Earlier on Wednesday, Google removed former President Donald Trump’s 2020 campaign app from Google’s Play Store. This is for none of the many other reasons that Trump was removed from some of the largest platforms in the world, but rather because it just did not work, Android Police reports.
Prior to the suspension, the app provided campaign news, an event schedule and ways to donate to the campaign, but at some point it stopped working, prompting Google to take it down. Android Police confirmed that the app was not functional before Google removed it. When Android Police tested the app, it was “unable to load content, report a network error, or simply rotate a load’T ‘circle indefinitely. The iOS version of the app is still in the Apple App Store and still working.
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This may not be surprising, but apps do have to maintain ‘minimum functionality’ as part of the Play Store’s policy, which means they both need to load and respond. Google has a statement to Android Police about why it removed the program:
The Trump 2020 campaign app recently stopped working and we reached out to the developer several times in an effort to get them to address the issue. People expect apps downloaded from Google Play to provide a minimum of functionality and our policy is to remove non-working apps from the Store if they are not fixed. ”
While there is a desire to link the removal of the app to larger political motives such as Trump’s second accusation or even earlier cases of the former president being removed from Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and YouTube, it is a simple moderation of app store at work: when app does not work and the developers do not work, it is removed until further notice. Since the 2020 campaign is over, you should not expect the app to be updated – at least until 2024.