Hi to all of you fellow developers and admirers of our lord and savior Jake Wharton. Like all of you, I faced a troubling period of my life where my apps were constantly getting banned from the mighty Google Play Store. But I found the enlightenment in the following guide, which I will share with you.
Since I was previously banned from the Play Store, I had to completely change my identity to avoid being recognized by Google. I began by moving into another house in another country. Then, I legally changed my name to avoid suspicion. I subsequently browsed the Dark Web with my Tor browser running in a VM running in another Tor browser in order to buy a fake identity from a supplier in Malaysia along with fake cards. Wearing this identity, I moved again, this time to Thailand, and I currently live in a cave with no internet connection and the nearest camera is 5 miles away. I obviously changed my appearance in the process and am now a 3'11" female. I never talked to anyone during the past two years. The identity I previously assumed is officially considered dead in the United States as of last week.
Now to the app itself. My app is a random string of letters (like "lTr2x1HQuM20603cfHzV" for example, I'm not sharing the real one here) in order to avoid any kind of impersonation with another app the the store. Additionally, my app description is empty to avoid mentioning any company or product that might exist. My developer name is another random string to again avoid impersonation. My privacy policy is 989 pages long (written in Arial 4) even though my app doesn't share any user information. Instead, it aims to cover every possible case where a user might try to find me IRL and force me to take his or her information.
I don't have any ads nor any kind of in-app purchase available. Instead, I expect user to find the address of my Bitcoin wallet (by guessing since we are not allowed to provide a donation URL) in order to cover my expenses.
To avoid impersonation further, my app has no UI nor any graphic assets. There's only one screenshot in the store listing, and it's a black screen. The user must connect the phone to a computer in order to communicate with the app via ADB (the app is a terminal SMS app). My app doesn't ask for any permission. No internet, no SMS, no location, nothing. In fact, there are negative permissions asked: the user is granted permissions as a result of downloading my app. This way, when Google eventually prevents apps from asking any permissions at all, my app will be the only one left.
I am not using any third-party library to avoid wrong SDK versions leaking into my app and I check every hour if Google has released a new Android version so the SDK version is always up-to-date. My keystore has 17 backups scattered around the world and each is managed by a trusted person that can also take over my app and continue updating it in case I die. I also use App Bundle even though my app has no resources or architecture-specific binaries.
Despite having no content at all, my app is rated 18+ for adults only to accelerate publishing process and to avoid getting banned for user-generated content (even if it's impossible for users to generate content). My app is written in Kotlin and Flutter so there are no crashes possible that might get me banned. I use ?. on every call and run the whole program in try {} catch {} to avoid crashes. I am also using RxJava 3, RxAndroid, RxKotlin, ButterKnife, Retrofit, OkHTTP, timber and RxRelay. Sure I said no 3rd party but everything written by our lord and savior is obviously first-party (more like zeroth-party since arrays start at 0).
My app is licensed under WTFPL (Do What The Fuck You Want To Public License) in order to avoid any confusion. My code also doesn't use any private APIs just in case. The code was also dipped 3 times in water blessed by our lord and savior Mr. Wharton himself in order to purify it.
Finally, I have hired a team of 30 hitmen worldwide to personally track and eliminate anyone trying to add ads to my app and publish it to third party stores, or worse, to the Google Play Store itself, and get my app (the original) banned. The hitmen search the Play Store in their free time to make sure my app name, developer name and description have no letters that matches any other app's.
These are very simple instructions to follow to avoid getting banned from the Google Play Store. Trust me it's worth it considering that the other possibility is living without the sacred Play Store!
Please be aware that posting this here is a risk I've decided to take personally. I'm afraid Google might try to track the familiar movements of my computer mouse and use it to recognize my real identity, thus sentencing my app and developer account to another painful ban. So please profit as much as possible from the short amount of information I could share with you. Farewell.
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