ponewheel/android-ponewheel

Ponewheel not listed on Play store?

Opened this issue · 13 comments

I no longer see Ponewheel listed on the Play store. Is this a temporary glitch?

Oh wow. Just got this e-mail, no idea why. Something I'll have to @#$ deal with now.

This is a notification that your Google Play Publisher account has been terminated.

REASON FOR TERMINATION: Violations of the Developer Program Policies and Developer Distribution Agreement.

Google Play Publisher terminations are associated with developers, and may span multiple account registrations and related Google services.

You can visit the Developer Policy Center to better understand how we enforce Developer Program Policies. If you’ve reviewed the policy and feel this termination may have been in error, please reach out to our policy support team.

Please do not attempt to register a new developer account. We will not be restoring your account at this time.

The Google Play Team
biell commented

Google has been "cracking down" and hopefully you just got caught up by accident. Onewave got kicked out of the store a while back because of a complaint and I don't think he ever got to the root of it.

I hope this isn't FM pushing back against 3rd party apps.

Is the APK available anywhere for sideloading?

No luck yet getting it back on app store (not because of FM but still contesting my developer account) - sorry about this one!
I might drop it on the Amazon Appstore. It looks to be on apkpure https://apkpure.com/ponewheel/net.kwatts.powtools. This still sucks opening up the mobile device to security risks - sideloaded apps could be ba-bad. If you do install it through sideloading make sure you turn back on the check restricting sideloading/installing unknown apps after.

Still unresolved?

any word on why Google removed it?

Google has been "cracking down" and hopefully you just got caught up by accident. Onewave got kicked out of the store a while back because of a complaint and I don't think he ever got to the root of it.

I hope this isn't FM pushing back against 3rd party apps.

Hey sorry Ive been gone so long and reviving an old thread, Ive been struggling through health problems. Onewave died because Future Motion DMCA'd the app itself, my developer account is fine. The reasons they stated were for safety. They only did it after I put up a build I believe on the beta branch that I thought had pint support, which ended up only having pint support for my board, whoops. It seems any app that connects to old boards is fine but anything that uses the new handshake will get taken down. I never appealed because then I can be taken to court and I can't have that happen. Its such a shame to me that companies can use laws meant to enforce copyright to take down whatever they want for any reason and as long as the other party is small enough they just get away with it. The app just read values from the board there weren't really any safety concerns with it.

(She btw 💗)

biell commented

@nanouX , I hope your health has improved, and I wish you the best; also I apologize for the incorrect pronoun.

One thing you may want to consider is to share your story with EconLIberties, they are a lobbying organization in support of developers like you. They support right-to-repair, are anti-monopoly, and I think that casting their very discerning eye at DMCA abuse could only be positive for this community: https://accesstomarkets.org/share-your-story/

@nanouX Apologies if this question had already been addressed, but have you considered publishing to F-Droid.org ?

Best wishes!

I don't think my app is eligible for F-Droid, I looked into it forever ago and I don't remember what the reason is now, I think it was a dependency on Google Play Services.

@biell Its no problem! My health is finally doing much better now thank you. The honest answer is that this ordeal has totally made me loose all motivation for my project, I'm using the official app now on my phone again. I still love my board but I have no love of Future Motion and I don't really want to interact with them ever again, I would much rather focus on new 100% independent projects in the future.