360-degree stereoscopic image
To publish a Daydream-enabled app, you’ll need to add a 360-degree stereoscopic image to your Store Listing page. When you’re creating a 360-degree stereoscopic image, think of it as your app’s background image within the Play Store on a Daydream device.
Requirements
- JPEG or 24-bit PNG (no alpha)
- 4096x4096px
- Stereo 360°
- 15MB maximum size
Pricing
When it comes to pricing, you can set your app as free or paid, update your app’s pricing universally or per country, and use pricing templates to simplify them for your apps in Play Console. After you publish an app or update, including price changes, adding SKUs, or making changes to your app’s distribution settings, it can take a few hours for your changes to be shown on Google Play.
Make your app free or paid
- Open Play Console and go to the App pricing page (Products > App pricing).
- In the “Pricing” section, next to “Your app is,” click Make your app free or Make your app paid.
Changes to your app’s Free or Paid selection
- You can change your app from Paid to Free.
- Once your app has been offered for Free, the app can’t be changed to Paid. If you want to charge for the app, you need to create a new app with a new package name and set a price.
Enter a price
When you offer paid apps and in-app products on Google Play, a service fee applies. If you aren’t distributing a paid app or in-app item to a country that you enter a price for, users won’t have access to it.
You can use pricing templates to set up or manage the same set of prices for multiple paid apps and in-app products. If you update a pricing template, all items linked to the template will use the template’s latest prices. You can use up to 100 different pricing templates per developer account, and you can link up to 1,000 items to each pricing template.
There are a few ways you can temporarily offer your apps for free or at a discounted price:
- Offer your paid apps at a discounted price.
- Give users a paid app or in-app product for free with a promo code.
Review
Google Play has been adjusting its app review process, requiring some apps to take more time for a thorough review before approval. This can impact the timing of an app or update going live, so developers should keep it in mind when pushing out updates for functionality or App Store Optimization.
The important thing for developers to do is to plan their releases accordingly. Since it is possible that apps can take up to a week to be approved, they should plan for an appropriate time frame for the approval process. If a developer is aiming for a specific release date, they should publish to a closed testing track, then use Timed Publishing to go live at the specified time. They should still submit it at least a week or more in advance, in order to provide enough time for the Google Play review process or in case the app gets rejected and requires fixing.
How to prepare your app for review by providing app information
Add a Privacy policy -- Adding a privacy policy to your app’s store listing helps provide transparency about how you treat sensitive user and device data. The privacy policy must, together with any in-app disclosures, comprehensively disclose how your app collects, uses, and shares user data, including the types of parties with whom it’s shared. You should consult your legal representative to advise you of what is required.
Ads -- You must declare whether or not your app contains ads. This includes ads delivered through third-party ad SDKs, display ads, native ads, and/or banner ads). Apps that contain ads will have a “Contains ads” label shown on their store listing. This label will be visible to all Play Store users.
App Access -- If your entire app or parts of your app are restricted based on login credentials, memberships, location, or other forms of authentication, you must provide access details.
Target audience and content -- You must declare your app’s target age group. Any apps that include children in their target audience must comply with Google Play’s Families policy requirements. It’s important to provide accurate information about your app. Depending on the target audience selections that you make, your app may be subject to additional Google Play policies.
Permissions declaration form -- You can communicate familiar and locally relevant content ratings to your users and help improve app engagement by targeting the right audience for your content. To prevent your apps from being listed as “Unrated,” sign in to Play Console and fill out the questionnaire for each of your apps as soon as possible. “Unrated” apps may be removed from Google Play.
Release
Whether you’re publishing an app for the first time or making an update, your app’s publishing status helps you understand its availability on Google Play. You can see your latest publishing status under the title and package name when you select the app in Play Console. For certain developer accounts, Google will take more time to thoroughly review their app to help better protect users. This may result in review times of up to seven days or longer in exceptional cases. You’ll receive a notification on your app’s Dashboard about how long this should take.
There are three types of publishing status:
- App status -- Helps you understand your app’s availability on Google Play and who it’s available to (such as testers, all Google Play users, etc.).
- Update status -- Helps you understand the availability of your latest update. An update is a set of one or more changes that you’ve made to your app.
- Item Status -- Helps you understand the availability of a specific part of an update, such as a particular release, a content rating, or a store listing experiment.
Publish a draft app
When you’re ready to publish a draft app, you’ll need to roll out a release. At the end of the process, clicking Release will also publish your app. If you see the heading “Errors summary” at the top of your app release’s review summary page, click Show more to view the details. When available, you can also view the recommended or required resolution. You can’t publish your app until errors have been resolved. If you only have warnings, minor issues, or a combination of the two, then you can still publish your app, but we recommend addressing them before doing so.
Publish an app update
- Standard publishing -- Updates to existing apps are processed and published as soon as possible. By default, your app will use standard publishing. Certain apps may be subject to extended reviews, which may result in review times of up to seven days or longer in exceptional cases. Go to Update or unpublish your app for more information.
- Managed publishing -- Updates to existing apps are processed as usual. After they’ve been approved, you control exactly when the changes are published. Go to Control when app changes are published with managed publishing to learn more.
Once you’re done with submitting your app and finished publishing it, you want to start promoting it since user download action isn’t enough for you to grow, therefore we recommend you to read our article on “How to promote your mobile app for free”.
