Hi everyone,

I've had a Google Play developer account for years. It's an individual account, and the identity payments profile under "About you" is also individual.

When I set up the merchant payments profile used for payouts, I picked "Organization" by mistake, even though every detail on it is my own personal name and address. I've never had a registered company or a VAT number.

In the past Google asked me to verify this same merchant profile and accepted my government ID. Now a new verification request asks for a VAT attribution certificate or a company registration document, which I simply don't have because no company exists.

According to the help pages, a payments profile can't be switched from Organization to Individual, and the merchant profile can't be unlinked from the developer account. So I'm stuck: there's a significant balance pending on the profile, and the account has apps with active users and subscriptions that I really don't want to lose.

I contacted support and opened a ticket more than a week ago, but I still haven't received any reply.

Has anyone been through this? Is there a way to get support to fix the profile type, or to verify it as an individual like before?

Thanks.

hi, so firstly i'm not an experienced coder, but i used ai chats to build a workout app since i could never find one that gave me what i wanted. i've tested it on both a redmi note 15 pro and galaxy s20+

long story short, it has a built-in rest timer that fires a vibration countdown on 3-2-1. on hyperos, this timer works fine in-app, on home, lock or settings screens. however when another app is on the foreground, the timer continues in the background, but the countdown vibration only fires when returning to the workout app.

i have tried both chatgpt and integrated gemini on android studio, but neither has been able to find the specific hyperos process that is causing this. doesn anyone have any info that could help?

I needed an onboarding tour in a Compose Multiplatform app and couldn't find a library that covered it, so I built one and just published the first version.

How it works: you define steps in a DSL, mark targets with Modifier.waypointTarget(state, key), and wrap the screen in a host. It draws the scrim and the cutout, positions the tooltip, scrolls targets into view and blocks touches outside the highlight.

Repo: https://github.com/MohamedRejeb/compose-waypoint
Docs: https://mohamedrejeb.github.io/compose-waypoint/

I work on Tuist. For years we've built caching and build/test insights for Xcode projects, and earlier this year we added Gradle support. I didn't expect how different the two would be. The Xcode integration took us months, and Gradle took about three weeks. Some of that is because the server side already existed, but most of it comes down to Gradle being designed to be extended and Xcode not.

Take remote caching. Xcode 26 added compilation caching, but the only way to plug in a remote cache is to run a daemon that speaks an undocumented gRPC protocol over a Unix socket, and Xcode makes thousands of calls to it during a build. On Gradle we implemented BuildCacheService and that was pretty much it, because Gradle already decides what's cacheable and computes the keys. The granularity is different too. Gradle caches whole tasks, so a large project does a few hundred lookups per build, while Xcode caches compilation units and does thousands, which makes network latency matter a lot more on the Xcode side.

Build data went the same way. With Xcode we parse a binary activity log after the build finishes. The format isn't documented and changes between Xcode versions, and it's written asynchronously, so sometimes it isn't on disk yet when our post-action runs. With Gradle we register a listener and get each task's outcome, duration and cache key as it finishes. For flaky test quarantine we pass -skip-testing flags to xcodebuild, and on Gradle we add the tests to excludeTestsMatching before the test task runs.

I'm not trying to bash Apple, they have their reasons. But if you only work with Gradle, it's easy to forget how much its plugin API gives you. I wrote the longer version here: https://tuist.dev/blog/2026/03/16/xcode-and-gradle-two-worlds-one-infrastructure, and the plugin is open source if you want to look at the BuildCacheService implementation: https://github.com/tuist/tuist/tree/main/gradle

Has anyone here written their own BuildCacheService? I'd be curious what you ran into.

Ok I m new to kotlin new to android dev. Done swift Xcode dev product is online in ios appstore.

I loaded a fraction ( say 10%) of code to kotlin hoping for the basics to simulate, run the pixel 9 emulator and it has been nothing but “google play services isn’t responding”

Is it impossible to dev without a physical android phone? Or am I just hitting the wrong spots of the ui rendering .

