Your app is Suspended from Google Play due to policy violation

Have you received this email from the Google play store and your application is no more available for download? First of all, do not panic, we understand that a lot of blood sweat and tears have been put in building the application infrastructure and on top of top you have lost your point of contact with the users.

The above statement simply means that your application does not adhere to the policies of the google – which are being changed off late due to data privacy issues being highlighted across the world. Here we go through a checkpoint list that you should follow in this case.

As in FYI we were in the same spot and we spent more than 2 weeks trying to find the root cause.

How to get back Suspended Play Store Apps

• Find the SDK’s that are violating the data privacy protocol. There are some SDK’s like AltaMob, Batmobi and YeahMobi, which were violating the data policy, hence if your application was using any of these, remove them and then resubmit your application.

• Take a step back. Go through your application and see if there are any data leakages or security issues. Convert your API’s to https if not done already. Though you may get your application back on the play store without the https, but it is highly recommended. You need to remember that you are in this for the long run and the better your control over data is the lesser the chances of your application being flagged.

• Keep your application up to date. You might be using some external libraries in your application, it is a good practice to upgrade to the latest versions of these libraries, because if there were any vulnerabilities present in these libraries, the developers ideally should have upgraded to more compatible and trustworthy versions of the same.

• Put up disclaimers on the application, clearly specifying how and where the data that would be collected would be used. Also, this disclaimer should be the first item the users should interact with i.e. before anything is stored in your database. If the user in not comfortable sharing their data, they should not be forced or tricked into signing up.

• Go through the history of releases of your application, including the releases in Beta and other categories. It could be the case that a vulnerable release has been lying there and is causing your trouble.

• Do thoroughly go through the link https://play.google.com/about/developer-content-policy/.

Please keep in mind that Google is to help you and is trying to clean the ecosystem. We all understand that when you are trying to get your application out to the market a lot of times the security aspect is undermined. Therefore, use this time to work on the security aspect of the application.

In case you are struggling and would like us to do an audit of your application, feel free to get in touch via hello@dignitas.digital