You can probably figure out
almost all the salient details of this story without
reading it – we've seen almost the exact same thing
happen to other developers. I'll just give you a
moment to outline the situation in your head, then
we'll see how close you got. Ready? Okay. The
developer of the super-neat video indexing app
Mizuu was notified earlier today that Google has
pulled the app for violating Google's policy on
sexually explicit material.
Mizuu plugs into themoviedb.org to analyze and ID
your video files. It then attaches cover images,
descriptions, and other data. Some of the content in
the database is of a more risqué variety, but the app
has that stuff disabled by default. The issue,
according to the developer, is likely that some titles
in themoviedb are not categorized properly as adult
material and might appear in the app with default
settings. The dev points out this is no different than
a browser app that can navigate to themoviedb, but
that's not a distinction made in Google's Play Store
agreement. [How are you doing so far? Close?]
Google tends not to be very communicative in these
situations, but the dev has reached out anyway. The
current plan is to re-upload Mizuu as a new package
soon, but that means users will have to buy it again.
It isn't made clear in the Google+ post whether or not
some changes will be made in an attempt to prevent
a recurrence of this problem. If it's the same app just
as a different package name, Google might end up
taking more extreme steps.
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