App suspended for repeated rejections - Reason and Solution

This is me Ameer Hamza, works as Google Play Console Product expert. Mostly we discuss the Google Play Console Problems with Fellow Product experts and Google Community Managers. Most of the Asked questioned on Google Play Community are replied by the Product experts. Here is an article on the "App Suspended for repeated Rejections" written by Google Play Developer @BenMcc Diamond Product Expert.

"We get a lot of questions from the community about why your app may have been suspended due to repeated rejections and what this means. This guide is to explain it and help you avoid it in the future.

?We all make mistakes from time to time and have an app rejected for one reason or another, and that’s ok - but when you submit an app and multiple time in succession it gets rejected (for the same or different reasons) then that is an indication the app is not yet ready for production, it's not been fully tested or checked for compliance against the policies.

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Why didn’t the reviewer tell me all the problems with the first rejection?

The review team is not a test team; they are there to check if the app meets current policies. When they find an issue with the app they will make the rejection and let you know what policy the app has been rejected against. They will then stop reviewing your app and move onto the next app. If there are multiple obvious violations they will tell you about them all they have seen, but obviously they can’t tell you about the ones they have not yet seen!

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How can I avoid this?

Simply by testing your app thoroughly and checking that it complies with the policies. When testing your app you should always test against the same build the review team will be testing against, an easy way to do this is by using the internal test track. Many developers test before uploading to Play but forget that when added to Play the signing key changes and many problems with broken apps occur here because backend servers etc don’t recognise the app due to the fingerprint not being correct.

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If your app has an account feature, make sure to use the same login credentials that you have supplied to Play, copy and paste them so you are sure you are using exactly the same that the review team will be using.

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Check your app against the policies and make sure you are following anything that is relevant to your app.

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Follow this guide: https://support.google.com/googleplay/android-developer/answer/9859348 and use it as a checklist to ensure you have checked everything and don’t forget the description, images and other store data also need to be checked for relevancy and accuracy.

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Can I appeal the suspended app?

Yes of course - making an appeal is always an option, however you have to decide if that is a good use of your time. If you think the Play team have made a mistake then go for it. If it's just because you don’t like the outcome then that is not really something you can appeal against and there is a good chance the appeal will be rejected. If you have a good history of launching apps on the store and something has just gone wrong with this one then again appealing based on your history may be a viable option. Otherwise you may be better just putting this down to experience and re-uploading your fully tested and compliant app with a new package name.

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Resources:

https://checks.google.com/

https://playacademy.exceedlms.com/student/collection/260728-prepare

https://firebase.google.com/docs/test-lab

https://play.google/developer-content-policy/