[lowleveldrone]

I just tried publishing my first app to the Play store and am in the middle of a horrible experience.

I wrote a little app to help myself learn birdsong. You copy some mp3s to a folder on your sdcard, open the folder in the app, and it will shuffle them and only show you the name of the file if you ask. Pretty simple, but I found it useful and thought it might be useful to other people. So I pay my $25, upload my app, and wake up the next day to an email saying my app had been suspended for "deceitful behaviour" and that it happened again they might suspend my other Google services, for instance the gmail account I've had since 2004.

Of course the email doesn't contain any information on what the deceitful behavior was, so like a Kafka story, I'm stuck defending myself against charges that I'm never informed of. When I heard back from support, they say that my app opens to a list of mp3 apps to download. So either my account has been hacked and someone changed the app apk, or they are unable to tell the difference between a directory listing from the sdcard and a list of mp3 apps. If the latter, how my app can be deceitful when it matches one of the screenshots I attached is completely beyond me.

Once my email migration to fastmail is complete, I'll rename my app and try again, this time with a modified UI that makes you click a button before showing a directory listing. I'd like to get my $25 worth if nothing else.

This whole incident has left me with zero confidence in their customer service or technical competence.

[hga]

It's this linkage with the rest of your accounts that can make doing business with them particularly dangerous. After the Google+ real names debacle started, which included people using their real names which Google didn't believe, and shutting down all their Google services, I stopped using every one of their services except for ephemeral zero stickiness ones like search (fortunately I'd discovered Fastmail some time previously, and they're beyond wonderful).

Buying a house built in 1910 and having to remodel and move to it financially prompted me to buy a smart phone, and Project Fi was clearly the best match, so I've now seriously reversed that ... but that also means I now won't even think about increasing my exposure to these sorts of risks by trying to write apps for the Play store, using any of their cloud offerings, etc. My main phone and its number are too valuable, too sticky to risk.