Have i made a mistake

Hi,

My name is Rajiv Memon from india, recently we ordered 2 apps for android market worth a lot(they are being coded), we have a few apps on our playstore, we have provided all our income info and all ids to google, we plan to launch a big campaign and have hired a company as our 2 new big apps will be launched , our press release and other stuff is going on …

Now some days back i purchased some installs and reviews from a service provider just to test incentivized installs model, i forgot about it as it was for one of our lesser apps and we could care less for it …

Then i read on internet that google is banning apps and developers account for fake reviews and installs , and that as fake installs in many cases do not even open the app and then uninstalls exactly after 3 days in many cases, its easy for google to detect such activities …

Also that google can suspend such accounts any time…

This has made me very nervous, we simply cannot have another account as every thing is with google in terms of ids etc. Do you guys know of cases where accounts got suspended …

Can you guide what can i do now… We were planning to use Admob but now i feel worried if our account will be suspended …

Regards
Rajiv

If you use Admob or Google AdWords for install then you should be fine; that’s one of their core functions. Sites like app2top are risky business, it works for some and not for others.

@Andre3wap - well that is my concern, i ended up using such a site for testing, though for a small number of test installs like 200 and some 10 odd reviews… now i am really concerned, should i inform google about it, we plan to spend some big amount on advertising using admob …

I Just want to know if any one was banned or suspended in past for using such a service …

Rajiv

I think you should be fine. If you had done alot of installs + reviews, then I’d think you would have something to worry about. And no, do not tell on your self.

Weather it’s a big app or small try to use new account with new IP and new system hash…you should be concern about this…if you are planning big Its easy for you to change those…my vote is for new account and new IDs…never use incentive installs for bigger apps…

@Andre3wap - that is nice to know, we will hope for best…
@NokiaDev- yeah we will try and use VPN, the thing is with incentive install , i thought some real human installing app or writing review, i never knew this could be done with softwares, as i thought google would have measures in place to check it …so i gave it a try …

Now to create new account , we will need to do a lot of things from fresh … really so silly of me , well i got lulled as many people said they used these services to get million downloads and so on and so forth …

Having said all above, the user accounts who reviewed our app , also reviewed other apps with 1 million downloads , this is with atleast 5 million plus download apps, most with more then 100,000, so seems many are using the service … also the apps store of such developers seems to be in business for several years now it seems , they have many apps …

Thanks for all the guidance …

Regards

Why don’t you just unpublish your old app and proceed to publish your new big app

@shuiwo - so if i unpublish the app on which i bought these incentive install and review, does it mean our account will be safe , i can do this right now, kindly guide in this regard …

Regards
Rajiv

yea just unpublish and republish the app with a different package and signature.

also if you have created a legit app and spent a lot of effort on it then it’s better to use the legit ways to generate users for it.