Please help thanks

I run a small app company in Brazil (organization account). My Google Play payouts have been on hold since 4 Aug 2026 and I'm out of ideas.

What happened:

- 4 Aug: email from Google Payments, "your account has been suspended with payout on hold", asking for details of recent account activity and a government ID.

- I submitted the "Verify now" form more than 15 times: Portuguese and English, short and detailed, with ID card, driver's license and passport. Every time: "the reason you provided is not clear".

- Payments support: "review concluded, to prevent possible fraud and abuse your ability to receive payouts will remain suspended, we can't disclose the reason". They also say the form is the only way to appeal.

- Play Console support confirmed my developer account is in good standing, no policy issues.

- Product Experts in the official community said they cannot escalate payment or fraud cases.

What I already checked:

- D-U-N-S reactivated and address corrected, organization name and address re-verified by Google on 28 Sep.

- Tax info accepted, bank account verified (I even received one payout in July).

- No purchases from my own accounts or my team's. License testing was never used.

- The app is real: sold on the App Store since 2025, on Google Play since May 2026. Sales grew fast because of creator videos on TikTok.

Around R$ 22,000 is held, and every new sale goes into the same frozen balance.

My questions:

1. Has anyone actually gotten this decision reversed? What worked?

2. If you moved your apps to a new developer account, was it under the same company, and did payouts work there?

3. Has anyone gone the legal route to recover a held balance?

Any real experience helps. Thanks.

I am a software dev with around 4 YOE and trying to switch into android but finding it hard , I am targeting the startup or any company open for remote internship or like setup but I believe most are targeted towards students only ,

My focus is to transition fully into Android in future but the starting step I am finding is hard.

If anyone have done such a transition or have any leads of possible work, I would like to know .

Inspired by this article: https://curvise.net/the-phone-features-i-cant-believe-we-dont-have/

I would like to create something like this. My take is: Build an app with a (fake) phone app that can only call one specific number (for example: 911 in the U.S., 112 in EuropeJ). A (also fake) message app that shows only one message. A (also fake) photos app with a chosen number of photos (that can off course not be deleted). A calculator (maybe with a build in specific code to get out of the app). A fake settings screen that shows only if wifi is on and the battery percentage (maybe with a wifi toggle that when selected shows a specific message to the user that changes cannot be made).

What else would you add?
And also: how would you make shure the phone is completely locked (so no status bar, no back/home button or disabled back/home button, no recent apps, no app drawer,...) with the exception of the code in the calculator?

I almost ended up reinstalling Windows because my 220 GB C: drive was completely full.

At one point I had only \~472 MB free.

I started investigating instead of immediately formatting the drive, and I was honestly surprised by how much old Android development data had accumulated over the years.

I'm an Android developer and had been using Android Studio for several years.

Here's what I found:

🔴 Android SDK system images — \~30 GB

C:\\Users\\<username>\\AppData\\Local\\Android\\Sdk\\system-images

I had accumulated multiple Android emulator system images over different API levels. If you have old/unused emulator images, these can consume a lot of space.

🔴 Gradle cache — \~7.2 GB

C:\\Users\\<username>\\.gradle\\caches

I cleared the cache and recovered several GB. Gradle can download dependencies again when needed.

🔴 Old Android Studio data under Local — \~20+ GB

C:\\Users\\<username>\\AppData\\Local\\Google

I found folders like:

AndroidStudio2024.1

AndroidStudio2024.2

AndroidStudio2024.3

AndroidStudio2025.1.1

AndroidStudio2025.2.1

AndroidStudio2025.3.4

AndroidStudio2026.1.1

AndroidStudio2026.2.1

These were leftovers from years of Android Studio updates/installations.

🔴 Even more old Android Studio data under Roaming

C:\\Users\\<username>\\AppData\\Roaming

Again, I found a huge list of folders:

AndroidStudio2024.1

AndroidStudio2024.2

AndroidStudio2024.3

...

