Must Read for New Developers: 5-Minute PlayStore Rejections

Hello. I am zm soft and I registered as a developer last year (end of ’23) and started releasing apps. We are also planning to release an app for developers to cooperate with other developers to get through the closed testing process, if you would like to check it out.

One of the tasks that is always required to publish an app on Google Play is the Google review process. Today, I would like to write about what you should pay attention to when developing an app and what you should do to avoid getting rejected or what you should do when you do, based on my actual experience of getting rejected in the review process.

Privacy Policy Statement

First, the privacy policy statement. This is probably the most common cause of rejection as we move forward with registering as a new developer. This is how I was actually contacted when I was rejected.

Listed below are the things that must be done.

• Decide on the wording of the privacy policy
• Publish the privacy policy on the site (see below for precautions)
• Set URL to PlayConsole
• Make it viewable from the app

Decide on wording and publish policy

You must first decide what to display and where. But if you are new to this, you don’t know what to write, do you? I was the same way, but don’t worry, it is easy to handle.

With the service Flycricket, you only have to answer a few questions and it will automatically determine what should appear in your privacy policy. The important part of the privacy policy is what information the app handles, such as the user’s address, usage history, etc. All you need to enter in flycricket is what that information is.

Use Flycricket’s AppPrivacyPoricyGenerator function. When you access the AppPrivacyPoricyGenerator, a screen similar to the one below will appear, and you will be asked to answer a few questions.

The key point in the question is Personally Identifiable Information (assuming you entered the app name correctly, etc.). The key point in the question is “Personally Identifiable Information,” which includes not only your user name, password, e-mail address, phone number, and profile, but also your ID information and location information, which may identify you. After that, the following completion screen will appear when you have completed the necessary inputs 2 and 3.

Press the [Privacy Policy] button to generate the text. After that, click [Deploy to Flycricket] to register an account, and you can issue a URL to the generated text. You can edit the text as shown below, and you can also retrieve the URL from [Get Link].

That’s right. The great thing about this service is that you can publish the generated content on your site as is. You need to register for the service, but you can generate and maintain up to 4 apps for free. This will not be enough when the number of registered apps increases, but it is enough for initial app development. When the number of registrations increases, you can move the privacy policy to another site.

Precautions

If you are using Flycricket, no problem, but here is a note about publishing your site. In my case, I changed the privacy policy publication site to WordPress in the middle of developing several applications. At that time, I had created the document as a post page, which had a comments section, which was rejected because it was pointed out that it was a “changeable” document. Be sure to format your privacy policy as a fixed page where comments, etc. cannot be left.

URL registration in PlayConsole

Register the URL as application information. Registration can be done from the [Policy and programs]-[App content]-[Privacy policy] setting in the lower left corner of the PlayConsole screen. The first time you register (unregistered), it will also be displayed on the dashboard.

Allow users to view policies from the app

This will be done by doing one of the following in the application.

• Link.
• Implement an implementation that displays the policy

I have taken the body of the policy and made it visible in the app; I keep it as text under the assets folder and load it.

Are there cases that are not rejected?

Even in the same Google review, whether it is a difference in the person in charge or not, it is still a human thing, so there can be oversights. It seems that even if an app is not fully compliant with policy statements, etc., it may still pass the review process. This was the case with the first app I registered. This is more risky than getting rejected. There is a possibility that the app will be deleted afterwards due to policy violations. Here is the PlayConsole notification when I was actually notified later.

There is a grace period, but make sure you do not miss the notification and have the application deleted.

Hype: Beware of app names and descriptions.

This one is usually not too much of a concern, but I am mentioning it because one of the apps I made was rejected due to this reason. The following is the original text.

The problem was the app name. First, I wanted to register a simple app, so I registered an app that just plays a bear repellent sound for hiking in the mountains. I named it “BearRepellent” as it was. This was not a good idea and was rejected. It seems that apps such as Mosquito repellent, which are not reliable and only expected to be effective, are interpreted as “claiming a function that cannot be realized. In the end, all that was needed was to change the name to “BearBell”. In fact, it took quite a while to get this fixed, and I had to go through several rounds of review and rejection by Google, who would not specifically point out the problem, but would excerpt the relevant part of the policy as misleading. For my part, I thought BearRepellent was generic, so I didn’t realize the content constituted hype. I reviewed the description and added a subtitle to the app name to see if the problem was that it was hard to tell whether the app was a game or a tool, but the word “repellent” was still there, so of course the app was rejected. It is good to know that there are cases like this.

Rejections for In-App Purchase

Further individual attention is required when making in-app purchases. This is especially true when dealing with subscription purchases. It is necessary to provide multilingual term descriptions and purchase clauses. I plan to describe the specifics in a separate article, so please wait a little longer.

At the end

How was your experience? I hope you will use this as a preliminary knowledge of your application and registration. If there is anything else that you need to be aware of, please comment on it.