Was "judged" by Google Play to violate the policy: the developer of the open source software FairEmail shut down all projects in anger

Recently, the implementation of an "automatic" review mechanism on the Google Play Store (Google Play) "killed" a popular open-source application, drawing attention from the developer community.

According to foreign media gHacks, the Google Play Store last week marked the open source email client FairEmail as Spyware (spyware) on the grounds that it "may be uploading a contact list from a mobile phone" without disclosing specific details.

Just after Google mistakenly flagged the app as spyware, FairEmail developer Marcel Bokhorst withdrew all apps from Google Play and announced that they would stop all development.

Google Play "decided" as spyware: developer furiously shuts down all projects

Earlier last week, Bokhorst received a "policy violation" email from Google saying Google believed the FairEmail app was spyware, the report said. A full statement has not been released, but Bokhorst believes Google may have misunderstood the use of favicons in the app.

After resubmitting a new version of the app, Bokhorst removed the use of favicons. Disappointingly, his appeal received a generic "official answer" -- one that has long disappointed Google Play developers: Google announced that "they believe the app is spyware." .

So Bokhorst made the final decision: pull the app and all other apps from Google Play. That is, these applications will no longer be maintained and supported in the future.

In fact, before this, Bokhorst was "dissatisfied" with Google Play's moderation mechanism, such as answering thousands of support questions per month, the difference between app revenue, and the inability to take action on unfair reviews in the Google Play Store. and many more.

Although Bokhorst has also considered keeping the app on GitHub, this would result in 98% of users churn. And recently Google forced the developers of Total Commander to remove the ability to install APKs from the file manager. So, a combination of factors influenced Bokhorst's final decision.

According to reports, FairEmail, a popular free email client for Google's Android operating system, is privacy-friendly, has no restrictions on the email accounts users can set up in the app, and supports unified inbox, conversational Threading, bidirectional synchronization, OpenPGP support, and more.

Google Play Store's "terrible" wording

According to comments in the XDA thread, FairEmail's developers previously tried to add optional Gravatar and Libravatar integration to an earlier version of the app, but Google turned it down.

Both services, Gravatar and Libravatar, are understood to upload email addresses to their servers in order to match them with existing profile pictures attached to those email addresses, so these must be specified in the app's privacy policy. use of addresses.

According to Google's feedback, the FairEmail app has no privacy policy at all, but that's not the case - the FairEmail app has had a privacy policy for a long time. However, Google is likely to dispute that Gravatar and Libravatar are not mentioned in the privacy policy (the company's automated text attempts to clarify this).

Meanwhile, developer Bokhorst insisted that he had a privacy policy in place, so this led to a deadlock, but in the end the developer had to "give in."

There has been speculation that the incident may have been caused by the Google Play Store's initial problems with the certification process for Gravatar and Libravatar, but it's unclear which problem Google is considering because the developers have removed those services.

Regardless, FairEmail said Google's wording on the issue was "very bad."

Google Play's review mechanism that 'tired' developers

As we all know, the number of apps that Google needs to manage is "massive", so it has to implement corresponding technologies and algorithms that allow it to quickly decide whether an app can enter the Play Store, or whether it violates Google's policies. .

Still, innocent apps are often "killed" by the automated review decision mechanism, which is where the company "fails". The point is that appeals are rarely granted after the general procedure is found to be "violating," and little is known about what developers have to do to get their apps through the review process.

FairEmail is the latest app to be "innocently killed", one of the most popular open source Gmail alternatives, FairEmail has more than 500,000 downloads in the Play Store.

The developers got tired of Google's handling of the situation and decided to quit all apps altogether.

Regarding this incident, FairEmail said that Google needs to strengthen communication with developers to provide them with useful and feasible advice, not to issue general statements that are ultimately self-contradictory, and not to imply that the privacy policy is completely missing, otherwise it will lead to more So many misunderstandings.

Reference link: https://www.androidpolice.com/googles-automated-play-store-policy-enforcement-fairemail/