Automated bot banned yet another game in Play Store, appeal system is defunct - My rant on how modern Google does not work at all

New day, new game banned in the Play Store by out-of-control AI bot. This time for using an old-timey anti-Nazi Soviet flag in the Patriotic War game. And yes, the Play Store Policy Team okay'ed using it in this particular historical context years earlier. Afterward I always realize the same freaking fact: I was naive. I'm sorry, I grew up in a society where your word meant something. If a decent human being or some a gigantic entity/authority states something to me, it's good enough for me: I will live by that. But no no no no... I guess I once again threw a handful of dice in the air and get a full series of ones.

The appeal process has been utterly defunct for years for us small indie developers, so we rarely hear anything back, at most automated canned meaningless responses, and very very rarely apps get restored, now matter how meaningless the perceived issue. Simply visualize it as Google marching to your house and kicking in the front door to rip your made-after-careful-consideration purchases away. In order to keep at least a few games in the Play Store, I'll be switching from historically-accurate policy-team-approved flags and symbols and names to some random 700-year-old seals, fictional doodle flags or fluffy pillows.

Obviously, all the games and their free turn-limited versions are still available in the Amazon App Store, where actual humans still carefully make common sense decisions based on context. You know, reality-based business-decisions. I know it's a hassle, but if you install the Amazon App Store on your device and purchase some of your apps via it, you'll be helpting to create some much needed competition int he Android App ecosystem.

The sad fact is that in a complex project with millions of lines of code and hundreds of icons, eventually the 987987987987 bots ruthlessly nonstop looking to find a single minor slip-up will eventually succeed. The overworked developer trying to follow all the ever-changing 98798798798 rules from 200 countries and Play Store can't be flawless day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year, decade after decade. Obvious challenge with all symbols is that they represent 100 different things to various groups across the decades. And there is no scale in the penalty system: The first reaction will be a total and full eternal ban, which sounds a bit unfair, since using a policy-team-approved old-timey symbol is not actually comparable violation to doing actual criminal acts like stealing credit card info.

But what can I do, what can you do? We all have complained about these issues to Google for a decade, at best they dismissively laugh at us. Absolutely nothing can be done, it's all an automated, inhumane wall of dystopian nightmare. Those small developers who are not yet mentally and financially shred to pieces put on their best black suit and with tears-in-their-eyes bury those entrepreneurs who simply no-longer could handle Google's nonstop barrage of unfair bans against their life's work and craftsmanship. All I can do is just follow what military historians do when publishing a new book: self-censor until nothing is left even vaguely resembling history or something new that contradicts the old existing narrative, or in my case innocent board-game tile pieces. Flags gone. Names gone. Symbols gone. Colors gone. And horrifyingly, even if I get this one game back by some miracle, so what? It's a meaningless momentary break. The 89756987698 bots will attack every word and symbol every nanosecond of every minute at ever-greater detail until something triggers them again.

And I'm not saying this current predicament is entirely caused by Google: ignorant politicians demand scrutiny of everything posted online. But hey, the last I checked, several billion messages are posted online every single day. Knowing the complex context before applying censorship is crucial, but, oh no, that would mean employing billions of people to properly carefully scrutinize everything that is posted online. This demand made by politicians is wildly impossible. For the past 10,000 years human society has not been able to control what is said in each street corner, and similarly we can't control every image and message online. Can't be done, sorry. Drunk, frustrated, mislead people will keep on saying crazy stuff. Plus knowledge changes, at one point in history medical doctors attacked and killed a doctor who called for more 'handwashing to be done' (look at the true story of Ignaz Semmelweis). The crazy conspiracy theory that 99.999% of medical doctors were ready to kill to suppress, turned out to be a fact that saved millions of lives. There must be avenues to bring forth new ideas, even if they do seem crazy, like handwashing, at one point every living medical doctor was fiercy against it.

