The latest app to detect an unreasonable ban from the Google Play Store is Element, an open source end-to-end encrypted messaging client for the federated Matrix chat protocol. Google banned Element on Friday night, a ban that Element said “is due to abusive content somewhere in the Matrix.” Matrix has millions of users and, as a federated chat protocol, Element does not control content in Matrix, so this is a bit like banning a web browser to display web content. Element says it is working with Google to “explain how Element works and resolve the situation”.
Google has been cracking down on apps that display hateful content, but Element says it shouldn’t be part of the crackdown. “We also explain that the Matrix servers that we Does run as Element (including the standard Matrix.org home server, which we run on behalf of The Matrix.org Foundation) has strict terms of use that we actively apply, “said Element.” Abuses, and Element is not an application that addresses abusive content. “
Element says it has a full-time team dedicated to handling abuse reports
Element (formerly called Riot.im) is often cited as one of the best Matrix customers. It looks a lot like – and is actually interoperable with – Slack and Discord. Element says it is used “by the governments of France, Germany, the United Kingdom and the USA, countless universities, thousands of companies and millions of people around the world”. The app recently saw an influx of new users after WhatsApp’s announcement about Facebook data sharing, so perhaps that has triggered deeper scrutiny by Google. At the moment, many other Matrix apps – which by definition show the same content as Element – are still active on the Play Store.
Google has a 30 percent reduction in all Play Store transactions, which is supposed to pay for the cost of running the Store, but the company doesn’t hire people to review apps primarily the way Apple does, choosing to leave that bots take care of that. Apple recently cut its App Store tax from 30% to 15%, so Apple charges developers less than Google and offers better human support.
The element last update on the situation at the time of this writing, he said he had been waiting more than eight hours for an email response. Element says he was not notified of the removal, which has already passed the 24-hour mark.
The bots’ interpretation of Google’s rules often doesn’t make sense, and as a result, Google regularly prohibits small random apps from the Play Store because they can display content from the Internet. We’ve seen Reddit apps, podcast apps, and other apps that display third-party web content, all “winning” in the Google Play ban-of-the-week lottery, just because they can be made to display third-party content. The same goes for Google Search, Chrome, Gmail, all Google chat apps, YouTube, Google Drive and Google Podcasts, but these apps are never banned. Earlier this week, Google banned a video application because it listed support for the standard subtitle file type “.ass” in its description.
The only benefit of the Play Store is that you don’t have to use it, as Android supports sideloading. Element is also available on F-Droid, a fully open source repository of Android apps, although the version offered there is a month out of date. A more up-to-date version is on APKmirror, the largest app store in the Android hacking community.
These prohibitions are almost forms of temporary errors that are rectified after a few hours or days, but that offer little consolation to application developers who may have their business kicked off suddenly because of an application error. Element says “we can only apologize for the interruption caused by the disappearance of the app in this way.”