Johannes is the co-founder of A couple of days ago, the Market account of another developer I know has been suspended.
What’s the reason for that?
According to the Android Market Developer Distribution Agreement, there are several reasons. Let me sum things up for you, here are the four main reasons:
Firs of all, I assume you don’t do something that is obviously not permitted, like showing violence or porn or uploading malware.
The second big thing is: Try not to use intellectual property of others. You might have done that because you needed a cool image or sound to test something in your app, did a short image search or forgot to mention a content distributed under CC license, and tadaaa: There you have your violation.
The third thing is not to respect the Android Market Developer Program Policies. The most common error here is to do something too obvious to optimise your Market Position. This means: Keyword spamming or repetitive content in your app’s description is not allowed. I’ve seen a couple of popular apps being kicked out of the Market beccause of this. If you want to optimize your app for more visibility in the Android Market however, stay tuned, I will publish an article on this topic soon.
Fourth: Follow the content rating guidelines. You should read this especially when your app needs the user’s location. In most cases, your content rating might then be too low. But: when your app doesn’t meet this guidelines and Google finds out, they will adjust your rating first. When you repeat to change the rating back, your app will be removed (and eventually your account).
You (usually) get a second chance
Finally, even if your app violates the Android Market DDA, at first only the app will be removed. Only if this happens repeatedly, your whole account will be suspended.
2011/06/14 at 11:04
Looks like more and more developers are being picked up by Google these days for policy violations. The Creative Commons attribution is something I find is really easy to forget, but it’s obviously important and I might have to get more aware on this aspect :)
I think it would be great if Google had some sort of “warning” system in place where they could alert developers to potential TOS violations before actually removing the app. It seems that 90% of the problems are accidental, and it wouldn’t be very encouraging to have an app removed on the spot without any chance to fix things.
2011/08/25 at 17:13
If your app was suspended for keyword spamming, do they allow you to remove the keyword spamming and unsuspend your app? I thought keyword spamming within reason was the aim of the game.
2011/08/25 at 19:29
Hi Coder
I’ve never heard of a case where this had been possible. In the developer content policies they state ‘Do not post repetitive content. Product descriptions should not be misleading or loaded with keywords in an attempt to manipulate ranking or relevancy in the store’s search results.’. So the game is probably intended to be more like your or our job is to describe your or our apps and the algorithm’s job is to show the most relevant apps to the user.
2012/03/02 at 15:57
Hello,
First let me thank you for your blog.
Today Google sent me an email “7-Day Notification of Android Market Developer Term Violation” about “Spam and Placement in the Store.” I think it was by the number of keywords that contained my description.
A while ago I changed my description but left some keywords, do you think that I meet the requirements? Do not quite understand why I have notified.
This is the site involved: https://market.android.com/details?id=es.luisjaviersanz.android.vatipsandgroups
Thank you very much for your attention.
Cheers!
2012/03/06 at 13:26
Hello Luis,
I can’t find anything else but the keywords. Calling eight keywords a violation is a little too hard in my opinion though. Does “7-Day Notification” mean that you have seven days to fix the issue?
Best regards
Johannes