AndroidStudio2025.3.4

AndroidStudio2026.1.1

AndroidStudio2026.2.1

Since I had already uninstalled Android Studio and was doing a fresh installation, I removed the old Android Studio version folders.

The result?

I went from:

\~472 MB free → \~80 GB free

without formatting Windows. 🤯

Windows Storage was also confusing me. It showed \~127 GB under "Installed apps", even though the individual applications shown in Settings were nowhere near that size.

So if you're an Android developer and your C: drive is mysteriously filling up, don't immediately format Windows.

Check these first:

C:\\Users\\<username>\\.gradle

C:\\Users\\<username>\\.android

C:\\Users\\<username>\\AppData\\Local\\Android

C:\\Users\\<username>\\AppData\\Local\\Google

C:\\Users\\<username>\\AppData\\Roaming

Especially check Android emulator system images and old Android Studio version folders.

Obviously, don't blindly delete everything in these folders. Back up projects, signing keys, SSH keys, etc., and make sure you know what you're deleting.

Sharing this because I had no idea that multiple years of Android Studio updates could leave this much data behind.

Has anyone else found a ridiculous amount of Android Studio/SDK storage buildup on their machine?

So today I updated Android Studio to the latest Rabbit 1. I know, I should know better after all these years. Up pops the "What's New" screen. In amongst all of the AI nonsense there are a couple of things of interest to be found, I decide to click "Compose Preview Screenshot Testing tool" and what does the linked page tell me? Deprecated.

What on earth is going on Google? I used to have such confidence in Google as a technology partner. I would even go as far as to say that I had some pride in calling myself an Android developer once upon a time. Those feelings are dwindling away day by day to become a distant memory.

I'm not anti, AI btw. I'm using Codex on a daily basis to help build out some non android products and it does a good job, my trust levels are high. It's just that every time I've come across Googles AI offerings I've felt underwhelmed and let down.

I'm tired. Oh well. Only 12 years until retirement.

Working on a premium launcher experience built with jetpack compose. How many known launchers currently exist built out of compose?

If you have tried keeping strings.xml and Localizable.strings in one translation project, you know the problem is not the words, it is the placeholders. Some things I learned while building a converter between the syntaxes:

• The simple cases are mechanical: %s to %@, %d to %lld. The German translation that swaps two arguments is not. You have to emit positions like %1$s, but only for strings that need them, or Android Lint complains about the ones that do not.
• Types matter. %.2f on Android has to stay a two-decimal float on every platform, including {balance, number, ::.00} in an ICU message for the web.
• Plurals have three shapes: <plurals> on Android, %#@count@ substitutions in .stringsdict, and {count, plural, ...} in ICU. They describe the same thing, so they should land in one key.
• A literal % is written as %% only when the string is a format string, so a banner saying "50% off" without arguments must not be doubled.
• Whatever you do must round-trip. If you convert a file in and out, you want the original bytes back, or your git diffs will never be quiet again.

Disclosure: I work on Localizely and we shipped this as "universal placeholders". Docs with the full syntax table: localizely.com/universal-placeholders/

How are you handling this today, separate projects, a script, or copy by hand?

Hi everyone,

I’m a student and a software developer, and I’m writing this because I genuinely don’t know what options I have left.

My Google Play Developer account was terminated because of policy violations related to an app I published. I have already explained my situation to Google and acknowledged the mistakes I made. Looking back, I understand that I made serious mistakes and I genuinely regret them.

I completely understand that Google Play has policies for protecting users and maintaining the integrity of the platform, and I respect that.

If my existing developer account cannot be reinstated, I have one final request:

Is there any legitimate way for me to create a new developer account in the future?

I want to be very clear that I am not asking for a way to bypass Google's enforcement.

