Salesforce Connected App using Salesforce Mobile SDK removed from Google Play Store due to webview spam policy

Question

We have an issue where our app was removed from the Google Play Store noting a violation of the Salesforce's webview spam policy. Here is the full notification we received from Google Play Support:

After further review, we found that your app 
violates webview spam policy of the following website: 
https://login.salesforce.com<https://login.salesforce.com/> 

It's a violation of the Webviews and Affiliate Spam 
policy<https://play.google.com/about/ip-deception-spam/spam/webviews- 
affiliate/> to publish an app where the primary purpose of the app is to 
provide a webview of a website without permission from the website owner or 
administrator. 

We were unable to verify your relationship with the original brand 
owner/content creator. If you are authorized by the site creator/content 
owner to redistribute the content in this manner, please reply with 
verifiable documentation(ex: contract, consignation form, certificate of 
registration for domain of website, screenshot of managing page of website 
etc. in PDF format). 

Please let us know if you have any other questions or concerns. 

I appreciate your understanding and look forward to your reply. 

I opened a case with Salesforce support but they notified me that the Salesforce Mobile SDK is open-source and directed me to open a question here.

We've reached out to Google Play support for additional information, but have not heard back as of yet.

We were in the process of updating the Salesforce Mobile SDK version when we received this notification/suspension. Is this something that could be caused by this being out of date? Any assistance/insight would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

I have not heard of anyone else running into this and it should have nothing to do with the SDK version. It sounds like this is simply an error in some automated spam detection system Google has. When Google responds with how exactly you need to verify that you are a customer that uses the Salesforce backend, Salesforce support should be able to provide you/Google with that.

I doubt that Google will come back with any information that is actionable in code, but if they do please let us know. We would be happy to make a reasonable change that would prevent you and other customers from experiencing this in the future.

Apologies for the inconvenience.