I did a little looking around HoopApp's details and I'm finding it all a bit suspect.

We've heard this story hundreds of times — Google Play's aggressive banning, automated responses that stonewall progress, and general inability to get things fixed even when people get involved — so there's nothing about it that isn't believable. But I have a feeling that some or all of this may not have actually happened to this particular developer account.

The first thing I checked was the history on the app itself. AppBrain shows that the app was originally released almost exactly 1 year ago, and in the 11 months it was available, it had still only reached the 100-500 install count. Apple's App Store doesn't show download numbers, but the listing has zero reviews, which is a fairly good indicator that download numbers are virtually non-existent.
https://www.appbrain.com/app/com.hoopapp
https://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/hoopapployalty/id1287914039

I also then looked into their website, curious if this might still be newsworthy. https://www.hoopapp.co.uk/

It's a proprietary digital loyalty card that requires that businesses pay a subscription fee and either rent or buy hardware from HoopApp, and customers will need the apps on their phones. On a personal note, I think the business idea was bad and doomed to fail, but who am I to judge...

This is when I started to consider the app may not have been delisted by Google, but could have actually been done intentionally by the HoopApp people. After all, the download numbers were abysmal, and the only way a business like this can succeed is if there are a ton of customers interested in using it, which would be incentive for businesses to pay a fee for it.

Their post makes a point to say that they had put some effort into hyping up the product prior to its launch, which was supposedly about to happen, so I looked at their social accounts.
https://www.facebook.com/HoopLoyalty/
https://twitter.com/hoopapployalty

Both have posts from 12 months ago that say the app already launched, and some from only a few months earlier that claim the app was just about to launch. To me, this doesn't really line up with the timeline they presented in their post, even taking into account the claims about server troubles. I don't think server troubles should take nearly a year to resolve. Regardless, both apps have been publicly accessible for a year.

https://twitter.com/HoopAppLoyalty/status/928166469136814080
https://twitter.com/JNights2/status/967074426272575488
https://twitter.com/HoopAppLoyalty/status/967723452957208576

https://www.facebook.com/HoopLoyalty/posts/880998315392883?_...
https://www.facebook.com/HoopLoyalty/photos/a.80383775977560...
https://www.facebook.com/HoopLoyalty/photos/a.80383775977560...
https://www.facebook.com/HoopLoyalty/photos/a.80383775977560...
https://www.facebook.com/HoopLoyalty/photos/a.80383775977560...
https://www.facebook.com/HoopLoyalty/photos/a.80383775977560...

Both accounts have been mostly silent for the better part of the last year, only popping up with a few generic reposts, some stuff about a video, plus a post on each account when they were anticipating an award. Evidently they won a local business award 8 months ago for a service that hadn't officially launched yet?

https://twitter.com/HoopAppLoyalty/status/100990469131517542...
https://www.facebook.com/HoopLoyalty/photos/a.80383775977560...

There's still room to dig, but once all of these pieces come together, it looks a lot like they're trying to stir up a mob to get attention for a business that had basically failed. It's not hard to pretend to be a victim of Google's famously bad management of developer accounts, there are screenshots and identical stories all over HN and reddit, all of which are easy to copy and modify.

I'm skeptical of story elements like an investment of only £25,000 (about $33,000 US). The way it's described, it sounds like this is for both the Android and iOS apps, plus server development, and an interface for the business owners. To say that's on the low side would be an understatement. Are there investors, and why aren't they doing something about this? They've supposedly sunk time and effort into promoting the service and making videos, but most of that happened over a year ago over a couple months, then abruptly slowed to very rare posts. This doesn't sound ambitious enough for a startup.

One other thing I noticed is that the HoopApp social accounts don't even point to this post, and the site still links to the Google Play listing even though it has been down for a month. You'd think they would have at least added a note to explain the app would be returning shortly. I'm not going to speculate on this or try to track down details, but I did briefly ponder the possibility that the post wasn't even written by somebody with a connection to the company.

Regardless, the tl;dr is that this whole thing smells a bit like a publicity stunt based on an all too familiar story. Raising the pitchforks for hundreds of other legitimate developers is more than justified, but I think this particular story should be scrutinized quite a bit more before it becomes the poster child for a call to action.