PlayStrikeKit

Who it's for

Indie Android devs and 1-5 person studios with live Play apps (including donation-funded OSS apps like AnkiDroid) who today cope via r/androiddev and XDA 'suspended my app' threads, generic Play support forms that return form letters, or $100+/hr Upwork 'policy consultants'.

The problem

Payment + time: a suspension stops revenue instantly and a terminated Play developer account is effectively a lifetime ban across future accounts, yet the notice names only a vague clause, gives ~7 days, and first appeals get template rejections for weeks.

How to build it

Web app: paste the violation email + store-listing URL (+ optional APK upload), receive a diagnosis report, an ordered fix checklist, and an editable appeal letter; plus a $/mo monitor that diffs your listing weekly against newly observed enforcement patterns; optional GitHub Action that scans manifest/listing text for known strike triggers before release.

How it makes money

$39 one-time per incident (diagnosis + fix checklist + appeal letter, bought in panic while the 7-day clock runs) and $12/mo for listing-drift monitoring; they pay because a terminated account ends their business and the free option is Reddit guessing that burns the window.

Why it doesn't exist yet

Google sells no remediation channel and deliberately keeps notices vague, so the enforcement pattern data lives scattered across forum posts and HN threads; big app-tooling vendors skip it because incidents are bursty panic purchases, not seats. The indie gap: one person can curate the public precedent corpus (this week's AnkiDroid Open Collective link removal, the AuroraStore block) and maintain the notice→clause→fix mapping faster than any vendor's release cycle.

First users

The AnkiDroid (801pt HN) and AuroraStore (442pt) threads this week are full of scared devs; answering the next enforcement wave's 'policy strike' posts on r/androiddev and XDA with a free instant diagnosis converts the first 10 into paid appeal letters the same day.

Build size

1 person x 8 weeks. Includes: notice-text parser mapped to ~50 Play policy clauses, curated precedent database seeded with 150+ public developer-reported enforcement cases, static checks for ~20 listing/APK strike triggers (external donation/payment links, restricted permissions, target-SDK violations), appeal-letter generator, weekly monitor. Excludes: any guarantee of reinstatement, iOS/App Store coverage, human legal review.

Biggest risk

Google ships genuinely specific violation notices with in-console fix guidance (their policy-communications revamp has been inching this way), or the enforcement wave pauses and the panic-purchase market evaporates; per-dev strike frequency is low, so the monitoring tier churns hard.

Conditions for a hit (all 3 required)

• Paste a real Play policy-violation notice plus a store-listing URL and receive, within 30 minutes, a report naming the specific policy clause, the exact offending element (quoted listing text, deep link, or manifest permission), and an ordered fix checklist.
• Ships a public, dated precedent database of at least 150 developer-reported enforcement cases (e.g., the AnkiDroid Open Collective link removal, the AuroraStore block), each citable in the generated appeal letters.
• Upload an APK or point at a listing and get pass/fail on at least 20 known strike triggers — external donation/payment links in listing text, restricted permissions, target-SDK violations — with the offending string or manifest line shown.

How it's judged (in 6 months)

A public launch of a tool matching all 3 features by a team of <=3, evidenced by GitHub >=1,000 stars OR Product Hunt daily top 5 on or before 2027-03-05(judgment date 2027-03-05)

AI self-confidence 50/100 — self-reported likelihood of meeting the criterion, not a business success rate