Respire

After all the work to upgrade Respire from a hacky personal app to a consumer friendly version, you would think publishing would just be a matter of uploading and hitting "Submit".

Well that may be the case for some apps, but Respire requires access to background location updates. For those not aware, the Play Store recently made some updates to their policies and any app that requires background location must prove without a reasonable doubt that both the app absolutely needs it, and you are explicitly informing your users why you need their location and how it will be used.

The documentation Google provides is pretty thorough, but there is still some ambiguity to exactly what they will be reviewing. They ask that you upload a video that shows the user prompts and the feature requiring background location. I recorded myself going through the onboarding flow on the emulator and a triggered notification of an air quality level change. Then I submitted the app for review. An hour or two later I see an email with the subject "Action Required: Your app is not compliant with Google Play Policies". Uh oh.

I scour through the email and it is mostly a recap of the same policies I had already made myself familiar with when trying to make the app compliant. But there is one item I had missed in my original research. An app requesting background location must have a privacy policy that covers the use of location. After some searching, I found a free online tool Termly that was able to generate the html for a privacy policy based on a series of questions about the app. I then took that html and pasted it into a wordpress page that I set up. Now I had a hosted custom privacy policy for Respire at the cost of $0, perfect!

With my new privacy policy link in hand, I resubmitted my app with a couple tweaks to the onboarding prompts to address the other feedback in the email. This time the review took much longer, somewhere around 4-6 hours and I receive the email that my app has been published to the closed alpha track.

Success!