7 main reasons why applications are blocked on Google Play and AppStore

Surely, lately it has been seen a lot of scary stories about how applications are blocked on Google Play and the AppStore. All this is associated with attracting great attention to the information security of applications, and more precisely, to the fact of its absence.

Often, public hysteria on this subject rises absolutely groundless and is associated only with the illiteracy of certain individuals on this issue and their posts suddenly taking off at the top 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 forced to give official comments and explain on fingers why and why certain actions were taken on her part.

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

Most often, the continuation of the story (the official response of the company, refutation, etc.) is not remembered by people, everyone remembers only the negative side. So even if the company was essentially not to blame for anything, public opinion has already been formed, ratings are rolled into plinths, PR managers are shedding dragon tears.

Of course, there are a huge number of cases where the fears are well founded and you really should draw attention to a specific situation. However, it should not be denied that in both cases, a company that 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 publishing a specific application directly. This would take up too many resources, given the flow of published and updated daily applications. They can only block after the fact, if the vulnerability is clarified and, as a rule, made widely publicized (for example, as happened recently with the AppSee analytic platform, all applications that contained it were cut out from the AppStore before removing it from their code, because She recorded everything that the user did with the application, including screens with credit cards).

And now you can return to the applications themselves and the policy of their placement in official stores. It is worth noting that Google and Apple can, in fact, remove or block the application for ANY reason, if you personally do not please them with something. So if you are not ̶v̶y̶sh̶l̶i̶ ̶l̶i̶ts̶o̶m̶ satisfied by some mythical criteria the platform administrator - you will not be able to publish on it. For some, this may sound awful, but in reality, this leads to the fact that sooner or later other platforms for the distribution of applications will begin to form, which Amazon and other similar services are trying to do now.

For the most part, the policies for placing applications on Google Play and the AppStore are very similar, because you can make a small top of what you should definitely not do if you are a mobile application developer and would like to continue to distribute them quietly and peacefully in official stores. Let's look at the most popular reasons for blocking and subsequent removal of applications from official stores.

1. Violation of the use of keywords

This violation occurs in almost 50% of cases, so in my opinion it deserves its first place. Developers and marketers, having read various articles on product promotion and who may have already done similar tricks on websites, decide to use keywords in application names 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. Violation of intellectual property rights

An application can violate someone’s intellectual property and for this, especially if a representative of this same intellectual property comes with a piece of paper from the court, they can block not only the application itself, but also the developer’s account. Sometimes such an unpleasant situation can arise simply because of inattention or because of ignorance in this matter. Intellectual property can include everything from the name of the application, its design, general direction and other points, to challenge in court which for a small company or even 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 pretty quickly cleans such applications. Unfortunately, we were not in 2012, when such applications could hang in the store for months. Neural networks have since become much smarter. So you have to find another way to attract and retain the user in your application, maybe just make it better;)

5. Third-party application markets

Google does not allow apps published on Google Play to go to third-party app markets for downloads or updates. Due to the openness of the Android system, it is relatively easy to implement third-party transitions during the boot process at a technical level. There may also be little commercial value behind this, but Google prohibits this behavior.

6. Violation of advertising policy

Any application should not contain false or misleading advertising. Ads may only appear in the application to which it relates, and any advertisement 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 only provide payment within their applications 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 on other players).

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

In fact, there are much more rules, but here I made out 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 occurs quite often. These updates may be due to public opinion or some tragic events in the world. So "but I did not know / did not see" - in this case it will not work.

The rules of official app stores are quite vague and in fact, you can drag any application for one or another violation, if you really want to. Google, in turn, will immediately block the application until further proceedings, depriving the developer of profit. For many, such a turn could result in enormous losses and the destruction of the company itself. Now about this there is a lot of bustling 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 for users on their own, as AdAway, MiXplorer, NewPipe and others do. This feature should especially be considered by the creators of applications,

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

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