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Another month, another wrongful removal from the Play Store. Google booted Podcast Addict off the Play Store because it references the novel coronavirus outbreak — or rather, it offers you to listen to podcasts that do, just like any other podcast player out there. For some reason, Podcast Addict has been singled out by Google, with the company asking the developer to prove that his product is endorsed by some government, or remove any references to COVID-19.

Google references section 8.3 of its developer distribution agreement, which it recently updated to make it harder for malicious apps to take advantage of people searching for information on the pandemic. That's a good thing, but taking down an app that merely offers third-party COVID-19 content seems to overshoot that goal — Google would have to remove its own apps like YouTube, Google News, and even feed readers or other news aggregation services shouldn't be allowed on the Play Store if they're not government-sanctioned. Thus, it's safe to say that some automated algorithms probably stumbled upon mentions of the coronavirus in the app and issued a false positive, and as always, no actual person at Google is available to the developer to resolve the problem.

This would be a huge blow to indie podcast developers on the Play Store if this is become a precedent. Hope it can be fixed ASAP.