Dear readers and customers,
bit by bit, our Android apps vanish from the official Google Play store.
It all started September 2023 when our only Android videogame, Zombie Resistor: Apocalypse, was found “not compliant with Google Play Policies” and thus removed. Google mentioned we missed a “Data safety form” – to be honest we had no f***ing clue what the problem really was here.
As our Android web browser, YAABy, was removed in March for the same reason, and Gizmeo Gadget News was forced to leave beginning of April 2024 too, we started digging. And fell into a rabbit hole we think was layed out entirely by the mega-corp Google itself.
We started a test, created an additional a “Google Play store privacy” document from scratch and updated the Gizmeo app first – and were rejected again. Furthermore, we are not allowed to use the “News” section for our app (but Gizmeo does exactly that: it’s weblog about electronic gadgets!) – a section we used since 2014(!) and never had to change. Double rejection – f*** yeah! We then contacted Google Play Store support, explained to them that this is nonsense and didn’t get a reply we could use for good (we can share the documents publicly in case some entity is interested). As our test for one app was not successful, we refused updating the other apps and currently think about releasing all of our Android apps with source codes on our GitLab.
You can vote for this action via our company LinkedIn page currently: https://linkedin.com/company/aethyx.
This is it! That’s summed up how Google Play died for us for distribution.
We had one helluva ride the last ten years. Thanks for all your support and your downloads! We hope you liked it!
Let’s see it from the bright side: the same thing must have happened to the Opera app store. In the later case, we didn’t even receive one Email, we just coincidentally some day couldn’t reach the app page anymore. Sh*t happens!
Yeah, being indie is in fact hard. For the moment, only Amazon is an app store where you can still download our Android apps if you like: https://www.amazon.com/s?i=mobile-apps&rh=p_4%3AAETHYX+MEDIAE+%28Sascha+Schroeder%29&ref=mas_dl. To this day, we don’t understand why on Amazon things work whereas with Google they don’t. We got the problem: we missed a form. But we created one, where rejected and then rejected again for another reason. This is bullshit, sorry folks.
Think twice where you release your apps,
stay positive out there,
the aethyx staff
