living in fear

Osama is dead and Obama has 4 more years. But a small unknown company called GOOxxx still rules the word. They control the Android operating system, the store, the ads in the app, the statistics and the site to translate the reviews. Ops, I forgot the browser that I am using…
I think they also have a search engine, forgot it’s name :angel:
And yes, there are other app stores. They give me 3% of my users.

Don’t misunderstand me - I think this company has great products (that’s why I use them, right?). But if this is not a giant monopoly I probably left my school class years ago to the bathroom and forgot to return.

Now, why I am writing what everyone knows?
My name is David and I am the writer of HandWallet – a free expense manager.
5 month ago I wrote a long post about how frustrated I am because no one downloads my app, located in place 500+ (I stopped counting after I lost feeling in my finger). Since the first few poor days (and thanks to good advices I got here) things improved: I have now +50,000 downloads – a nice number for an app that is not a game. I can now get enough money from ads for a GOOD beer in the end of the day AND peanuts (not a lousy beer in a cheap place like in the first days).
So the sun started to shine and I even gave food to my dog (read older post).

One regular morning I found a love message from the giant in my incoming email: " 7-Day Notification of Google Play Developer Term Violation"
After the first hard attack I started to read and found the reason:
This is a notification that your application, Expense Manager - HandWallet, with package ID mediavision.handwallet, is currently in violation of our developer terms. REASON FOR WARNING: Violation of the spam provisions of the Content Policy.
• Do not post repetitive content.
• Product descriptions should not be misleading or loaded with keywords in an attempt to manipulate ranking or relevancy in the store’s search results.

Yes, I had a short list of keywords in the end of my app description (with the title Keywords). Like many other apps (including my competitors). What’s so wrong with that? All words were relevant. None of them were "sex, “Britney Spears” or “angry birds (I now understand why all the birds in GOOxxx store are angry :@)”. I removed these keywords immediately (back to the cheap beer but better than nothing).
But what is the “repetitive content”? Is it illegal to explain the concept from different aspects? Am I repeating myself?

So I need your help again-
Please have a look on the product description here (after I removed the keywords) and let me know if I’ll be executed in 4 days…

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=mediavision.handwallet

And yes – if you need a good expense manager you are watching the right place…
As you can see you might have only 4 days to enjoy downloading. If the date now is after 13 Nov 2012 and the link is broken it is not your browser problem, only the company that created it… (hmm, now that I think about it, 13 in NOT a lucky number, right?!?)

I would get rid of the list of supported languages if I were you. Apart from that it looks OK. The monopoly is a little frightful which is why I hope Apple and Microsoft will always have some percentage of users so we can write apps for them too.
[hr]
Ps. In Polish you still have the keywords!

It’s very sad to see things like that. I can’t really see anything wrong with your app. It seems to be well designed and fairly complete. I whish you good luck against the borg.

Magnesus, hi
I understand what you say. I got the letter after I relesed a new version and the only change I did to the description was adding the languages. But what the hell is wrong with a list of languages? This information doesn’t appear anywhere else. And there are some languages (for example Indonesian or Malay) that don’t have a Google store. In Indonesia there are 250,000,000 potential customers. Don’t they have the right to read that the app is translated to Indonesian? This is spam?!?

Could it be that Google just pur a robot that counts commas?
[hr]
Androider - thanks for your kind words. Unfortunately this is a really big problem. I don’t drink beer with the profit - I am 41 years old, and have a wife and 3 kids. We really live partly from this. HandWallet is my working place now. And they can fire me even without a notice just because someone didn’t like the description.
I think it is OK if they make rules (stupid as they may be) and force us to obey. But the right way to handle this is to have a support team or someone that can explain if I did something wrong and check if I fixed it. I don’t mind to write anything in this damn description - that my app is bad, that it will destroy the phone and that I recommend to use something else. But please - tell me my mistake, give me a chance to fix it and let me know if it is OK now.

I feel your pain. David, the administrator of this forum got his AdMob account banned a couple of weeks ago with an automated message. That’s why I use only the minimum required Google services (Gmail and Play). I don’t really trust them.

I’m thinking about switching to Windows Mobile because honestly there are a lot of bad things in the Android ecosystem, both for developers and for end-users. I hate Apple way too much (child abuse in third world, stupid patents…) to ever think about giving iPhone a try.

In this forum it’s always recommended not to put all your eggs in a single basket, and it’s because of situations like yours.

Good luck.

AdMob account?
You mean Google developer account, right?

Do you know the reason for what they did?

This is exactly what they did. Avoid lists with commas and you are OK. And never get all your revenue from one source - you might get without any in just one second - not only on Google Play.

This behaviour is disgusting.
I still think the languages are important. Does anyone have an idea how to write it so that the robot will be happy? Without the comma it looks bad.

bulleted list?

Max, hi
I have 30 languages - it will look terrible.

Remember that you still have keywords listed in Polish edition - that would get you banned for sure (looks like you only updated the English description).

:slight_smile:
I am not going to take the chance so I’ll update also the languages pages.
Since I need to do that 20 times I decided to finish the English first.
Maybe I’ll write few languages in each translation. For example:
In English: “HandWallet is translated to most European languages and also Indonesian, Malay, Vietnamese and more.”
In Polish: “HandWallet is translated to German, Fench, Hungarian and more”
And so on…

Yeah, that should work. I have similar small lists in my description (max 4 items and with “and” between them etc.) and it was never a problem.

of course. This is their algorithm:
if (PRODUCT_BELONGS_TO_GOOXXX) {
possition=100; //first place!
} else if (CURRENT_WIND_SPEED>48) {
remove_product();
} else if (PRODUCT_COMMAS_NUMBER>CURRENT_TEMPERATURE) {
send_notice();
} else {
continue_to_make_money();
}

I got a similar warning a while ago: http://makingmoneywithandroid.com/forum/showthread.php?tid=420&highlight=warning

The worst part of this is that you now have one strike against you. From what I’ve heard, it’s two strikes and your out with google. The next time you get a ban notice not a warning. I may be wrong about this but that’s what I’ve heard.

I just got my second one and my account still exists. Sucks because I lost a lot of revenue…But I’m thankful to have the rest of my apps.

I’m considering moving to iOS unless I can figure out a way to get around account bans, just in case it happens.

As I wrote before in one of my old posts:
I WISH WE HAD A WAY TO GET UNITED.

Dan - as I understand in the second time they remove the app but keep the account?
What was the reason for the removal?

I think now you have cleared your keyword text in the description. but there is one little problem that i have noticed.

as google informed, you have repeated content. repeated content means buddy you have duplicate or almost similar apps in your developer account. not the content in the description. for me, your Expense Manager - HandWa and Expense Tracker Recorder apps seems pretty similar except the icon.
that’s a violation of their terms and you have to unpublish one them. otherwise you have a risk

The ‘Expense Tracker Recorder’ is an add-on to HandWallet. It enables people to record expense using their voice (insted of typing). I did it this way to avoid the hardware permission. It is written clearly on the beginning of the description:

“Expense Tracker Recorder is a small app that helps you record your expense using your own voice and save them in HandWallet.
In order to use this app you should install first HandWallet - a free professional expense tracker that helps you to control your expense, accounts, bills and budget.”

asanka-
I followed your advice and rewrote again the description of ‘Expense Tracker Recorder’. Do you think it is OK now? (I also changed the images but it might take some time to appear)
This is the direct link:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.expense.tracker.recorder

It’s crazy on what I am wasting my time. Could add some features of fix some bugs in this time.
Regards,
David