You make a privacy-first service → You get banned on Google

This topic is unpleasant, so there won’t be a lot of jokes. You need to have a lot of courage and composure to make jokes about your deadly wound when you’re still severely bleeding.

Lately people suddenly got brave enough and started telling their stories about App Store and Google Play moderation going not so good for them. Their apps were banned or not even put out from sale — all without any real reason. Months of work down the drain.

The rules are very generic, there’s a lot of room for interpretation. Their application is highly selective. If you get banned, the provided reasons are super-common, and you’ll never get any real details. You can pass the review multiple times with the same app, but then suddenly get banned over nothing. They can forbid you from using the promotion text that Apple uses on their own payment pages! Hell, they can ban the designs that are added to the documentation as a perfect example!

Google does a pretty good job moderating the ads. I cannot say I saw a lot of unacceptable content in the ads. Nonetheless, there are lots of such cases.

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