Key Takeaways
- iA Writer, popular across many platforms, was taken offline from the Play Store due to Google’s API access restrictions.
- Google’s new audit requirement 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 the user experience did not protect it from being removed.
In all of Android Police’s years of covering the Android world, we’ve seen just how difficult it can be for independent developers to create, maintain and update some great apps in digital marketplaces. Obviously, there’s no bigger digital app store than Google Play, which has been the default app marketplace on Android devices since it launched in 2008. With its pre-installed nature comes multitudes of problems for Google, however, as it was found guilty of illegally monopolizing the Play Store last year in the Epic v. Google verdict. With all that being said, Google doesn’t always make it easy or play nice with its app developers, and that has recently caused the creator of a popular writing app to take it offline.
iA Writer is an extremely popular markdown editing app available across many different platforms, such as Windows PCs, iOS devices, and Android smartphones. For years, it has used an integration with Google Drive and Google Docs to make workflows easier for people that mainly use that ecosystem. However, iA Writer’s API access to Drive on Android was revoked “a couple of months ago,” and after continuous frustrating conversations with Google, the development team has decided to remove the app from the Play Store (via Daring Fireball). As of today, no one can download the app that hasn’t already, as it has been removed from the storefront. Existing users will retain their access.
iA Writer’s battles with Google
It’s a shame that iA Writer has now been taken offline from Play Store servers. The final straw is said to have been Google’s new requirement for iA Writer to pass a yearly Cloud Application Security Assessment audit. This would have necessitated the hiring of a third-party audit vendor like KPMG, and it would have cost “about one to two months of revenue” for iA Writer’s developers. Five years ago, Google cracked down on app access to Drive files in the name of user privacy. The crackdown has continued.
iA Writer has a lot of strengths, such as its ability to track what you wrote and what you copied and pasted from other sources. It puts a lot of emphasis on maintaining authorship, and it allows you to link notes from other sites and applications, focus on individual sentences you’re typing, and more. While Google began cracking down on low-effort Play Store apps in August, iA Writer was certainly not one of them.