I propose a new heuristic called "The HN PR Law" or something to that effect: no response from a company on a negative PR incident should be taken seriously after an article on said incident hits the front page of HN.
Given Google's track record and the ranking of this post, they'll probably reinstate the app within a few hours, and I propose that we act as if they had not - only acting on issues after they have been exposed to a massive audience signals a desire for public positive perception without any actual care for users, and users shouldn't have to go to social media to get their problems solved.
I like Apple's approach. When some scammy dev ran to the press with a sob story, Apple would expose all the shady shit the dev was doing. Sorry, but 99% of these whiney stories are the developer's fault. Don't violate the terms of service, and don't be shady. It's not that hard.
Maybe Google can´t do that because they are the ones doing the scummy thing.
I personally know 2 cases of people banned from Google, in one case they were actually infringement (they made an app using copyrighted characters), and in the other it was the same case stated elsewhere - grandmother clicked repeatedly on the ads thinking she was helping her grandson, and he got banned from AdSense forever.
Given Google's track record and the ranking of this post, they'll probably reinstate the app within a few hours, and I propose that we act as if they had not - only acting on issues after they have been exposed to a massive audience signals a desire for public positive perception without any actual care for users, and users shouldn't have to go to social media to get their problems solved.
Edit: a bit late, but I called it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20829484
Edit^2: technically, Google hasn't reinstated the app yet, but I think that the idea still stands