u/ge33ek

Hi Team,

New to the Google App Developer space. I operate a news site focused on two particular non US stock markets.

In terms of timeline, we build an app version of our site and submitted it to the app store, code version 3 for Production.

Eventually, this was rejected and the screenshot showed the app wasn't able to connect to our server. This was expected as the User Agent Google used to connect was restricted from our WAF.

We whitelisted it, resubmitted the same codebase, but, again we got a rejection with the same screenshot. This time however, the screenshot was identical and we had no record of the Google IP's accessing our server - so it was almost like they didn't kill the app and relaunch it at all - just flat out rejected it.

So, we improved the notification, retry ability, included a retry button and enhanced the UI to include the error log and submitted Code Version 4. Shortly after we submitted this version, we saw a series of logins and test and usage of the app to various endpoints, all successful and working.

At this point, we thought, great, it's all working, they logged in, viewed various news articles, browsed around and logged in fine. Only a matter of time now until approval.

This morning we woke up to a note from Google saying the app had been rejected, but worse had been suspended as well and that we only had the ability to appeal. The details provided were;

Issue details

We found an issue in the following area(s):

• In-app experience: "Repeated app rejections."

This was confusing, because, the most recent submission wasn't rejected, if anything it appears it worked fine, based on the logs, and the latest version was working fine. There is no other policy issue listed, or any other detail around why. Just that we had repeated rejections - but each time, the rejection was simply;

Your app has the following functionality issue(s):

• Problems loading Your app does not open or load

Issue details

We found an issue in the following area(s):

• Version code 3: In-app experience: Please see attached screenshot IN_APP_EXPERIENCE-539.png

So, in sum, 2 x rejections - 1st because of WAF, 2nd because they didn't relaunch the app, and 3rd shows from the logs it worked, but then rejected with no other context.

How can it be this hard to get an app approved that is a simple website wrapper.

I've explained this in the appeal, but 1000 characters makes it hard and I genuinely have no idea what the issue is and why it necessitated a full App Suspension?

Any help appreciated - its been a terrible experience if I'm honest. I wish i could just speak to a human and explain.