Google Play Taking My apps Down (YouTube Player)

1

Hi, Just off hand does anyone know if the embedded NSB YouTube Player is still ok to use with Google play apps? Just got an email this morning saying that 2 of my apps have been removed for the following reason:

Your app shouldn’t access or use the service or API in a manner that violates its terms of service. For example, your app shouldn’t download, monetize, or access YouTube videos in a way that violates the YouTube Terms of Service.

All I have done is embedded the player to access YouTube vids from my own YouTube channel. Tried to talk to Google Play but really hard to get hold of people there right now.

Thanks
Will.

2

I went through this several years ago with a customer’s app. The bottom line was that, in their eyes, i was stealing from them because they couldn’t track who was viewing the videos. They framed it as a public safety issue (this was a public safety app LOL) saying without being able to track who views certain videos… blah blah blah… it was the most irrational argument in the history of arguments that don’t involve ex’s.

3

Thanks for getting back to me Phil. I embedded the YouTube player into my app so the user could watch instructional videos on my YouTube Channel on how to use the apps in question? Struggling to see what the problem is? I have appealed, but after reading your reply it looks like I’ve wasted my time :-).

Will.

4

You never know… I’ve won some appeals and lost some. With this public safety app we ended up hosting the videos on the clients server and skipped YouTube altogether. On another we just used the in-app-browser.

5

Didn’t win this one phil :slight_smile: This is what they said:

During review, we found that your app (com.nsbasic.Project1) violates the Device and Network Abuse policy by enabling background play of YouTube videos.

6

So the issue is “background play” - yeah, that’s a huge no-no. In short, there was a whole spate of apps that would background play videos and increase channel monetization when there were no viewers. Advertisers complained, YouTube had to refund $$ etc. (There are similar apps for liking and sharing tweets, Facebook and Instagram posts, installing other mobile apps etc.)

7

It only background plays within the app it’s self I.e. when you navigate between forms. Other than using the YouTube controls on the player, I don’t know how to stop the player when exiting the form it’s attached to?

8

Here are Google’s docs for the player:

9

For some reason YouTube1.stopVideo() didn’t work, in the browser it said it wasn’t a function? so in the end I used YouTube1.refresh()

i.e.

Function Button40_onclick()
  Form24.Visible = False
  YouTube1.refresh()
End Function

Now I can navigate from the YouTube Player whilst it’s playing and then it just turns off.

Thanks

Will.

10

Awesome! Hopefully that fixes the problem and you can get your app approved!