Extension taken down: Please help.

[William A.]

This is the scenario: 

Our popular extension got taken down without warning 2 days ago. Item id is  jjbjnljfglickglligjldckgpmclnoek.

Our extension allows users to see additional information about a business on Google domains, which includes Google Search and other google domain. The email notification mentioned that our tool allows to extract and copy information out of Google Maps. We are not an extraction or scraping tool, and we only allowed to export/print the report that we create for the user. This was just a minor function of the tool and the core. 

Till now we have done this: 

- Removed the export/print functionality. 

- We in fact use the Google API in our tool. We dont extract and copy information about map. We have mentioned that. We are not a scraping service.

- We have also offered to completely stop our tool on Google Maps if that is the concern. We can still work on other Google domains.

We are happy to comply with any concerns they have and we have been trying to contact Chrome team for any feedback. We are not having much luck, not getting a full response at all on what we need to do. It is an active extension, so we have many daily active users on the tool. 

Has anyone gone through this? Any suggestions on what we can do? 

Our team has spend years diligently building a  brand and service around this tool and have a 4.97 rating, and very popular. So thing is surprising and troublesome. All our success depends on this tool. 

We are a bit desperate now, so any help will be deeply appreciated.

[William A.]

I think I made a mistake on the extension Item Id. My extension item id that was taken down is  oibcaeeplepnjfjhokfcabnaafodppik and not  jjbjnljfglickglligjldckgpmclnoek. Sorry for the confusion. 

[William A.]

Just wanted to provide an update here. 

Our extension was allowed back online now. Not sure what changes, nor did not receive any communication yet. We redeployed the extension and send a mail to the team with the detailed explanation, and it was back online. 

I really hope there was a better communication system for Chrome Store though. We are completely happy to engage with them and help with any concerns they have, but the communication we had was definitely not satisfactory. Also, I hope there would be warning before these kind of take downs. This experience was pretty traumatic for our team since we had put all our eggs in 'Chrome Store' basket. 

Thank you all for your help here. 

[Simeon Vincent]

As I just mentioned on Twitter, I only just started looking into this when I saw your message that the extension is back in the store. At the moment mu best guess on why you haven't received an email is that you opened an appeal and the review team too action on it, but haven't replied to your support ticket yet.

We have some documentation that describes how the review Chrome Web Store review  process normally works. Based on what you've shared, it sounds like the expected process broke down a bit. I'm going to poke around a bit more to try to figure out why.

https://developer.chrome.com/docs/webstore/review-process/ 

Apologies for the poor experience.

Simeon - @dotproto

Chrome Extensions DevRel

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[William A.]

Hi Simeon, on behalf of our team would like to thank you for taking proactive action on this. 

Our experience was a bit sudden. Thought we will share our experience if it could help analyze the issue. This was our experience. 

- Customers started reporting extension is down. 

- 20 min later we got a message from Chrome team that the extension was taken down since it is seen as a scrapping and exporting extension. We are a business information extension which provides information about business on Google domain. We immediately responded back with the details and asking what is the point of concern. We also reached back immediately that we will be happy to make any changes to the extension. 

- We raised a ticket immediately, and then around 20 hours later we got a response that it is export button in one of the page that was the issue. We removed it between 2 hours and completely removed the functionality. We responded to the email. Our export button was actually a print button which allows users to download our report as pdf. BTW, we also actually use the Google Maps API. 

- Around 20 hours later we got another mail telling that we are not able to come back in and then we should submit a new item completely. This did not make any sense. We already have 15000 users and lot of great reviews in the extension. We were still desperate and then submitted another response with the details. We also submitted the extension and a new item. 

- Around 24 hour later the extension was published back. This was 2 hours ago. We still have not got any email. 

Thank you once again for all your help. 

[Cuyler Stuwe]

That experience (rough timelines, level of feedback, level of internal consistency, etc.) sounds pretty par for the course to me.

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[Simeon Vincent]

Cuyler, you may be right, but I want to change that.

Simeon - @dotproto

Chrome Extensions DevRel

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