Popular writing app goes offline on Android after issues with Google

• iA Writer, which is popular on many platforms, was taken offline from the Play Store due to Google’s API access restrictions.

• Google’s new moderation requirement has led iA Writer developers to remove the app from the Play Store.

• Despite Google’s crackdown on low-effort apps, iA Writer’s emphasis on user experience hasn’t prevented its removal.

Throughout Android Police’s years of covering the Android world, we’ve seen how difficult it can be for independent developers to create, maintain, and update great apps in digital markets. Frankly, there is no bigger digital app store than this Google Playwhich has been the default app market on Android devices since its launch in 2008. Found guilty of illegally monopolizing the Play Store last year Epic v. Google’s decision. With all that said, Google doesn’t always make things easy or treat app developers well, which recently led to the creator of a popular writing app taking it offline.

iA Writer is an extremely popular markup editing application available on many different platforms such as Windows PCs, iOS devices and Android smartphones. It has been using integration with Google Drive and Google Docs for years, mostly to streamline the workflows of people using this ecosystem. However, iA Writer’s API access to Drive on Android has been revoked”few months ago,” and after ongoing frustrating negotiations with Google, the development team decided to remove the app from the Play Store (via) Brave Fireball). As of today, no one can download the app that has not yet been downloaded because it has been removed from the store. Existing users will retain their access.

iA Writers are fighting Google

It’s a shame that iA Writer is now taken offline from the Play Store servers. The final straw is said to be Google’s new requirement for iA Writer to pass its annual Cloud Application Security Assessment audit. This would require hiring a third-party audit provider such as KPMG and would cost “approximately one to two months of revenue” for iA Writer developers. Five years ago Google restricts apps from accessing Drive files in the name of user privacy. The raid continued.

iA Writer has many strengths, including the ability to keep track of what you’ve written and what you’ve copied and pasted from other sources. It puts a strong emphasis on preserving authorship and lets you link notes from other sites and apps, focus on individual sentences you’ve written, and more. During Google starts blocking low-effort Play Store apps Back in August, iA Writer was definitely not one of them.