there are a huge number of cases where the concerns are well-founded and really should draw attention to a specific situation. However, one should not deny that in both cases the company, which has attracted negative public attention, incurs reputational losses.

But all this relates to information security, and Google and Apple do not check the code and business logic before directly publishing a specific application. This would take too many resources, given the flow of applications published and updated daily. They can only block after the fact, if a vulnerability is identified and, as a rule, widely publicized (for example, as was recently done with the AppSee analytical platform, all applications that contained it were cut out from the AppStore before removing it from their code, because she recorded everything the user did with the application, including credit card screens).

And now you can go back to the applications themselves and the policy of placing them in official stores. It is worth noting that removing or blocking the Google application and Apple can, in fact, for ANY reason, if you personally don’t please them. So, if you aren’t satisfied with some mythical criteria of the platform administrator, you cannot publish on it. For some, it may sound horrible, but in fact, this leads to the fact that sooner or later other platforms will start to form for distributing applications, which is what Amazon and other services like it are trying to do now.

For the most part, the policies for placing apps on Google Play and the AppStore are very similar, so you can do a little top of what should not be done if you are a mobile application developer and would like to continue to quietly and peacefully distribute them in official stores. Let's look at the most popular reasons for blocking and then deleting applications from official stores.

1. Violation of the use of keywords

This violation occurs in almost 50% of cases, so in my opinion deserves its first place. Developers and marketers, having read various articles on the promotion of products and, perhaps, have already turned these tricks on sites, decide to use keywords and in the names of applications in order to “facilitate” the search for potential users. As a result, the name of the application looks just like a hodgepodge of the most frequently requested words, which is banned by the robot instantly.

2. Infringement of intellectual property rights

An application can violate someone's intellectual property and for this, especially if a representative of this intellectual property comes with a piece of paper from the court, can block not only the application itself, but also the developer’s account. Sometimes such an unpleasant situation may arise simply because of inattention or because of ignorance in this matter. Intellectual property can include everything, starting with the name of the application, its design, general direction, and other points, challenging in court that for a small company or one developer in general can be an impossible task.

3. Illegal use of images

All images (logo, banner, images of the application itself) must be legally acquired. If you download a picture from the Internet and use it in your application, and its owner sees it and takes action, then you risk losing your application as well.

4. Sexual content

Some applications may contain pornographic content in order to look more attractive to users. Google Play cleans up such applications pretty quickly. Unfortunately, we are not in 2012, when such applications could hang in the store for months. Neural networks have since become very smart. So you have to find another way to attract and retain the user in your application, perhaps just to make it better;)

5. Third-party application markets

Google does not allow applications published on Google Play to move to third-party application markets for download or update. Due to the openness of the Android system, it is relatively easy to implement third-party transitions in the boot process at a technical level. There may also be some commercial value behind this, but Google prohibits this behavior.

6. Violation of advertising policy

Any application must not contain false or misleading advertising. Advertisements can only be shown in the application to which they apply, and any ad shown in the application is considered part of the Google Play application. In addition, destructive advertising and advertising functions that may interfere with the operation of the application itself, as well as advertising of inappropriate content, are prohibited.

7. Payment system

Developers should provide payment within their applications only through the Google Play payment system, whether it be paid downloads or in-game purchases. Of course, there are two exceptions:

• sale of non-digital goods;
• selling digital content that can be used outside the application (for example, tracks that can be played in other players).

If we talk about games, everything, including gold coins, precious stones, extra rounds, special items or equipment, characters or displayed images, as well as additional levels, playing time, etc., all involved funds must be sold through payment. google system.

In fact, the rules are much more, but here I have dismantled those for which they most often block applications in official stores. In the AppStore, the situation is almost the same. In addition, the developer must constantly monitor the update of the rules, which happens quite often. These updates may be due to public opinion or some tragic events in the world. So "I did not know / did not see" - in this case it will not work.

The rules of the official app stores are quite blurred and in fact, you can attract any application for any violations, if you really want to. Google, in turn, will immediately block the application until further investigation, depriving the developer of profit. For many, such a turn could turn into huge losses and the destruction of the company itself. Now there are a lot of buzzing on this issue in various forums, and in my opinion this should lead to the emergence of completely independent application markets. Or companies that can afford it will distribute the installation packages of their applications to users on their own, as AdAway, MiXplorer, NewPipe and others do. This feature should be especially thought of by the creators of applications that can successfully compete with popular applications of Google and Apple itself, because when placing such an application in their markets, the developer cannot be sure that it will not be thrown out from there when his application becomes very inconvenient for corporations, as happened, for example, with the Sense application and others like it, when Apple decided to release its own tracker of user activity in other applications, at the same time covering competitors.

If we talk about the situation when your application was blocked in the official store, despite the fact that you knew and followed all the above rules, then you will most likely be able to figure out this question without a lawyer or an agency of a very narrow profile that deals specifically with issues of licensing and software protection fail.

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