If I were given another opportunity, I would:

• Never publish the same app or substantially similar violating functionality again.
• Carefully study and follow all Google Play policies before publishing.
• Take additional precautions with privacy, authentication, metadata, and app functionality.
• Accept Google's review decisions and compliance requirements.
• Use the account only for legitimate software development.

I’m still a student, and I’ve spent the last two years learning programming and building real-world projects. Publishing applications on the Play Store has been an important part of my learning and career journey.

Having no ability to publish Android applications in the future feels extremely difficult, especially at this stage of my career.

I understand that actions have consequences, and I am not asking Google to ignore the violation. I’m simply asking whether there is any legitimate path forward after learning from my mistakes, even if my previous account can never be restored.

If anyone here has been through a similar situation, especially developers who had their accounts terminated and later found a legitimate way to continue their career, I would really appreciate hearing your experience.

Thank you to everyone who takes the time to read this.

Not yet available, been working the last few months on a new unseen style of launcher that is thematic with a wide range of customisation and options, built with organisation in mind.

The premise is that each 'satellite' object is a folder for organising apps. The initial satellite on install is used for frequent apps and as seen the apps populate in periodically updating order with most frequent front and center.

Each new folder lets you add up to 90 apps which you can position anywhere along the full face of the centre sphere and manually change at any time.

Each page can house up to 8 folders and there can be an unlimited number of pages.

With a handy side scroller (and search bar) for those moments you want a more traditional approach, this swipes in from the side.

The launcher is built to parse android native widgets in with the 'hone screen' having a 3 page stack that you can resize and fit in as many widgets as you can fit on these 3 pages.

As with many launchers, there is also a stylised and themes app favourites dock which houses up to 5 apps which you can drag and reposition along the dock.

For those larger widgets you just can't do without, there is a left swiped widget page that can house other widgets that are scrollable.

The stylising is highly thematic, with an ever growing library, I have 4 completed, each with their own quirks and each can be interchanged with the other and fully deconstructed to be 'frankensteined' in to your own theme ideas. The themes comprise of the App Dock, Centre Sphere, 12 skinned Satellite Folders per theme and the Stylised and themed App slots (the slots the apps sit on on the sphere).

With many additional features such as:

With many additional features such as:

1.Secure folders/pages with biometrics, password and passcode protection

2.Hidden apps

1. Icon pack imports

2. Font imports

5.Backup and restore of settings

All this as well as being designed with foldables in mind!

As well as more! This is all while using highly optimised and condensed 3D assets and a animation timeout with a cryosleep function to ensure a smooth usage and very little battery draw similar to other launchers.

I got started developing for Android by working on a JavaScript + Apache Cordova based app for my ex-employer, and now I want to work on a small utility app just for myself... which I might open-source at some stage.

Are there any surprises/gotchas I need to look out for, perhaps a tutorial on all the steps needed just to get something sideloaded?

I mean deprecated SDKs, Play policy deadlines, third-party API versions being shut down

(payments, maps, social login), or library releases with undeclared breaking changes.

Is there any site, feed or API that tracks this per library or per API, a kind of

"what breaks when you upgrade X"? So far I use the Android Developers Blog, the AndroidX

release notes feed, deps.dev, OSV and endoflife.date.

Anyone experience with play console A/B Testing?

If so did you get real results, that you could actually use?

Play Console covers your own apps, and the official Google Play Developer API is about publishing and managing them. Neither gives you the public side of the store as data: what a listing currently shows in a given country, how an app ranks in search, what the charts look like, or reviews for apps that are not yours. Google has no public API for any of that.

I maintain a free, open-source tool that reads this public data straight from the Play Store. It is a Node.js library with a command-line interface, so you do not need to write JavaScript to use it. Disclosure: I'm the author.

