Making it easier for you to build safer apps from the start

We understand you want clear Play policy guidance early in your development, so you can focus on building amazing experiences and prevent unexpected delays from disrupting launch plans. That’s why we’re making it easier to have smoother app publishing experiences, from the moment you start coding.

With Play Policy Insights beta in Android Studio, you’ll get richer, in-context guidance on policies that may impact your app through lint warnings. You’ll see policy summaries, dos and don'ts to avoid common pitfalls, and direct links to details.

We hope you caught an early demo at I/O. And now, you can check out Play Policy Insights beta in the Android Studio Narwhal Feature Drop Canary release.

How to use Play Policy Insights beta in Android Studio

Lint warnings will pop up as you code, like when you add a permission. For example, if you add an Android API that uses Photos and requires READ_MEDIA_IMAGES permission, then the Photos & Video Insights lint warning will appear under the respective API call line item in Android Studio.

You can also get these insights by going to Code > Inspect for Play Policy Insights and selecting the project scope to analyze. The scope can be set to the whole project, the current module or file, or a custom scope.

In addition to seeing these insights in Android Studio, you can also generate them as part of your Continuous Integration process by adding the following dependency to your project.

Kotlin

lintChecks("com.google.play.policy.insights:insights-lint:<version>")

Groovy

lintChecks 'com.google.play.policy.insights:insights-lint:<version>'

Share your feedback on Play Policy Insights beta

We’re actively working on this feature and want your feedback to refine it before releasing it in the Stable channel of Android Studio later this year. Try it out, report issues, and stop by the Google Play Developer Help Community to share your questions and thoughts directly with our team.

Join us on June 16 when we answer your questions. We’d love to hear about:

• How will this change your current Android app development and Google Play Store submission workflow?
• Which was more helpful in addressing issues: lint warnings in the IDE or lint warnings from CI build?
• What was most helpful in the policy guidance, and what could be improved?

Developers have told us they like:

• Catching potential Google Play policy issues early, right in their code, so they can build more efficiently.
• Seeing potential Google Play policy issues and guidance all in one-place, reducing the need to dig through policy announcements and issue emails.
• Easily discussing potential issues with their team, now that everyone has shared information.
• Continuously checking for potential policy issues as they add new features, gaining confidence in a smoother launch.

For more, see our Google Play Help Center article or Android Studio preview release notes.

We hope features like this will help give you a better policy experience and more streamlined development.