The past week has been a roller coaster ride for the Indian developers’ community as the tech giant Google deleted two applications from its play store – Mitron and Remove China apps.
‘Mitron; was an application developed by a Pakistani software development company Qboxus which was later purchased by an Indian student. ‘Mitron’ was proving to be a competition to ‘Tik-Tok’ after the latter was hit by the controversy of discrete content. Another application, ‘Remove China Apps’ was an application that will let the user delete the Chinese origin applications on their phone. The application became popular after the trend of boycotting Chinese products began on social media. The application had reached 10 lakh downloads already. Both these applications were disappeared from the Google play store overnight.
Prior to this, Google mysteriously deleted the negative reviews and ratings that were bombarded to the Chinese based application Tik-Tok. All three incidents gave rise to massive outrage against the tech company for being biased. The company addressed a press conference and provided clarifications on the reasons behind the decisions.
Both apps violated the policy
In the matter of deleting the Mitron app, Google explained that the application violated several of its technical policy violations. It said,
“Earlier this week, we removed a video application for a number of technical policy violations. We have an established process of working with developers to help them fix issues and restore their applications.”
According to the terms and conditions of Google under its category of ‘Repetitive content’, the company categorically mentions that copying content from other applications without adding any value to it will become a violation. This is what the application Mitron did after it purchased the source code from a Pakistani company and rebranded it. However, Google also said that the application can make a comeback to the play store and also said that it has provided certain guidelines to the developer.
With respect to the Remove China apps, Google said that it infringes its policy of ‘Deceptive Device Setting Changes’ where the said application encourages users to remove or disable other applications. It said,
“When apps are allowed to specifically target other apps, it can lead to behavior that we believe is not in the best interest of our community of developers and consumers. We’ve enforced this policy against other apps in many countries consistently in the past – just as we did here.”
Source: India Times
