Bitcoin Forum

Is anyone here an app developer, and has a faucet-like game or app in Google Play?

We are a game developer studio, and partnered with Xapo to create a few games that give out BTC rewards. To our surprise, as soon at is was live, Google suspended the game, saying it was against it's policies, which is weird, since there are a ton of games that give out money or free items in exchange of playing.
I think this was because of the BTC.

Anyone has a similar issue?

Now we are left to trying to upload to a different store (Amazon, App Store), and our own website , but the organic growth will not be the same :(

Email them because i don't think it's suspended for giving out bitcoins. Maybe it got suspended for some other reason...

Exactly, it could be advertisement reason

How many days or hours did it take to take down your games from Google Play Store?
Moving to app store is a bit hard because they have strict guidelines and rules.

Contacting them and thus determining which was the reason is the best way to do.
Google is not against btc as far as i know, so I doubt this can be the cause.

Contact Google and ask them about the exact reason why they rejected your application.
As you wrote, there are a lot of Bitcoin-based apps on the store therefore i do not think that it was about Bitcoin, but because of an other reason.

They should be able to give you the reason that it has been removed and it could be something easily solved, it could be taken down if there is some kind of gambling aspect to the app as I have seen other apps taken down for this reason.

They will not just suspend it.

Either there was something wrong with your coding (exploits) or with your business model (the method how people can get free bitcoins).

Google, don't just suspend it because it is affiliated with bitcoin.

The thing that they dont like is that we give out bitcoins as prizes, so they tagged it as gambling, but there is no way for the player to put down money, which makes it kind of weird to be gambling :S

We are kind of bummed out about this, hoping amazon & iOS don't see it the same way :(

If anyone is interested, here is a link to try it out!

http://app.appsflyer.com/com.xapoworld.bitcoinhunter-XapoWorld?pid=Referral&af_sub1=QYZFYXVUPFAIMLDU&af_r=https://world.xapo.com/?id=3267#modal

I don't understand how this is any different than games incentivizing a freemium model by awarding players diamonds, coins, or whatever, while charging them to buy these in order to speed up an upgrade or building a something.

Try to contact member "Vineyard".
He has at least 3 games on google play that give out free btc. He might be able to help you out.

but there are loads of bitcoin apps that pay in bitcoins still there.

If they tagged it as gambling and you believe otherwise, you should email them and state your case. Google is more open to bitcoin than Apple. Another way round could be to create an in game token and then exchange that for bitcoin.

You need to read int he terms of the agreement with Google.  There are rules for giving away things in any of the apps in Google.  This is why you can not download any apps to pay poker or similar.  What you need to do is make a game that gives away nothing buy points and then have an upgrade download link in the game to earn BTC or whatever and then that link will download the app from your server.  I have had to do this many times.

I may be wrong but doesn't it have to be skill based?  Like flappy coin.  You get btc based on how you finish. 

Google play pulled down 2 apps a friend of ours made. It was
an advertising issue and he got it all sorted out with them but
it was a pain in the butt to deal with them. You really are going
uphill once you get flagged.

No worries! Coinapps.io is coming!

Just like paypal  ;D

Was the advertising issue related to bitcoin or were they separate?

Well actually in google play i have been counting more than 20 faucets and four games paying in bitcoin, probably they only ban some for dont follow the terms of google (really they can ban you for something)