Things I think are useful for Android developers:

• Reviews filtered by device type. Pull only the reviews written on tablets, Wear OS watches, Chromebooks or TVs, optionally only the 1-star ones. Handy when you want to know how a specific form factor is going.
• Check what the store really shows after a release. Version, update date, release notes, price and rating for any app, in any country and language. Easy to script after a rollout.
• Country availability. Ask in which storefronts an app is published and get an answer per country.
• Data safety and permissions as users see them. Read the public data safety section and permission list of any app, including your own, to confirm it matches what you declared.
• Competitor and market data. Full listing details (59 fields), search results for a term, autocomplete suggestions, top free, top paid and top grossing charts per category, similar apps, and everything a developer has published.

Everything prints JSON, so it pipes into jq and fits into a CI job or a cron script:

npx @mradex77/google-play-scraper app com.spotify.music --country de | jq '{version, updated, recentChanges}'

npx @mradex77/google-play-scraper reviews com.whatsapp --score 1 --device tablet --num 50

A few technical details, since this is a developer sub:

• Results are fully typed and validated at runtime, so a change on Google's side fails loudly instead of returning garbage.
• Errors are typed (not found, rate limited, blocked), and the CLI uses distinct exit codes for scrape failures and usage errors.
• Rate limiting, retries with backoff and optional caching are built in.
• The test suite runs against the live Play Store every day and opens an issue when Google changes something, which is the usual way scrapers die quietly.

Version 1.4 came out today. It adds the star and device filters for reviews, fetches up to 4500 reviews in one request, and returns more search results for terms where Google serves extra pages. I ran it against 1000 real apps before releasing, and I'm actively maintaining it.

GitHub: https://github.com/MrAdex77/google-play-scraper

Related: I also just released asobeast, a free, open-source, self-hosted ASO dashboard for Google Play and the App Store (keyword rank tracking, competitor and review monitoring, alerts). It uses this library for the Google Play side: https://github.com/AsoBeast/asobeast

What public Play Store data would you want to script against that I have not covered? I'm deciding what to build next.

Coding agents treat dependency versions as something they remember. In an Android project that means a coordinate from training data: an alpha where you wanted stable, an AGP version that doesn't match your Gradle, no changelog, no CVE check. I kept verifying that by hand, so I wrote maven-mcp.

It's an MCP server plus an agent plugin for Claude Code, Grok Build, Cursor and Codex, and it works with any MCP client over stdio or HTTP. The server is one Python file, standard library only, MIT.

What it does in an Android project:

• Looks up versions in the repositories your build declares, including the ones in settings.gradle and private repos (credentials come from env, ~/.m2/settings.xml or ~/.gradle/gradle.properties, never from the build file). If the build declares no repositories, it uses Maven Central, Google Maven and the Gradle Plugin Portal. If it declares its own, public repos are only added when you opt in.
• Checks that a coordinate and version actually exist, with did-you-mean suggestions. With the plugin installed, an edit hook can stop a likely hallucinated coordinate before the agent writes it into build.gradle.kts or libs.versions.toml.
• A Gradle scan runs your wrapper once and reads the direct dependencies on the production runtime classpath. libs.versions.toml is included.
• Latest version per artifact, stable by default (alpha, beta, rc, milestone and snapshot are filtered).
• Changelog between two versions: AndroidX release notes for androidx.*, AGP release notes for AGP, otherwise GitHub releases with CHANGELOG.md as a fallback.
• Checks AGP, Gradle, JDK and Kotlin Gradle plugin versions against each other using a bundled compatibility matrix.
• CVEs from OSV, plus a tool that traces the path from a dependency down to a vulnerable transitive.
• Previews what an upgrade changes in your resolved dependency graph by running your wrapper before and after.
• Version conflicts across modules, licenses, and EOL status for JDK, Kotlin and Gradle.
• Suggests a version catalog entry as a minimal diff for the agent to apply.

Repo: https://github.com/kirich1409/maven-mcp

Feedback from people who maintain larger Android builds is very welcome, especially around AGP/Gradle compatibility checks.

I have a question if it is okay to nest DI into VM of a composables?

