Digital wallet provider Mycelium has had its popular bitcoin wallet suspended from the Google Play store following a violation of the Google Play content policy.
Google informed the app administrators of the reason behind the suspension:
“REASON FOR SUSPENSION: Violation of the paid and free provision of the Content Policy and section 3.5 of the Developer Distribution Agreement. Please refer to the Third Party Payments help center article for more information.”
Section 3.5 of that agreement reads:
“If the product is free, you will not be charged a transaction fee. You may not start charging a user for a product that was initially free unless the charge correlates with an alternative version of the product. The Payment processor must process all fees a developer received for any version of a product distributed via the store.”
Mycelium announced the wallet’s unavailability via social media platform Reddit, saying:
“If you try to download Mycelium Wallet from Google Play, you will get a 403 error. We just received an email stating that Mycelium Wallet has been suspended due to policy violations… We are trying to get to the bottom of this. In the meantime, you can always download our wallet from our website directly at https://mycelium.com/bitcoinwallet.”
Mycelium developer Jan Dreske says that the company team was unable to find any direct violations of the terms of service. The company is filing a complaint with Google, as it is felt that the app was removed in error.
The good news is that current users will not be affected by the suspension and removal, and all wallets that have already been downloaded from the store are still slated to work.
