“All my projects have been terminated after Google mistakenly flagged FairEmail as spyware without giving a reasonable opportunity to appeal. There will be no further development and support until this issue is resolved.” Marcel Bokhorst, the developer of the mail client FairEmail, has pulled all of his apps from Google Play, announcing that they will stop developing and maintaining them, including Netguard, a popular open-source firewall app.
Earlier this week, Bokhorst received a policy violation email from Google, which deemed the FairEmail app to be spyware. The full statement has not been released, but Bokhorst believes that Google may have misunderstood the use of favicons in the app, so he resubmitted a new version without the favicon feature.
But the outcome of the appeal seems to be the “standard answer” . While the content of the answer is unclear to us, it appears to be a generic answer that has long been frustrating for Google Play Store developers – it’s very difficult to appeal and reinstate a policy violation by Google Play In most cases, people just get automated replies.
“In a fit of rage,” Bokhorst decided to pull FairEmail and all his other apps from the Google Play Store. Despite many attempts to persuade, Bokhorst was firm, saying, “I really appreciate all the kind words and concern, but I still haven’t found a good answer to why I should continue these projects. In a long time For a while, I felt like a slave to Google and all those people who kept making demands and judging others, and now I feel liberated.”
Bokhorst considers keeping the apps on GitHub, but that would result in a loss of 99 percent of the audience, so continuing to support the open-source project doesn’t make much sense in his view. The repository on GitHub is still available, but has been archived. Users can still download the latest version from the repository and install it on their devices. On his personal website, Bokhorst said that FairEmail’s source code will continue to be available on GitHub. But he doesn’t plan to sell the app — “Selling the app will almost never benefit you.”
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