Thursday, June 6, 2019

Google suspended Watch Out from Google Play?!


So Two days before I received a message that shocked me, Google suspended Watch Out! They recently updated their privacy policy and suspended my game because they said my game "has been removed from Google Play due to a policy violation".

In their message they said the following:
"After review, Watch Out, com.gamerpirate.watchout (Version Code:8), has been removed from Google Play due to a policy violation. This app won’t be available to users until you submit a compliant update.

Issue: Violation of Personal and Sensitive Information policy
We’ve identified that your app is using the AliPay SDK or library, which facilitates the transmission of phone number information without meeting the prominent disclosure guidelines. Make sure to also post a privacy policy in both the designated field in the Play Developer Console and from within the Play distributed app itself.

If necessary, you can consult your SDK provider(s) for further information or please upgrade AliPay SDK version to 15.5.5 or higher."

Luckily I wasn't the only one affected with this. The whole Google Play publishers who use unity are affected, and within minutes the developers reported this to unity team and they understood what happened.

To get everything wrapped up, I didn't know my game had AliPay SDK included, it's funny but so true. Many developers didn't know about this until this moment. Basically when I added "Xiaomi SDK" to Watch Out unity automatically added "AliPay SDK". We don't know how to solve this problem yet, we are in touch with Unity Support Team to help us solve this issue.

For now, Watch Out will stay removed from Google Play.
By the way Marbles Playground is still published, I won't be surprised if Google suspended it too since the both games are made with unity.

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