Google Killed My App Today, RIP RoboStop

Google Killed my App Today, RIP RoboStop

In October 2018 Google announced Project Strobe, a new initiative to limit app developers access to users data launched in response to the recent Google+ data breach discovered back in March 2018. Essentially what Google is doing with Project Strobe is simply removing every app on the Play Store that accesses users’ contact books, call logs, or uses SMS. The Google Play team notified me a month or two ago and stated that I could submit my app for review to be granted a possible exception, but today I received a notice from Google that my request for an exemption had been denied. RIP RoboStop. My app had reached 5,000+ active installs since launching less than a year ago in March 2018 at SXSW, and was growing at a rate of 7.2% week over week at the time of this post.

I'm not sure if anyone else here on the forum has been affected by this, but it is a serious bummer to have a "platform" kill your app/startup/business/etc. I know I'm not the first, and I won't be the last. But I suppose if you just keep pumping out web and mobile apps, eventually you'll find success even if a few of your babies get "deplatformed."

So here's to 2019! Write code. Get users. Make money.*

• Still working on the making money part ;)