Comment by VLM

Actually no, they didn't seem to admit any violations.

I've been in this game awhile, dealing with Google is a continuous stream of "we have a new policy and you now have 30 days to provide the URL of your official formal legal privacy policy." or whatever new policy they invent.

Usually its not terribly exciting or controversial. For example by next month ALL updated apps must target Android 11 aka API level 30 (AFAIK unless they've recently altered the date, etc). I'm not having a significant problem with that, but historically its been a pain occasionally.

AFAIK all in-app subscriptions have to support account hold and restore as of next month, as a policy example, I'm not in that game, but as I understand, its perfectly OK to not support that today; just make sure its all good by Nov 1st.

I see there's a new "data safety section" on the play app content page as of next April. I would casually interpret that as being similar but different from the privacy policy requirement in that the priv pol seems to cover all activities of a company whereas the app data safety section will lay out exactly what OS calls your app is making. Which begs the question of why the play store or the OS don't simply automate the whole thing seeing as they have a pretty good idea what the binaries are calling...

Anyway the play store list of requirements is in continuous flux and has been for years and probably will continue to change until it closes someday.

Just because they haven't announced the official deadline date probably sometime next year when you'll have to upload only Android 12 / API 31 as a minimum doesn't mean that just like clockwork "everyone" knows its coming in a year or two.

The legal contract says they only have to give 30 days warning; honestly they're almost always far more generous.

On one hand its continuous lifetime work for me until some random bot accidentally inevitably wipes me out; on the other hand its also not productive work and most of the changes Google demands don't really help anyone, not even GOOG. They're so random sometimes.