I'd like to republish my app using the same package name under a different account. Can this be done?
Background:
I have read many posts about people post about how they lost their keystore or were banned, and the solution provided to them was to republish their app using a new package name and a new keystore. This is not my situation or what I'm looking to do. I do have my password(s)/keystore.
The motivation:
I have published about a half dozen apps to the market, and now that they are growing in user base, I have realized it was a mistake to publish under my personal google account and now wish to do things as a company/LLC to protect my personal assets/account. To that end, I want to effectively transfer the app to another account. using a new wallet account, admob, etc.
I imagine this would be done by unpublishing from my personal account, resigning and then uploading under a new account.
Policy Considerations:
For those people that have been banned, they are obviously breaking some kind of terms of service by republishing the same thing. I am in good standing with Google currently and don't want to risk anything that might make them upset or give reason to ban. I can not figure out whether or not this is against their TOS/policies. Especially since I am trying to migrate towards that they were advocating.
(As an aside, if it were trivially possible, why wouldn't a malicious user publish the same content under numerous accounts?)
Goal:
Retain userbase and package ID so that when I release new versions under the new account all existing users on my personal account will receive those updates.
Resources:
Developer Program Policy; https://play.google.com/about/developer-content-policy.html
Developer Distribution Agreement; https://play.google.com/about/developer-distribution-agreement.html
(There are other agreements but those two seem most relevant)
Summary question: Can I accomplish this transfer without losing users?
It is possible to transfer the ownership of your apps from one account to another in google play store. I found a blog post that tells you the steps to do so:
Visit this link
Fill out the form completely and accurately
Select “Transfer Applications to Another Account” from the Issue Type drop down
Submit Form
Check your E-Mail and reply with the requested information
Forward the E-Mail to the person accepting the app/game transfer and have them reply as requested
Wait for Google to wave their magic wand
After digging deeper I have discovered this
https://support.google.com/googleplay/android-developer/checklist/3294213?hl=en&ref_topic=3450986
Which may be the answer to transferring. I haven't done it yet, though. Plan to respond when I know it works.
Related
I am currently evaluating a mobile developer that I met online. He sent me a list of his published apps and there are a total of 33 apps in the list, mostly Native with a few in React Native.
The weird part is that every app I’ve checked so far has a different developer name and none of them match the personal name of the developer. (Yes, he could publish under a business name but one of the apps is (C) Aston Martin.)
Am I reading too much into this or is it actually as fishy as it smells?
To answer your title :
Yes, it is possible provided the publisher have enough resources.
There might be a few reason for a developer to publish the apps under different names/developer/publisher.
The apps are developed for different clients, thus they would want to separate out the publishing to store (PlayStore or AppStore) part, so that when the clients decide they want to use the services of other publisher etc, the current publisher could just hand over the accounts related to that client. Such as emails, store accounts, hosting accounts, and possibly even bank and credit card account which could have been made under the client's company name to begin with. And it also allows the clients to handle the informations of the Apps at the store themselves easier.
The company, for one reason or another does not want the published apps to be easily traced back to the same company. Maybe because of tax-evasion, privacy issues, or simply because the content of the apps is not totally legal to be distributed in the country where the developer is operating from.
But considering your description of "evaluating a mobile developer that I met online." There are a few possibilities that the apps are published under different names
The apps are build while he is working under different companies.
The apps he listed are apps that uses one/few libraries that he made.
He was working under freelance jobs for company(ies) that in the end developed the apps for those companies published separately.
He was simply lying that those are his apps to get your approval, since you can't really trace back so many step without a legal court request to the store (PlayStore and AppStore) to know that he is really the one developing it.
One easy way to validate for PlayStore is to have them send you an email (or a few) using the registered email address at the bottom of the PlayStore listing page of the apps for one or few of the apps.
For example Facebook Lite's would be lite-android-support#fb.com.
But if they are working under another company, or such, they would not have access to the said email address, and you would have to ask them to provide other ways to validate their relations to the projects listed.
Me and 2 other friends have made an app, and we'd like to publish it on the Play store. However, I can't find anything relating to how I can give them credit too if I were to publish it under my developer account. How can I ensure that they are both included as developers for the app?
Thanks in advance!
There are lots of different forms of credit, and so it will depend on the relationship between you and your friends.
If it is just moral credit, you could easily add a credits page in your app, or put information about them in the app description.
However, often these things come down to ownership. Conceptually the developer account an app is published under represents the entity (company / organization / person) who owns the app. If you want it to be reflected that you all own the app, I'd recommend:
create a new gmail address and a new developer account for things you do together called whatever you want to call the organization: eg "Me and My friends software".
then in the Google Play console add all of you as users with full permissions
That way it is very clear this app belongs to all of you. It also makes things easier if you want to found a legal company etc later.
We have an app that exists in the Google Play store that was created by a developer who is no longer at our company. We own the app and want to remove it, but we don't know what Google account the developer used to publish the app to the store.
Is there any way we can find out what account the app is associated with? If we try to log in under Google accounts we think it might be, Google wants to charge us $25 per guess.
If we can't find the account, is there a way to have Google remove the app for us if we can provide sufficient evidence that it's ours?
If the developer is unavailable or uncooperative, and you can prove that this app includes your intellectual property, you can file a DMCA request with Google, asking them to remove it from the GP store. Read the warnings on the page carefully:
http://support.google.com/bin/request.py?&product=androidmarket&contact_type=lr_dmca
You can't pull down the application from Google Play if you don't have the access to the account which is used to upload that application. If you are lucky and the developer who uploaded the app typed his mail as contact developer mail in application in Google Play, maybe in this way trying to send a mail you can find the account which is used to upload the app, but you can't trust that, because most of the developers and companies have different mails for communicating with the customers and it depends on that.
