Max number of strikes to loose account?

Monetizing, Advertising & Marketing Advertising Networks
1

I would like to know what you guys think is the max limit for strikes to loose an account, common sense seems to be after 3rd strike you loose account.

But i have seen cases where an developer have more than 3 strikes and don´t lose account and normally is because they are not repeated violations and they have some good time gap between them.

I am asking this because i have an account with one strike some months old because of wrong content rating because an ad network shown some ads that werent compliant with the content rating i didnt lose the app and google adjusted the rating.

I am now thinking creating a merchant account to create IAP and paid apps for some of my successful quality free apps but i am bit paranoid with all the ban stories and don´t know if i should create a new account and only transfer my quality apps to the new accounts with 0 strikes or use the old account and fill all the details for the merchant account (i dont use admob on that account)

I am an developer that following stricly all google policy guidelines but i am right now a bit paranoid with all horror stories i read here.

Also in this account i unpublished some apps that werent successfull and were probably not complaint with new policy like finger/age scanners and stuff i unpublished them and replaced with dummy apk to avoid surprises

What would guys do in my position? keep that account with 1 strike or have the trouble to make a new account and transfer the published apps?

2

It can happen any moments. There is no kind of third strike policy. It depends the weight of the policy strike and your competitor work. That’s way. I developed a plugin to not to lose active user withing app in case ban happens and direct them to new one. It will be in code canyon soon. Keep in touch.

3

You sure? I have always read here about the 3 strike policy, but reading the post The app has been removed from Google Play - Advertising Networks - Making Money with Android seems that in some cases they now only remove the app without suspending giving you the opportunity to correct the problem i really hope Google is getting friendlier with us

4

Yeah, I think Google can pretty much do whatever they want.

5

For now, Google is cruel to Dev

  1. Ban you anytime even you have no app strike before. If u ask them why, they will just tell you that your account is related to another account. So be ready for this mistaken ban!:rolleyes:

  2. Ban you because of app strikes. No clear numbers of app strike for account termination! Sometimes, only one app strike can transport your account to the hell :o It depends on the type of violation such as IP, API abuse, keyword spam,…etc.

6

I would love to try that. Please keep us updated!

7

Development process has finished successfully. The plugin works as expected and so far it has implemented over 8 android applications in gp. I will uptade to codecanyon after I finish the self guide instruction.

8

You are right, its usually the third strike that gets you. If you received a strike and are paranoid on updating some old apps, I would advise starting to think about creating a new dev account, and transferring established apps over, or use the new account to submit “riskier” apps.

I also lost apps due to incorrect content rating, its a shame that google policy is so stupid and doesn’t give developers a chance of rebuttle

9

It is usualy third strike but it depends to your fault. If you are easily breaking some content policy, yes, third strike but try to put some Angry Birds, Flash Player, Windows XP or something like this in store and they will delete account. Sometimes without any email. The same situation if you are using some malware, spyware, push notification ads, bundle 2.0 from airpush(it’s for alternative stores only) or something like this.

10

They suspended your Apps for having a wrong content rating only?
So far I got that kind of warning twice but they just asked me to modify the content ratings without suspending any Apps.
Plus I got another warning for excessive Keyword spam.
So I got 3 warnings in the span of about 2 years but my account is still ok so far…

11

i had few other warnings before the third warning (third violation was related to content rating), after third warning, the took the account down “due to repeated violations”, even though these violations were all different from each other and in the span of 6 months.

12

Sorry to ask again, did your previous warnings also resulted in the Apps being suspended from Google Play? or was just a warning that you could fix and keep the App active?
By the time you received the last warning, did you have some suspended Apps in your account?

13

yes, both apps got suspended, then i added a third one, which got suspended and minutes later, the account got suspended as well

14

What did you do that gave you the warning? thanks

15

At the bottom of the App description I had a line similar to this below (when I first started publishing Apps on Google Play I just used other Apps already in the Store for reference… instead of checking the Google Play policy pages where it’s clearly stated it’s not allowed):

KEYWORDS: gold, metal, shiny, phone, xxxx, yyyy, zzzz, etc (about 10 words or so)