Cleaning up a ten-year-old Google Play developer account

We've been publishing apps since 2014. Over the years our Play Console account grew to more than a hundred apps, from serious projects to quick experiments. This month we did a full audit. The account was still in good standing, but the risks were obvious once we looked. Here is what we found and what we changed.

What an audit reveals

• A long tail of near-empty apps. Sixty live apps had fewer than ten installs, and many hadn't been updated in years.
• Near-duplicates. Several apps were the same template with a different source website. Google's spam and minimum functionality policy specifically mentions repetitive apps.
• Borrowed brand names. Some older listings used the name of the publication the app read from. Even when the app only shows public RSS content, a listing that looks like an official app is an impersonation risk.
• Suspensions. A few old apps had been suspended years ago. Suspensions count as strikes against the account's standing, and enough strikes can lead to the whole account being terminated.

What we changed

Unpublished the long tail. Unpublishing removes an app from the store for new users. Existing users keep it, and nothing is deleted. We unpublished 36 apps in one afternoon from Advanced settings > App availability.

Renamed every brand-borrowing listing. Each got an original name and a rewritten description that says what the app is: an independent reader, not affiliated with any publication. We removed copied marketing claims like "the largest site in the region", which belong to the publisher, not to us.

Fixed every declaration. Data safety, Ads, Content rating, Target audience, App access and Health apps were reviewed app by app. Several Data safety forms said user data wasn't encrypted in transit, which was simply wrong.

Planned rebuilds for the apps worth keeping, starting with those above Google's crash-rate threshold.

Habits we're keeping

• Before creating a new app, check that it isn't a variant of one we already have.
• Never use a third-party brand in a title, icon or screenshot without written permission.
• Give reviewers what they need. If an app requires sign-in, provide a working demo account or a demo mode, and describe it in App access.
• Read every rejection email fully and fix the root cause before resubmitting. Repeated rejections can lead to a suspension on their own.
• Look at Policy status and Android vitals every week, not every year.

A smaller, cleaner portfolio is easier to maintain and safer for the account that every app depends on.