Right now in my apps i have a link that directs the user to the app page in the market so they can rate and review the app. Im curious if there is an api where they can review directly in the app and ad it to the market.
I wish there were, but whenever I think about this, I come to the conclusion that there probably isn't. This would more than likely be due to the fact that your application could "Automatically" send a rating/review without the user ever knowing so.
I would love to be proved wrong though.
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Does anyone know of a way to speak to someone at Google regarding releasing apps on the Play Store? We've been encountering endless issues with our apps apparently not adhering to their policies, and every time a build is rejected it just comes with a blanket template response for the policies it doesn't adhere to, but with no specific reason as to why.
It's becoming extremely frustrating when we try our best to understand what the non-adhering aspect might be, attempt to resolve it and resubmit, wait another ~48 hours for a review only for it to come back as declined again with the same templated response.
Conversely, our releases go through without a hitch every time on the Apple App Store, and usually only take a couple of hours - from point of submission, to review being completed and approved for release. And on the off-chance there is ever an issue, Apple send us a message explaining specifically how to resolve it, and then provide a platform to liaise with their app review team, who will usually reply to messages within 20 minute window.
Google instead has nothing like this, just an 'appeal form' which, again, takes them over 48 hours to respond to and even then provides no specific information around what we can do to resolve whatever issue they seem to have with our release.
Please tell me we're not alone here? Can anyone offer any advice on how to extract some useful feedback on which specific parts of our apps Google isn't liking without it dragging on for days and weeks on end?
I'm trying to understand the Google Play app review process.
When an app is rejected you only get a list of generic vague possible reasons your app can be rejected, but nothing specific to your app, leaving you to guess at the reason and resubmit with random changes.
Anyone know how this process works?
It seems they can reject an app for something that 1000s of apps that were approved have?
Their reason was: "During review, we found that your app, violates our Metadata policy"
https://play.google.com/about/storelisting-promotional/metadata/
Which lists several possible issues, could be an issue with the description text, or the logo, or one of the screen shots.
You are left to guess, and attempt to resubmit. But they warn "repeated violations can result in the suspension of this app or your Google Play Developer account". So if you guess wrong and resubmit your account can potentially be suspended...
It was a pretty tame app, no crazy SEO keywords stuff, or offensive or adult content.
Sorry for asking this question here, anyone know if stack exchange has a better place to ask such questions?
So my solution was to remove all of the app screen shots and resubmit.
It went through, so I assume it was one of the screen shots, even though I used almost the identical screen shot on other apps and they had no issues.
One of the screen shots had a woman in a bathing suite, So I assume this was the cause. Pretty insane that Google does not let woman wear bathing suites anymore.
My guess as to Google's process is,
an artificial intelligent algorithm checks your submission using a heuristic looking for key patterns in the text and images
the algorithm flags you app to be rejected, you get automated email
if you appeal a human reviews your submission
the human can neither fully understand why the algorithm flagged your submission, nor override its decisions, so is pretty much useless to argue with them
you must figure out why the algorithm did not like in your submission, and resubmit
Apps are checked with an algorithm, therefore, some may be lucky to pass through the checking system. Even if google had manual checks, some things are subjective and it is possible that for some people you didn't violate policies.
So, if you can guess what could be a reason, fix it and resubmit. Otherwise, you have to write an appeal and then a human being will check it manually.
One of my apps was rejected twice and only got accepted after 2 appeals. Sometimes you may need to prove that you are not violating their policies.
James, I think you are right.
The clause applicable in the case of the bikini was:
Not allowed if "Imagery or videos with sexually suggestive content. Avoid suggestive imagery containing breasts, buttocks, genitalia, or other fetishized anatomy or content, whether illustrated or real."
It is a shame that they do not let you know the reason for rejection when there are 15 possible categories on their page of reasons:
https://play.google.com/about/storelisting-promotional/metadata/
I received a complain from admob regarding an specific App that does not belongs to me, saying that the Ads were disabled on it.
Taking a closer look, I noticed that it is related to an App the I have developed and is available on Google Play, but someone changed it's App ID, and put it on a store called 1mobile.com/ ( Probably a store of illegal content ).
Here is my original App on Google Play
And here is the App with a different ID
How can someone do this? How can I prevent this from happening? This could causes someone to loose their admob account.
How can someone do this?
What do you mean, download your app, change AndroidManifest and resign it? Well, it's just that. Download, change one file, resign.
How can I prevent this from happening?
You can use obfuscator and App Licensing but note that anything in your application can be changed, if there is enough motivation for someone to do it. Personally, I learned not to care.
This could causes someone to loose their admob account.
I don't see how. You won't get any money from the stolen copies, that's for sure. But that't about it.
So I need to detect in app if it was banned by Google no matter why. Just to inform the user about that (and that there will be no updates or whatever). So is there a way to detect the ban?
I'm pretty sure my app doesn't have any violation but like Carl said:
I afraid my app might get banned/suspended occasionally or eventually and Google typically does not warn about that. The reason is that Google is deliberately sudden and vague about enforcing its policies and this can result in innocent devs getting smacked unexpectedly.
And I know that this happens already and I know about such developers, they are usually small independent devs. Also I know that Google's support usually doesn't even answer emails about that fact. Moreover if you gonna try to discuss their decision about suspending your app on market this could result in permanent ban without any further details.
If app has Internet permission it can just bring up the app's listing page on the GP store. If not there - and if you have ability to access similar pages -then you might infer that the app was taken down.
I'm considering asking users to submit a review to the Android Marketplace (Google Play I guess now, but...) ocassionally, but I would like to know before I ask them to if they have submitted a review. Is this even possible?
There is no API for the Play Market, which is what you really need.
As others have mentioned, you can always keep track if a user has pressed a button to launch the Play Market, but you can't tell what they did once there.
There is a 3rd party Market API, but it is not reliable (certainly not there fault - it is a workaround, since an official API doesn't exist).
It is possible to create a "Campaign" using AdWords. This allows you to track referral URLs (which would allow you to track entry points to the app from external resources). I found a good post about that here: http://gyurigrell.com/2012/2/21/tracking-install-sources-android-apps
Bottom line, I am pretty sure you can't do what you are asking.
Googling gave me this link - http://code.google.com/p/android-market-api/. I haven't tried it but it claims that it can get the comments according to your app ID. There are other ports listed there.
What you can try is that get all the comments for your app. Then get the user account details using the AccountManager. Check if any details here match those with the author name in the comments. You will need to add a permission in your manifest to get data from the AccountManager and it's a pretty creepy permission.
It seems like a lot of work though and I think you would be better off just using a dialog box once and then making sure it does not pop up again after someone has clicked on it through a stored preference.
if you have a button for them to press to leave you the review, you could always put a preference when they click it, and then check later to remove the button.
It would be nice if Google/Android, one day, would allow for a custom rate-my-app dialog where that user information could be known server side and not popup the developer/app dialog if it doesn't need to (the user has already rated the app). Wishful thinking Feature Request
Unfortunately this is not possible at the moment. See How to know if a specific user has rated a Android App?
Also, although a suggestion might be to use something like android-market-api please note that it does violate absent licenses and you could lose your developer account although I doubt it, but the app may mysteriously get banned one day!
I think the biggest issue is that of privacy.
As far as workarounds, it may be better to wait for something official. All unofficial APIs often are unreliable as to changes Google makes and the unofficial APIs have to catch up and fix problems while the service no longer works, with no way of continuing to run until it is fixed. Therefore, simply setting a SharedPreference may be the most you can comfortably achieve at this point. Either on first run, at delayed and specified intervals, or if a user has already checked a 'don't ask again/already rated' box.