So a few months back, I was invited to join the Google Mobile App Developer Panel (as I'm sure other B4A users were as well) - & coincidentally was issued with a pending app suspension warning on the same day from Play Store...! Anyway, in those first days when I & other invitees onto the panel started posting, it became very obvious that there was a lot of unhappiness & fear from developers about the way they were being treated by Google, with quite a few of the contributors having had apps & accounts suspended & banned. Several of us were very vocal about the situation & there were a lot of comments made on the panel about the poor treatment of developers generally & also a lot of specific examples of how seemingly quite successful developers were now unable to even publish apps. The whole atmosphere was very doom & gloom...
Anyway, it seems that maybe Google has listened to those (& other, I'm sure) comments, because it looks like they have finally implemented an app approval process along the lines of what Apple does. I submitted a new app this evening & noticed that instead of immediately being published it went into a "Pending publication" status - which I had never seen before. I did some searching through the Play Store help system, as well as generally on Google & it seems that they have indeed started to approve (& in some cases reject) new apps & updates to existing apps.
This might be old news to some of you, but to me it's very exciting & hopefully is the first step in the direction of getting rid of the bad old days of arbitrary suspensions & bannings that seem to be almost impossible to appeal or even get any insight into why the action was taken in the first place. If this really is a genuine attempt by Google to review apps & provide useful feedback & direction to developers, then I applaud Google for finally listening & taking a sensible step.
- Colin.