[Published: June 7, 2026 | Last updated: June 7, 2026] | 8 min read
TL;DR
- Piano Tiles (and Piano Tiles 2) were removed from the Google Play Store in February 2020 because developer Cheetah Mobile was banned for serving disruptive, out-of-context ads and committing ad fraud.
- Google pulled roughly 600 apps in the same purge, removing Cheetah Mobile’s entire catalogue of around 45 apps at once.
- The investigation into Cheetah Mobile began in late 2018 when BuzzFeed News first exposed ad-fraud behavior in its apps.
- Piano Tiles 2 returned to the Play Store in 2023 after Kooapps bought the publishing rights from Cheetah Mobile.
- If you cannot find Piano Tiles on Google Play today, search for “Piano Tiles 2” by Kooapps – that is the legitimate, current version.
Why Piano Tiles Was Removed From Google Play
Piano Tiles was removed from the Google Play Store in late February 2020 because its developer, Cheetah Mobile, was permanently banned from the platform. Google pulled every Cheetah Mobile app – roughly 45 in total – as part of a wider enforcement action that removed nearly 600 apps for violating its disruptive ads policy and disallowed interstitial policy (Google Security Blog, 2020).
Piano Tiles itself was not removed for its gameplay. The game was caught in the ban because it shared a developer account with apps that were actively committing ad fraud. When Google bans a developer, every app under that account goes down – no exceptions.
What Are “Disruptive Ads” and Why Did Google Care?
Google defines disruptive ads as ads displayed to users in unexpected ways, including impairing or interfering with the usability of device functions. The specific type Cheetah Mobile was found using is called out-of-context ads – ads that appear on a mobile device when the user is not even inside the app (Google Security Blog, 2020).
Think of it this way: you close a game, go to check your maps or make a phone call, and a full-screen ad appears out of nowhere. That’s an out-of-context ad. Clicking it – even by accident – sends money to the developer, frustrates the user, and wastes the advertiser’s budget.
That is invasive. And it is the specific behavior Google’s new machine-learning detection system caught at scale in early 2020.
Google developed machine-learning technology to detect when apps show out-of-context ads, then used it to enforce its policies against disruptive ads and disallowed interstitials, announcing the ban through its per Bjorke, Senior Product Manager for Ad Traffic Quality (Google Security Blog, 2020).
The Full Timeline: How Cheetah Mobile Lost Everything
The ban in 2020 did not come out of nowhere. Cheetah Mobile had a documented history of crossing Google’s policy lines.
2014 – First Warning Signs
Around 2014, a user reportedly found an advertisement inside Cheetah Mobile’s then-popular app Clean Master that led to a malware website. During the “optimization process” in that app, it would spam users to stop using Google Chrome and switch to Cheetah’s own browser. These were early signals of the aggressive ad and engagement tactics that would define the company’s later troubles (Piano Tiles Wiki, Fandom, 2026).
November 2018 – BuzzFeed Exposé
The first major investigation landed in November 2018. BuzzFeed News revealed that Cheetah Mobile had been engaging in ad fraud, with its apps committing “click injection” and “click flooding” – techniques that falsely credited Cheetah apps for app installs they had nothing to do with, collecting developer bounty payments without earning them (BuzzFeed News, 2018).
Google investigated, found deceptive and malicious behavior in CM File Manager, and removed it. But it allowed Cheetah Mobile to keep the rest of its apps on the store. That decision did not age well.
December 2018 – Partial Action
Google removed CM File Manager and Kika Keyboard (from separate developer Kika Tech) from the Play Store and its AdMob network after confirming the click injection findings. Google said it expected to take additional action – and it did, just over a year later (BuzzFeed News, 2018).
February 20, 2020 – Full Ban
Google published a blog post announcing the removal of nearly 600 apps from the Play Store for violating its disruptive ads and disallowed interstitial policies. Cheetah Mobile’s entire catalogue – roughly 45 apps installed more than 4.5 billion times – was pulled at once (BuzzFeed News, 2020).
Piano Tiles, Piano Tiles 2, Clean Master, Battery Doctor, Security Master – gone from Google Play in a single day.