Sure, Google has to deal with massive volume of feedback. I and many others have suggested a billion times to Google that they should introduce multi-level ranking. For example, an account that has had a professional relationship with Google for 15 years making huge amounts of money reports a bug. Maybe that bug report should have a higher priority vs 5-second-old account from North Korea that has earned zero dollars in the ecosystem. Secondly, the penalty for having a now-suddenly-frowned-upon symbol in your 13-year-old screenshots is the same exact instant removal and killing of your 20-year-old business as is the penalty for trying to insert malware to steal credit card info. Surely there could be some scaling system on how to react to these: for mild cases give a warning and 2 weeks to fix the issue, while we all want to see outright criminal activity to be banned instantly.

And could we improve on the tone and wording of Play Store messaging. Imagine giving your all for 2 years to craft an app and then waking up to a message labeling you a scum extremist criminal for accidentally leaving one now suddenly frowned-upon historical word in two millions lines of complex code. How about instead wording the message something like: "Unfortunately, due to massive volume, we have to automate checking apps, and often there are false positives." There is a slight difference in perceived tone here.

Since I have access to limited military libraries, I sometimes help historians doing research as they are writing their books. You would not believe how much amazing content they have to self-censor and remove from their history books to avoid automated shadow-bans based on trigger keywords. Worse yet, anything new that would change our thinking of something is guaranteed never see the light of day, as anything new would simply by definition go against 10,000 out of date sources of information. The AI will crush anything new that improves our knowledge and goes against the out of date majority view based on decades or in the worst cases century old pre-existing 'knowledge'. This phenomenon is called 'stagnation' and it is what basically killed the Soviet Union. It was semi-impossible to introduce new things, as people in power were older, and their knowledge was many decades old. Horrifyingly, the West is now cheerfully walking into the same stagnation due to automated censorship wiping out anything new going against the very old established knowledge.

We all remember what happened to famous content creator Simon Dyke: Google's bots banned his financials repeatedly for him being 'derogatory' until he was forced to legally change his proud historical surname and business-name into something completely different. It did not matter one bit that several bosses at Google repeatedly made the sensible appeal decision that Simon can use his true legal name. The mindless AI bots simply nanosecond later flooded over decisions made by human bosses and their bot-will prevailed. That is the world we live in, I can't change it, but I can at least point out how deeply dystopian this all is. Maybe if you're an average guy doing average things with average names and terms, the system works for you. But dear lord, for anyone one millimeter away from that dead-middle of the average center, you will be ground to absolute dust by the no-context-at-all bots doing the policing. The word demoralizing does not even begin to describe how unfair this is.

Okay, you might counter that these are 'only' massive series on unfortunate individual occurrences. No, no, Google is so paralyzed that it cannot react to even when the fundamental financial part of it totally breaks. One example: in 2014 the European Union switched from allowing casual short bank account numbers to ONLY allowing financial transactions when the long full formal account number was used. Since this is a crucial change, EU spent a mammoth amount of money to talk about this, to warn everybody, for 20 years. So, for longer than Google had existed, the EU had been raving about warnings about this coming change. In the last years before the change, the amount of messages about it drove me nuts. You could stop a random infant on the streets and talk with them about this coming change. I could use an Ouija board to contact my dead grandma and talk about this coming change in the bank accounts. Every single body knew about it 20 years in advance. Except, you guessed, Google. This change caught Google pant in their ankles. All Google payments in EU failed. Probably a hundred thousands payments failed at once. If one hundred payments suddenly fail in one continent in your business, would you draw the conclusion that there is something wrong in YOUR system? It's bloody unlikely that 100,000 bank account numbers suddenly magically turned incorrect without nobody changes them. Well, Google started blaming us developers for not using correct bank numbers. So, 100,000 developers woke up, made strong coffee, sent Google feedback that "hey, EU changed banking laws, we must use longer bank account numbers, but Google system ONLY allows entering an old short invalid bank account numbers." If 100,000 persons write to you the same exact fact, would you believe them? Google didn't. Day after day, week after week, month after month, Google kept harassing us developers to enter a working bank account number. Over time, we must have reported back tens of millions times that EU law had changed, and we literally could not enter those now required long bank account numbers to Google's systems. Then, after months of an entire continent not getting paid, something wonderful happened: Probably one googler wandered outside from their closed-off elitist buildings, and must have inhaled a free-floating idea, and he started to doubt that, maybe, just maybe, Google's basic data entry is once again not working at all. Then somebody very easily, 5-second job, change the number limiting the length of the entered bank account number and BOOM, all we European developers could once again submit correct bank details and get paid. Please, take a moment to comprehend how dysfunctional Google was in 2014 already. It had then already fully lost its ability to react in reality or millions of pieces of feedback reporting the same exact thing.

