WireGuard and andOTP removed from Google Play due to donation links

Google company deleted android application wire guard (open vpn) from the Google Play catalog due to a payment policy violation. WireGuard is an open source application that is distributed free of charge and does not participate in monetization through display of ads. The violation consisted in the fact that in the application in the settings section there was a link "Donate to the WireGuard Project", leading to the page for accepting donations for the development of the project (wireguard.com/donations/).

An attempt to challenge the deletion was unsuccessful and the appeal was rejected (judging by the response time, the answer was generated by a bot, as in a recent incident with the removal of uBlock Origin from the Chrome Web Store catalog). After that the developer removed link to accept donations and re-submit the application to the catalog. The application is currently in the review queue, until the completion of which the application remains not available on Google Play. As a fallback, the application can be installed from the directory F-Droid.

Initially, the impression was that the removal of WireGuard was an isolated misunderstanding caused by a false positive of the automated review system for updates on Google Play. But it turned out that with a similar problem last week also collided open source developers andOTP (a program for two-factor authentication using one-time passwords). This application was also removed from Google Play, and also for having a link to the donation page.

Since the notice of violation contains only general information, the developers assumed that the violation is that donations are not accepted through the Googles In-App payment mechanism prescribed by the rules for making payments from the application. At the same time, in rules, accepting donations via In-app Billing is declared as a monetization method that is not yet supported. Besides, in FAQ by payment method, donations are marked as ineligible unless collected by a specially registered non-profit organization.

Like WireGuard, andOTP, despite being removed 6 days ago, still remains not available on Google Play, but it can be installed through the directory F-Droid. The WireGuard app has over 50k installs on Google Play, and andOTP has over 10k.

Source: opennet.ru