Google has removed at least several major cryptocurrency wallets from its Play Store overnight. Although the reason for this decision is not yet clear, Bitcoin.com CEO Roger Ver has already criticized Google's new cryptocurrency policy.
Over the past 12 hours, Bitcoin Wallet (owned by Bitcoin.com), CoPay and BitPay have been removed from the platform. The most interesting thing is that none of these applications are mining applications, nor do they advertise such services.
Google, as before, does not provide any comments regarding the reasons for its decision. This is not surprising - Google rarely comments on individual cases like this. According to Roger Ver, the Play Store's updated policy incorrectly labeled wallets as cryptocurrency miners, which are strictly prohibited.
“According to Google, this was due to the ban on mining applications. I can’t understand how they came to the conclusion that our wallet is a mining application.”
At the moment, only the Bitcoin.com wallet has been restored to the store.
Hard Fork reporters contacted representatives of BitPay and Bitcoin.com. According to BitPay, the wallet should be operational again soon, but no details were revealed as to why it was removed.
Three wallets have a similar code. CoPay is the oldest of them, Bitcoin Wallet is a direct fork of this wallet. The CoPay team has developed and released the BitPay application, which is very similar to the original, but has expanded functionality.
Android users have already installed BitPay and CoPay more than 100,000 times. Bitcoin Wallet boasts over a million users. All three wallets support both Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash. Developers share code for wallets using GitHub.
Despite the declared good intentions, Google's new policy towards cryptocurrencies is still not working well. Researchers from Hard Fork have discovered that the Play Store currently contains a huge number of applications that specialize in mining cryptocurrency on devices.
According to thenextweb.com
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