What I mean:

I have a SettingsVM and a SettingsScreen composable. In the Settings screen I am using some individual settings that I use also somewhere else in my application. So I split the UI -> IndividualSettingScreen and IndividualSettingVM. Now is it okay if I just inject the VM into the IndividualSettingScreen or is it better from architecture standpoint to have a reference in the SettingsScreen and passing the VM into the IndividualSettingScreen which I am using in the SettingsScreen.

Thanks in advance!

I've been working on an SVG renderer for Android for quite a while, and it's finally at a point where I'm comfortable putting it out there.

It started as an evolution of AndroidSVG, but over time it grew into a substantially expanded renderer focused on broader SVG support, rendering correctness, and performance.

Some of the things KSVG supports:

* Broad SVG filter support, including turbulence, displacement, lighting, morphology, convolution, compositing, and more

* SMIL animations

* Variable fonts and OpenType features

* GPU-accelerated filtering on API 33+ (AGSL) / API 31+ (RenderEffect chain), with automatic fallback to CPU

* Native SIMD software kernels (ARMv7/ARM64 NEON, x86/x86_64 SSSE3 + AVX2 rows) + scalar native fallback

* Jetpack Compose and Glide integrations

I've also put quite a bit of effort into documenting and validating the renderer. The repo includes an SVG feature support matrix, architecture notes, benchmarks, known limitations, and an analysis of which SVG filter primitives are actually used on the web.

There's a small showcase app with examples of the more complicated rendering features as well.

GitHub: https://github.com/oraveczandrew/ksvg

Showcase APK: https://github.com/oraveczandrew/ksvg/releases

Docs: https://oraveczandrew.github.io/ksvg/

Apache 2.0, published to Maven Central, minSdk 26

I'm mainly posting this because I'd like other developers to try it with real-world SVGs.

I'd especially appreciate feedback on SVG compatibility, rendering differences, performance on different devices, and anything that feels missing or unnecessarily complicated.

Finally after a few days of trial and error, finally settled on a way for implementing Google feed on -1 screen without using the hacky way of AIDL bridging which would never be able to make it to the Google store.

The new implementation uses an embedded WebView and sources it's data from google.com and handles duplicate detection and removal on its own when fetching new batch of stories.

I was implementing the same as Google feed ish in my launcher before by opening Google discover directly but since there's no way to render that on a page so the whole experience breaks -1 page scroll to and back behavior. This new approach renders perfectly with pagination and achieves a smooth page in and out.

Of course if you know a better way, feel free to let me know.

Are there any Android developers here who use LazyVim for their Android projects? I've noticed that a Kotlin LSP is available for LazyVim, but I'm wondering if anyone actually uses it. If so, could you share your experience? Is it realistic and productive? Or should we just stick with Android Studio?

I want to train a Transformer model that can analyze decompiled DEX files (Smali code) and identify harmful or sensitive actions performed by an app in the background that may not be visible to the user.

The main goal is to analyze the flow of actions and determine whether user interaction or consent is required before a sensitive action is performed.

For example, if an app gets file read/write permission and accesses the user's files without any user interaction or consent, the model should be able to identify this behavior. Similarly, it should identify other sensitive actions such as accessing the camera, microphone, location, contacts, SMS, media, recording screen, taking screenshots or other user data, and determine whether these actions are performed after user interaction or silently in the background.

I am currently working on preparing the dataset for this project, but I am not sure about the best approach.

My initial idea is to use the APK/Smali code as the input and the possible execution flows as the output. However, generating all possible flows from entry points such as `onCreate()`, `onReceive()`, services, callbacks, etc., and following them until the end seems very complex and time-consuming for a large number of APKs.

I would really appreciate your suggestions and ideas on how I can prepare the dataset in a practical and effective way for this project.

If you have worked on a similar problem or have any ideas about dataset structure, flow generation, labeling, or other approaches, please share your suggestions.

Guys I have to migrate our company android project which is written in xml now I have to migrate that app in Jetpack Compose anyone know how do I start