Announcing Policy Updates To Support App Quality on Google Play

The Android community expects safe and high-quality experiences, which directly influences the long-term success of your app or game in terms of installs, user rating, and reviews. An app’s design, privacy protections, information quality, and security standards all play an important role. Today, we’re announcing updates to our developer policies to further elevate the quality of apps on Play and continue delivering the best experiences.

Enabling Safe Generative AI Apps

As a reminder, apps that generate content using AI must also continue to comply with all other developer policies. This includes prohibiting and preventing the generation of restricted content, such as content that facilitates the exploitation or abuse of children, and content that enables deceptive behavior. This is a fast-evolving app category and we appreciate your partnership in helping to maintain a safe experience.

Expanding Privacy Protections

To safeguard privacy, some app permissions require an additional review by the Google Play team and have additional guardrails. We’ve found this has been an effective strategy to protect people’s privacy and are expanding these requirements further, including a new policy to reduce the types of apps allowed to request broad photo and video permissions.

Limiting Disruptive Notifications

Today’s policy update also sets stronger boundaries around the use of full screen intent notifications that share high-priority messages and require the user’s immediate attention. There are certain scenarios where people would reasonably expect full screen intent notification, like waking up to their alarm or receiving phone and video calls. To ensure that this permission is limited to these high-priority use cases, we’re introducing new limitations and changing it to a special app access permission.

For apps targeting Android 14 and above, only apps whose core functionality requires a full screen notification will be granted Full Screen Intent permission by default and all others will need to request consent for use of this permission. Limiting notifications in this way helps ensure a better user experience. More information on this policy change can be found here.

Additional Resources

Today’s policy updates play an important role in our efforts to offer the world's most trusted source for apps and games. We appreciate your partnership in delivering safe and high-quality apps to the Android community. For more information:

• Review the latest policy updates and watch our PolicyBytes video
• Register for a policy webinar, available for multiple regions
• Ask questions or share best practices with fellow developers in the Google Play Developer Help Community