By whole account deleted do you mean your Chrome dev "account" or your Google account including Gmail, Gcal, and YouTube? The latter is my greatest fear.
My play store dev account was deleted, but my gmail and everything was fine. Good thing because I had a lot on there.
To get back to the store I created a new account with a different name. But then google took down my apps because their bots said I was impersonating “Joe Hinkle” (which is me). So then I made this blog post to “verify” that Joe Hinkle gave permission for Impact Studios (my new account name) to host my content, and it worked...somehow...
or pay them 6 bucks a month for a G Suite account instead of free gmail so you actually have the ability to call a 24/7 customer service phone number and yell and scream and get someone to find out why they removed access to your lifeblood account, and have access restored.
it constantly amazes me that so many HN people put their ENTIRE LIVES/BUSINESSES in a free account that [has been proven, countless times] can be taken away from them at any time.
i mean what do folks expect for free?
google is an asshole company, sure. but so many HN'ers expect to be treated like "customers" with associated "customer rights" when in actual fact, they are a free user, a total nobody.
pay a company a small bit of money, and hey, whaddyaknow, you can suddenly call them up and talk to someone, figure out why they removed access to your account, and get it sorted out.
We have the same problem, but on the Google Play Store.
We have an brand name app used by millions of people. We uploaded an update where the only change was a new Firebase library.
Google rejected the update for vague reasons (“violation of Google Play policies” but not telling us which one).
Appealing the rejection, the CSR just pasted the vague policy thing back at us. We asked for more information and they just closed the ticket.
So we took the exact build that was accepted, incremented the version number, and uploaded that. Rejected again.
And there’s no real human to talk to.
No idea what’s going on at Google.