But if you contact to Google and explain them everything and as I told above if you are lucky you can convince them to delete the app from Google Play. Or the best situation in my opinion is to contact the developer who upload the application and ask him to remove it.
Good luck!
Pretty rough situation. I'm not going to advice you to use a corporate google account in the future, but I think the easiest way is to speak with the developer in person. Then explain to him that there are several clauses in his former contract with you, which concern the intellectual property obligations, signed by him.
If you don't have any, or if he was hired on a freelancer contract, with no mentioning of the above, then you'll have the real deal in the court when he sues you for "his" intellectual property (being th application), uploaded by him on the Play Store.
Of course, this is the worse case scenario, but you should consider it.
If you have nothing left, you can contact Google, as Android-Developer above me suggested, but you risk a denial.
It is a really complicated case and I would like to see the result of it, when you settle the things out.
I have a paid app in the Play Store (Profile Widget, in case anyone is wondering ;)) and I want to allow some users (friends, or people who do not have a credit card) to download it for free.
Of course I could just send them the APK, but they wouldn't get the updates automatically, and with every update to the app I would have to send them all the APK file again. And also, by using this method, anyone that had access to the APK file would be able to install the app for free.
I saw that by using the Android Licensing Library you could make some users bypass the License Check, but I want the app to show as "Purchased" for them in the Play Store, and I don't think this would do it.
I searched Stack Overflow but none of the solutions I found (like creating a separate APK and checking for its existence from the "real" app) handled the auto-update part.
Has anyone found a good solution for this?
Thanks in advance!
You can now generate and distribute promo codes to current and new users on Google Play to drive engagement. Under the Promotions tab in the Developer Console, you can set up promo codes for your apps, games, and in-app products to distribute in your own marketing campaigns (up to 500 codes per app, per quarter). Consider using promo codes to reward loyal users and attract new customers.
Reference:
1) http://android-developers.blogspot.in/2016/01/create-promo-codes-for-your-apps-and-in.html
2) https://support.google.com/googleplay/android-developer/answer/6321495
The best solution is to have them buy the app, then refund their purchase. It would still show up as paid. Alternatively, you could give them the app, and license it via the LVL, and configure their email addresses as test accounts listing as purchased., but then they won't get updates.
I have the same problem, I've checked and from what I can see there is no analog to the Apple system (Give out a one-use code to download the app).
If you just give them the APK you don't get Crash/ANRs from them and they won't automatically get updates.
It is something that Google really do need to fix, sorry there isn't a better option.
(I have the same problem for my own device (you can't buy your own app), I had a crash that was rare in the app on my own phone, but I couldn't reproduce it at a computer and the logs had well cycled past the error by the time I did, Being able to get the crash report through the developer console would have saved me a lot of mucking around)
this is an updated and no credit card method.
You can create a free version of the same app in the play store,
but publish it in alpha release.
Then, you can create a google+ provate group of alpha testers and set it as the tester group for the alpha version.
Now add the 'free licensed' users to the alpha testing group and they have your free app.
To push updates, you will have to upload updates also to the 'free alpha', that's not gold, but I think is pretty close to the best you can get at the moment
This method has an issue. As long as licensing is per-App, you will have a different license key, and it may always return TRUE, so if the users share the apks, they may be able to let other people use the app, not totally sure about this occurrence, but you are warned, better if you are sharing the free app to trusted users.
You can set up a sale at price zero for the paid app and let your contacts know about it. Google allows up to 8 days of the sale at a time, but you can also set it up for a single day. This way, you may still get a few downloads from unintended recipients, but the 'problem' will be far more controlled than if you were to mail out APKs. Other problems like updates are also solved automatically.
You can upload in third party app stores like Amazon App Store, Aptoide , www.proapk.in to allow users to download paid Android apps for free.
For downloading the app as a developer: Google Playstore's official word on this, is that you must create a 2nd google account to download the app you are listed as developer for. That way the stats for downloads and terms are not breached. Spoke about same issue today (though its a while after the question was posted, others should see this with similar issues)
For giving it away free: Can't you just change the app to free at a given time then notify those people to hit it during a certain window?
To be clear, I am an Android Developer - and sold one of my apps (i have 5 in my account) to a business contact of mine. I want to transfer that ONE app from my developer account to his developer account.
It seems Android clearly defines how you transfer apps from an old account, to a new account (but both of those accounts are owned by you - and in this case the old account is closed down)
How do i transfer this one app i sold, with out affecting either account, or without hurting/losing the apps ratings/reviews/rank etc?
There is no official way to do this that I know of. As you mentioned, there is a support page that suggests that Google has this capability. I would recommend that you contact the Android Market support team and ask them directly, clearly explaining your situation. That page says:
Contact us from both the original email address and the new email address requesting to transfer applications. We require emails from both accounts so that we can confirm ownership.
So I think it's not so much about owning both accounts as much as proving that this isn't a fraudulent transaction. If you explain the situation and have both yourself and the contact you sold the app to email them, that would confirm that both parties have consented.
I'm not sure if the Android Market support team will actually do it, but it's worth a shot.
I don't have an answer to your question, but hope you realize that you can't change the apk signing key for signing the app. If you do, users can't update and you have to release the app with a new package name.
Verify you have everything ready in checklist:
https://support.google.com/googleplay/android-developer/checklist/3294213
Ask to transfer your app to target Google Play account e-mail:
https://support.google.com/googleplay/android-developer/contact/appt
Always remember to get original signing key for the app from developer. If he's using one singing key for all of his apps, it's his fault.