If you want to radicalize people, oh hell yes, this is the way: make somebody feel 100% powerless even when they have done nothing worthwhile wrong and are getting abused this way again and again, truly multiplying the pain from lack of any counter-measure or justice. It's simple as that. If there was real, genuine competition, I could just use the other 9 popular app stores and abandon Play Store and accept losing 10% of sales, but that's not the case, most sales happen in Play Store. It's pretty darn hard to boycott an overpowering majority of the effectively only supplier of something. Well, many users have abandoned Android for Apple. But it's not that easy for us developers to flip ecosystems: phones, laptops, developer accounts, programming languages, all need to be rebought, thoroughly relearned. Plus, how do you move your fan base and trust-built-over-years to a new world. Not as easy as ABC.

And it is not that one thing is failing at Google. I could tell you almost endless stories of basic aspects crashing and burning. Recently, I had to submit an official government tax certificate for 2025 to various online platforms. It went very smoothly, a routine act, except in the Google Pay. For some reason, Google just kept saying that my certificate ends in 2024. So, after several failed attempts, I contacted their support, knowing this would be the start of the usual stress-inducing dismissal. Fortunately, this particular case was about finance and official government documents, so this Google department can't behave as fully dismissive manner as their other departments. Hour after hour, day after day, week after week, they just kept ignoring the issue, telling me to carry out the same exact submit process again. This process also moved so slowly, that by the time somebody at Google bothered to reply, and information in the support thread was out of date, sigh. Anyway, then something happened no human has probably never experienced! One of the people actually realized there might be an error in the way Google is handling official government certificates, so he raised my case upwards. Did that help? Not at all, I was back at getting the same exact 'advice': do the same thing you have already unsuccessfully done 98798798 times before. I explained I had done that many times, and it did not work. They explained that I should do that same thing again. Repeat. Endlessly. At this point, months has passed by without me being able to submit my official government certificate to Google. Then I finally figured out the flaw in the data entry logic Google was using! Since there are countless different levels of various business types around the world, ranging from no-money hobby accounts to solo-no-separate-bank-account-for-business to major corporations, there are also few or many OPTIONAL elements in the certificate submission process. I realized that maybe, just like in the case of chaotic DUNS-number confirmation, Google might have once again screwed up the basic data entry, and I tried filling out the data fields marked OPTIONAL (not applicable to my business type), and BOOM, my official government certificate was processed and approved. It goes without saying that Google has shown zero interest in my bug report or my fix, but at least I managed to talk some nearly suicidal living-hand-to-mouth developers into calming down. I explained to them how they can submit their official government certificates into the flawed Google system, avoiding the pitfalls. I never have these types of issues with Amazon or other platforms. I am so sorry to repeat the same phrase, but Google simply just does not work.

Even bosses inside Google can't take Google anymore, every week new Google-boss rage-quits out of frustration: App founder quits Google, says company doesn't serve users anymore: A scathing blog post details dysfunctional life inside Google: "The company is trapped in a maze of approvals, launch processes, legal reviews, performance reviews, exec reviews, and other bureaucratic processes, and while the employees are capable, they get very little done quarter over quarter, year over year. I have left Google understanding how a once-great company has slowly ceased to function."

