Our problems began in the fall. We were almost ready to roll out new features for our app that we spent the past few months working on. In preparation for launch, we updated our Google play store listing, adding the word “Plus” to our app name to reflect the upcoming features.

Automated app removals

Shortly after, we received a notice from Google that our app had been removed from the US store because someone had filed a complaint alleging our revised app name infringed on their trademark.

You get instantly removed for “alleged” trademark infringement

We were shocked. The US is our primary market and our app had been on the app store for 7 years with a perfectly clean record.

Examining the complaint, we learnt that it came from a China-based developer who publishes a number ad-ridden generic flash light type apps.

More ludicrously, the trademark we were accused of infringing was different from our app name.

Where are the humans?

Our guess was that Google’s system received the complaint via a web form and automatically responded by removing us, without noticing that we weren’t using the trademarked name and that the complaint was at best flimsy.

Full text of the complaint that Google forwarded to us. Highlights by me.

Surely this was a simple mix up that any human would catch. We thought naively that this was a small hiccup we could resolve. We rolled back our app name as requested in the complaint as a sign of good faith and filed an appeal against the removal using the appropriate web form, describing the mix up as well as our remedial actions.

Think you have a chance at an appeal?

Imagine our exasperation when we received the result of the appeal the very next day.

The auto-generated appeal response

A boilerplate rejection. No acknowledgement that the trademarked name and our app name were different. No acknowledgement that we had rolled back our app name as requested in the complaint.

Had anyone looked at our appeal?

It is painful to recall the exasperation we experienced. After the 7 years we dedicated to developing for Android, Google can’t take a second to acknowledge us.

We reached out to everyone we could, including the individual who filed the complaint, but it was dead end after dead end.

We concluded we were not going to be able to get through to a human decision maker without spending a bucket load of money on lawyers — money we did not have.

Because of the way our app was integrated, relaunching as a different app was not viable. It would have the same as restarting from scratch and discarding the years of work we spent growing our user base and taking care of our community.

We eventually gave up. We could not go on paying our staff without knowing if our app would ever be reinstated to the play store. It was the end of the road for us.