Google Play recent review notification - APK HAS A PROMINENT DISCLOSURE BUT THE DISCLOSURE IS NOT ADEQUATE

Question

We recently received a notification from the google play team stating "Action Required: Your app is not compliant with Google Play Policies". They state to resolve the changes within 7 days or the app will be removed from the google play store. See the eligibility issues in the image below.

They explain that the app is sending user Phone number information to https://cloud.codenameone.com. The only thing we can think that is causing this is a crash report log that may be sent for debugging. Any other information in the app is only ever stored on the device itself.

The Google Prominent Disclosure & Consent Requirement states: -

You must provide an in-app disclosure of your data access, collection, use, and sharing. The in-app disclosure:

• Must be within the app itself, not only in the app description or on a website;
• Must be displayed in the normal usage of the app and not require the user to navigate into a menu or settings;
• Must describe the data being accessed or collected;
• Must explain how the data will be used and/or shared;
• Cannot only be placed in a privacy policy or terms of service; and
• Cannot be included with other disclosures unrelated to personal or sensitive data collection.

Your in-app disclosure must accompany and immediately precede a request for user consent and, where available, an associated runtime permission. You may not access or collect any personal or sensitive data until the user consents. The app's request for consent:

• Must present the consent dialog clearly and unambiguously;
• Must require affirmative user action (e.g., tap to accept, tick a check-box);
• Must not interpret navigation away from the disclosure (including tapping away or pressing the back or home button) as consent; and
• Must not use auto-dismissing or expiring messages as a means of obtaining user consent.

Our app currently requires only the phone permission since the app launches to the message app to send programming SMS messages. This is the only permission currently applied. When using the crash report feature for codename one is there some other permission that needs adding in some way? Or does it look like we will need to remove the log feature and resubmit. Any advice on how to resolve this would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

It's been weeks but our app is finally live after countless attempts and retries it turned out to be the dumbest thing and most insane example on how the Google review process is broken.

It seems that Google fails a production app even if an old PAUSED test channel exists with an old version of the app. They indicate this in the version of the APK (1.91 in your case which corresponds to 191). I'm guessing that's just a very old version that's nowhere close to the current version you have in production. The solution is to go one by one to the internal, alpha, beta channels and promote a release then finally publish to production.

It's insane that they would suspend the production app because of that. It's insane that they won't say that in the email and throw a misdirect in a completely wrong direction. It's insane that their UI/UX is so awful that I tried to update the APK in these channels a week ago and it seems that this update just didn't go through because I needed to follow through another stage and promote to the next level.

Note: This answer was edited to reflect the correct answer, this is the original answer which might be still valid for some edge cases...

Is it possible this is a very old build?

We had this ourselves for one of our apps. Historically we used the phone access permissions for Codename One apps to work around bugs in older versions of Android (not collect numbers as they incorrectly imply). Simply creating a new build might workaround this problem.

In the case of our app I just sent a new build and uploaded a new version and so far it's still up (2 weeks later) so it seems to be the right thing.

Edit: I also wrote a blog post on this: https://dev.to/codenameone/google-play-kafkaesque-experience-mp3