[anonymous1983]

I agree that he did violate one of their terms of service, and, like you, I believe it is unfair and too extreme to ban him from ever submitting an app to the Google Play store again.

The author links to a few other people who have also been banned. It's amazing that Google does not provide some way for developers to get reinstated in the Google Play store. Google basically owns the Android app market space and a ban for life is too severe.

[MattPearce]

It is possible to be reinstated, but very difficult - I signed up for a Play Developer account a year ago, and didn't end up using it at all. A few months later, I got an email saying my Play Developer and Wallet accounts were banned. I emailed their appeals system once and got an autoresponse saying it wouldn't be reviewed. I emailed again and got a personal response saying they couldn't tell me why they banned it for "security reasons". I pushed them, and they finally told me it was part of some sort of auto-ban on a Play Developer account that had also banned all other "associated" accounts. I only have one account. I asked them to investigate further, and got told it wouldn't be reviewed. I finally managed to contact someone at Google Support who helped put me through to someone on the Google Play team, who finally confirmed it was a bug in their system designed to automatically find associated accounts when banning a particular account. Someone else had been banned, and I was caught up in the sweep.

I finally got my Play Developer and Wallet accounts reinstated, and I promptly shut down my Play Developer account so that I wouldn't risk having my Wallet account accidentally banned again due to someone else's actions. Now I just develop for iOS.