We all saw how it went with photo apps and photo storage services: Google made Google Photos forever free with unlimited storage. And the second every last small and medium-sized competing business or the owner went down, Google walked back on their "unlimited", "forever" and "free" hype, and now it's limited, monthly, and you pay through the nose.

After developer meet-ups, we lowly ignored indie developers sometimes wonder... How many of the accounts that go silent, after getting hit by random unfair automated bans and fail to get corrections, end up with the developer giving up their calling in life and finding another job. And how many simply are fully financially and mentally exhausted by Google and end their lives as they see no way to get justice. Is the number only 1, or 100, or 10,000 suicides of sensitive creative personalities caused, if not fully then partly, by the attempt by big tech to be efficient and remove all human-common-sense by almost solely relying on AI automation. Even if you get a human review, those folks in turn are under pressure to handle massive pre-set number of cases per week. Can you really get any proper context with a quick glance. It's turtles all the way down.

And you might think: 'wow, this dude blindly one-sidedly hates Google'. Nope, for a longest time I was a die-hard Google fanboy. Only in recent years, after my own long, long string of bad experiences, have to be turned into a critic. Let me tell you a shameful story from my past to highlight how much of a starry-eyed, naive Google fanboy I was many years ago. Once, I was on a date with a smart, classy Polish girl, and somehow she mentioned tech and future. And I kid you not, I talked so much about how Google's amazing tech will solve various issues, that she, very smartly and understandably, decided not to have a second date. THAT is how freaking much I hyped Google up back then when working with them in the early years. But getting regularly and increasingly beaten up by Google's incoherent automated or outsourced decisions, while other tech firms and app stores work just fine, have eroded all that good-will and turned me into a loud critic of Google. In good films, there is a massive character arc: my arc has been going from nerd praising Google to grumpy dude launching out in 60 hours rants on how Google does not work. And to mix my metaphors, that has been a bitter pill to swallow. As a pro-tech, pro-efficiency person, who highly values fairness, I'm just saying that we are currently at a horrific point in time and space. Yes, sure, maybe the future AI will be 1,000,000 times better, and it can instantly handle all appeal cases fairly and graciously. Or maybe the masses torch everything down, like so boringly predictably happens time and again in history. Because why learn nothing from the past? Which to me, as an avid history buff, is fairly tragicomic.

As Google has mismanaged Android ecosystem (ads-first-approach, random bans, defunct appeal system, submitting proper tax forms fails most of the time, etc), most developers have abandoned Android and moved to iPhone or left the programming field, or this entire field of existence, entirely. I'm one of the last holdouts of the decade-plus old developers, but every year I'm more pessimistic. My apps are great enough quality that many people have publicly stated that it's the reason they haven't switched to iPhone. How many developers can say the same? Surely such craftsmanship should give me some peace of mind business-wise, but no. Looking back at the year 2024, most of my time and energy went into fighting Google, barely anything works (in the past year it has been very nearly impossible to upload official government certificates to Google, and Google does not care as proven by all the months I have wasted on their support system dystopia, they just penalize me for not uploading the official certificates). And somehow, unbelievably, every year is so much worse than the last. If it weren't for the support of a dozen biggest fans, I might have called it quits, at least on Android, or, maybe I would make a great onion farmer. The other fact keeping me upright is the feeling that Google will go kaput before me, seriously, interacting with them week after week, year after year, has annihilated 95% of my belief that Google can still turn around and start functioning again. I'll reserve 5% for the case that they get their current laughable AI working and the AI will make solid common sense reasonable decisions, saving Google. Currently, they are just squeezing the system and folks ever-harder on their way driving off the cliff at full speed and full profits. And I guess that's the ultimate difference: Individual humans do long term planning, balancing out short term pains and long term gains. Companies and big bosses look at yearly quarters, or at most their few years at the top, knowing the next person will inherit the mess. We single solo one-of-kind humans can't really do that, can we...

Thanks for reading my rant. C'est la vie.

Cinnamon stick impression of Churchill, in case you are confused by uncanny similarity, I'm on the right, no, left, wait a second, your left or mine?