Nova Wallet Android app is temporarily inaccessible in Google Play due to conflict initiated by SORAMITSU

Update — Nova Wallet team won the dispute and both apps are available:
🚀 Android app: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=io.novafoundation.nova.market
🍎 iOS app: https://apps.apple.com/app/nova-polkadot-kusama-wallet/id1597119355

TL;DR:

• SORAMITSU requested Google Play to suspend Nova Wallet claiming that commercial use of Fearless Wallet codebase, which our team originally developed and which was used as a base for Nova Wallet, is prohibited.
• Nova Wallet team will file an appeal giving that all used codebase is Licensed under Apache 2.0 License, which allows commercial use of intellectual property, to reinstate the Android app.

Today, on November 17th, Google Play temporarily suspended the Nova Wallet Android application following the request made by Soramitsu Helvetia AG. As we are always transparent with our community, we want to describe the situation as a whole and state further steps that the Nova Wallet team will take to resolve the suspension.

To start with, the SORAMITSU request is based on the claims regarding forbidden commercial use of the Fearless Wallet, being SORAMITSU intellectual property. However, the Nova Wallet is based and forked from the open-source Github Fearless Wallet repository, which is licensed under Apache 2.0 license, allowing full commercial use as can be seen here.

That’s being said, we are preparing an appeal to Google Play in order to reinstate the Nova Wallet Android application. As the original team that designed & implemented Fearless Wallet applications (including UI, localization files, architecture, and codebase), we are willing to continue our work on Nova Wallet applications, focusing on delivering high-quality and community-oriented app for the Polkadot & Kusama ecosystem.

Taking into account previous attempts of SORAMITSU to interrupt our work on Nova Wallet during the transition, we are considering their behavior going against Polkadot & Kusama ecosystem principles of encouraging open source development and collaborations on common good activities. We believe that SORAMITSU should focus on continuing to implement their own vision of mobile apps in the ecosystem rather than encumbering and interrupting our team from implementing Nova Wallet apps.

We understand that this will interrupt our users from having a comfortable way to download and receive updates of Nova Wallet Android applications. In addition to that, we hope that the ecosystem itself, including infrastructure providers, parachain networks, Kusama & Polkadot Councillors, will understand the situation and tolerate possible delays related to our collaboration agreements.

From our side, we will do everything possible in order to minimize the impact on the community from their actions.

Join the Nova Wallet community:

Website: https://novawallet.io
Telegram group: https://t.me/novawallet
Twitter: https://twitter.com/NovaWalletApp
GitHub: https://github.com/nova-wallet
Element: https://matrix.to/#/#nova-wallet:matrix.org