Google Play bans video app for standard “.ass” subtitle support - Ars Technica

This time, the puritan robot overlords that run the Play Store briefly decided that listing support for common subtitle files is enough to get your app banned. The developer for Just (Video) Player posted their story to Hacker News, writing in the app's bug tracker, "After a tiny unrelated description update, Just Player got suspended from the Google Play Store for "Sexual Content and Profanity policy". Google finds issues with following: Full description (en_US): “* Subtitles: SRT, SSA, ASS, TTML, VTT.”".

Yes, just listing standard video player features like support for the "ASS" subtitle format was apparently enough to temporarily earn a suspension.

It's good that Google reinstated the app, but it's crazy that a suspension happened in the first place, and this is just another story in the unstable relationship developers have with Google's automated app review process.

Google gets a lot of criticism from developers for the lack of human involvement in its app review process, with the Play Store instead opting for automated scanning of apps for viruses, policy violations, and other bannable offenses.

Apple uses this money partly to hire an army of human app reviewers, a system that Google Play developers often hold up as an example that Google should follow.

Instead, Google only has this bot system—or at best, it has an extremely small team of manual reviewers—and developers frequently complain that they are at the mercy of an illogical bot, with no human to speak to even during an appeals process.

The people most affected by Google's app enforcement bots are small indie developers, which can have their entire incomes stripped away because of a bot mistake. Google wants developers to build a business and a livelihood on Google Play, but when it's such an unstable, illogical platform, that's a tough way to run a business.