Google also suspended Cheetah Mobile’s Google AdMob and Google Ad Manager accounts, meaning the company could no longer earn any income from Google’s advertising platforms, including from apps users had already downloaded (TechNode, 2020).
March 2020 – Appeal Rejected
Cheetah Mobile contacted Google to appeal the ban. Google rejected the appeal. A Cheetah Mobile executive said during an analyst call: “We are still in talks with Google [about restoring apps to the Play Store], but it really depends on Google’s attitude. We can’t make any predictions” (TechNode, 2020).
The appeal went nowhere.
What Happened to Cheetah Mobile After the Ban
The Google ban effectively ended Cheetah Mobile as a global company. The removal from Google’s app store had the biggest effect on Cheetah Mobile’s overseas revenue from mobile games and utility apps, because most of Google’s services are not accessible from mainland China – including the Play Store (TechNode, 2020).
Cheetah Mobile pivoted its utility tool business back to China. Its website replaced all Play Store links with direct APK download links – which created its own problem. Downloading Cheetah apps as APKs outside of Google Play removed the safety layer the Play Store provided, making it potentially more dangerous for users than getting the app from the store in the first place (Android Police, 2020).
As of 2023, Cheetah Mobile had shifted focus to AI robotics, co-operating with another company on that line of business. By August 2023, even its own Cheetah Games website had erased all download links for Piano Tiles 2, leaving only the game listing with no way to get it (Piano Tiles Wiki, Fandom, 2026).
Piano Tiles 2 Is Back – Under New Ownership
This is the part most articles miss.
Piano Tiles 2 returned to the Google Play Store in 2023. But not under Cheetah Mobile. About three and a half years after the removal, Kooapps bought the publishing rights to Piano Tiles 2 and uploaded it again to both the Play Store and the App Store (Piano Tiles Wiki, Fandom, 2026).
Kooapps also made gameplay changes: it removed the “lives” system that had frustrated long-time players, then re-added lives to Android in 2024. The game celebrated its 10th anniversary in August 2025 with a special in-game event called “Tree of Melodies” (Wikipedia, Piano Tiles, 2025).
Piano Tiles 2 also landed on Apple Arcade, giving subscribers access to the game with exclusive features and ad-free gameplay, according to reporting cited by Wikipedia.
If you search Google Play today, look for “Piano Tiles 2” with the developer listed as Kooapps. That is the legitimate, maintained version.
Case Study: What Happens to Players When a Developer Gets Banned
A user in one of our AIinBangla community sessions brought up an interesting question: why did they lose all their Piano Tiles 2 progress after the game returned?
Here’s what happened. When Cheetah Mobile was banned in February 2020, the app was delisted – but users who already had it installed could still play it on their existing devices. Progress was stored locally or on Cheetah’s servers.
When Kooapps published the new version in 2023 under a different developer account, it came with a different package name and server backend. There was no migration path. Players who had accumulated years of progress – unlocked songs, high scores, custom settings – found a fresh install with nothing carried over.
This is a broader pattern in app store bans. When a developer is banned rather than an individual app, user data tied to that developer’s account has no guaranteed continuity. The game comes back; the history does not.
It is a problem Google has not formally solved, and it affects real users whenever a major developer loses Play Store access.
Was Piano Tiles Actually “Bad” for Users?
This is worth separating out. The game itself – the tap-on-black-tiles mechanics, the classical music catalog, the speed challenge – was not the problem. Piano Tiles 2 won “Best Game of 2016” in the Google Play Store across 13 countries. It served over 900 million users globally at its peak and earned a Red Dot Award in game design in 2016 (Wikipedia, Piano Tiles, 2025).
The problem was what was happening in the background, invisible to players. Cheetah Mobile was running ad code that served ads outside the app, committed click fraud, and used permissions in ways that violated user trust and Google’s policies.
A beloved game became collateral damage in a fraud enforcement action. That is the accurate framing.
How Google Play Handles App Bans: The Broader Context
Piano Tiles was part of a much larger enforcement wave. Of the roughly 564 apps removed in February 2020, analysis by ad-fraud research firm Pixalate found that 75% had the System Alert Window permission enabled – the permission that allows apps to draw overlays on top of other apps, which is exactly what out-of-context ads abuse (Pixalate, 2020).
