Google Rejects XDA Feed Updates for “Unauthorized” Use of XDA’s Own Copyright

Last week, we were excited to announce the launch of our latest app, XDA Feed. XDA Feed is our attempt to make the most of our vast, resourceful forums and deliver content specific to your device. It is a “feed” of the best of the best for your particular phone: new ROMs, kernels, root method, news article, analysis, video or even an interesting icon pack, theme or wallpaper.

Unfortunately, our ongoing launch was stalled by a rather bizarre roadblock. We tried pushing a new update to XDA Feed on Friday through the Google Play Store. This update was to add round icons for use on Nougat devices, but this change triggered a manual investigation on Google’s end.

Google ended up rejecting the update.

Google’s reasoning for rejecting updates for XDA Feed was “unauthorized use of copyright content in your app icon”. The review guidelines further expanded this in point 1 as “Your App Store listing contains: imagery of ‘Xda-developers’ in the Hi-res icon and the launcher icon”. To make matters worse, this rejection email was signed by a human and was not an automated email, meaning that someone within Google just rejected our app for ‘violating’ our own trademark…

Screenshot of rejection email

If it isn’t clear still, we do own the trademark to our own name. We’ve appealed the rejection with all the necessary proofs, and have received the standard, automated response that our case would be reviewed within 72 hours. It has been close to 90 hours now, and we are still trying to get Google to understand that we are the owners of the copyright content used in our own app.

As a result of the update ban, we are unable to post any new builds with fixes and additions to Google Play. We are sorry for the inconvenience and apologize for the same, but ultimately, this is out of our control.

What is in our control, however, is XDA Labs. XDA Labs is an app platform that serves as an alternative to the Google Play Store, and it is best serving its purpose in times like these. Updates to XDA Feed are being pushed through XDA Labs, so we advise users to install Labs if they would like to be on the latest version. Alternatively, you can also keep an eye on the XDA Feed thread in our forums.

We are not very happy about this, but the show must go on. While we wait on Google to fix their internal mechanisms and hope they do it sooner rather than later, we will continue to push updates through the other channels mentioned.

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