Google Play Store

[Update: Back] Popular Reddit client ‘Slide for Reddit’ torn from Play Store over ‘impersonation’ claims

Damien Wilde | Jul 14 2020 - 12:54 am PT

Slide for Reddit has been unceremoniously torn from the Google Play Store over claims that the app violated Google’s “impersonation” policy.

[Update 07/14]: It looks like Slide for Reddit has now been returned to the Google Play Store (via Android Police). It doesn’t look as though an explanation was forthcoming from Google on the unceremonious removal in the first place. However, if you want one of the best Reddit clients for your mobile, then you can download to your heart’s content again.

Another announcement post confirmed the return of the app to the world’s most popular digital app store, while it will come with a ton of extra improvements and extra features for avid Reddit scrollers.

Hey all!

Slide is back on the Play Store, and we’ve shipped a great update with a lot of improvements to Slide’s video system and some new features to boot.

Changelog

Rewrite of a lot of our video-handling code, thanks to @timawesomeness! Some of these updates include the ability to mute Imgur images, fixes for Reddit videos without sound, memory usage improvements, and improvements to video caching
Support for mod locking of individual comments
Added option to save photos to a manual folder (thanks to @Archeidos)
Added an always show FAB option in Settings (thanks to @darshan099)
Graceful handling of submission loading errors with new “try again” button (thanks to @ctbur)
Updated Fastlane metadata for F-Droid builds (thanks to @obar). This will speed up Slide builds on the F-Droid platform
Fixed offline mode crash when no subreddits were cached
Fixed posting to profiles with more than 20 characters (thanks to @LostGhost1)
Fix OnePlus and Huawei media scanner intents, will fix images not immediately showing in gallery on these devices (thanks to @Rexee)
Fixed handling of intent links in internal browser
Fix toolbox encoded chars in removal reason text
Fixed startup crash on some devices

Thank you all for the support during the last removal process, and I hope you enjoy this update :)

Cheers,

Carlos

It actually isn’t clear just why Slide was removed from the Play Store, as the app developer has yet to be contacted by Google as to why it is no longer on the digital storefront (via Android Police).

In an announcement post on the official Slide subreddit, the developer, Carlos confirmed that his app is no longer searchable or visible on the Play Store ⁠— which throws up the “We’re sorry, the requested URL was not found on this server” message when you try and visit the listing.

Slide missing from the Play Store?
byu/ccrama inslideforreddit

With over 100,000 downloads, this is indicative of the treatment developers have vented about in recent months. Google’s automated systems clearly need some sort of tweaking to ensure that developers are not left picking up the pieces of Play Store bans and app removals.

As the guys over at Android Police have noted, this is not the first time that Slide has been removed from the Play Store. This time around, it looks as though the problem is the Google Play Store’s intellectual property policy. Google told Carlos that the app was removed due to “impersonation.”

Now you’re probably wondering why they chose this reason. It could simply be due to the fact that “Reddit” is being used in the name of the application. Having had the same name since launch almost four years ago, it’s a weird potential reason for Google to remove Slide for Reddit from the Play Store.

Either way, we’ll be keeping an eye on the situation as big fans of the third-party Reddit client. Let’s just hope it’s a temporary error that will get resolved quickly so we can go back to scrolling thousands of reposts.