The removed apps had been installed more than 4.5 billion times in total. They primarily targeted English-speaking users and came mainly from developers based in China, Hong Kong, Singapore, and India (BuzzFeed News, 2020).
Google’s broader Play Store cleanup has continued since. By early 2025, the Play Store had lost nearly 47% of its apps since the start of 2024, dropping from 3.4 million apps to around 1.8 million. Of those removed, 200,000 were in the “games” category – the single largest category of purged apps (The Verge / Appfigures, 2025).
How to Play Piano Tiles on Android Right Now
Three working options for Android users in 2026:
Option 1 – Google Play (recommended): Search “Piano Tiles 2” by Kooapps and install directly. This is the maintained, updated version with no security concerns.
Option 2 – Apple App Store: The game was never removed from iOS. Piano Tiles 2 remained on the App Store through the entire Cheetah Mobile ban and continues to be available there.
Option 3 – APK from trusted repositories: Sites like APKMirror or Uptodown host older Cheetah-era APKs. The Uptodown version history goes back to the original 2019 builds. But use these with caution – older APKs from the Cheetah era may still carry the ad code that caused the ban in the first place. The Kooapps Play Store version is always the safer choice.
Do not download APKs from unofficial sites claiming to host “Piano Tiles 2” – these are often repackaged with additional malware.
Frequently Asked Questions About Piano Tiles and Google Play
Why is Piano Tiles not showing up on Google Play?
Piano Tiles (the original) is no longer on Google Play and has not returned. Piano Tiles 2 is available under the developer name Kooapps after Cheetah Mobile – the original developer – was permanently banned in February 2020. Search “Piano Tiles 2 Kooapps” in the Play Store to find the current version.
Was Piano Tiles removed because of a copyright issue?
No. Piano Tiles was removed because its developer, Cheetah Mobile, violated Google’s disruptive ads policy and was found to have committed ad fraud. Copyright was not the reason for the ban. The game’s use of classical music was generally within fair use given the compositions were in the public domain.
Can I still play Piano Tiles on iPhone?
Yes. Piano Tiles 2 was never removed from the Apple App Store. The iOS version continued to receive updates through the Cheetah Mobile era and now under Kooapps. Piano Tiles 2 is also available on Apple Arcade with an ad-free version.
Did Google ever restore Cheetah Mobile’s apps?
No. Cheetah Mobile appealed the ban in February 2020 and Google rejected the appeal. No Cheetah Mobile apps have been restored to the Play Store. The Piano Tiles 2 return in 2023 was made possible only because Kooapps purchased the publishing rights and uploaded the game under a new, separate developer account.
Is it safe to download Piano Tiles as an APK?
It depends on the source. Trusted APK repositories like APKMirror and Uptodown maintain versions that are scanned for known malware. However, older Cheetah-era APKs may still contain the aggressive ad code that led to the ban. The Kooapps version on Google Play is the safest option for Android users.
What other Cheetah Mobile apps were removed with Piano Tiles?
Cheetah Mobile’s entire app portfolio was removed in February 2020. This included Clean Master, Battery Doctor, Security Master, CM File Manager, CM Launcher, and approximately 45 apps in total. All were banned simultaneously when Google enforced the account-level ban.
What is the difference between Piano Tiles and Piano Tiles 2?
Piano Tiles (also called “Don’t Tap the White Tile”) is the original tap-the-black-tiles game. Piano Tiles 2, released on August 19, 2015, added song selection, global competition mode, and a larger music catalog. Both were developed by Cheetah Mobile originally. The original Piano Tiles has not returned to Google Play; Piano Tiles 2 returned under Kooapps in 2023.
Key Takeaways
- Piano Tiles was removed from Google Play in February 2020 not because of the game itself, but because its developer, Cheetah Mobile, was banned for ad fraud and disruptive ads.
- The ban was part of a 600-app enforcement action – the largest of its kind at the time.
- Cheetah Mobile’s ad fraud history started in 2018 and ended in a full account ban in 2020 after an appeal was rejected.
- Piano Tiles 2 is back on Google Play under Kooapps since 2023 and is safe to install.
- User progress from the Cheetah Mobile era was not migrated to the Kooapps version – a broader issue with developer-level bans that Google has not resolved.