Detect app issues early with pre-review checks

Pre-review checks help you catch potential problems with changes you plan to make to your app, before you send them for review. Some of the problems may be critical and must be fixed before you can send your changes for review.

Overview

You can find pre-review checks on the Publishing overview page, in the "Changes not yet sent for review" section. This section is only visible if you have made changes to your app since it was last sent for review.

Pre-review checks automatically start running whenever you make changes to your app. You can view their status on the Publishing overview page, but should note the following:

Some of the checks take longer to run than others, so you may see an estimated time until they finish.
You don’t need to wait for the checks to finish to be able to send your changes for review. You can send changes at any time, and we’ll finish these checks before sending your changes to be reviewed.

Issues will be visible as soon as they are discovered. Click View issues to learn about each issue.

Learn more about our app review process at Google Play Academy.

View an example screen capture of pre-review checks

Managing detected issues

We check for a variety of different issues. We provide information on each issue, along with links to help you fix them or learn more about the relevant subject. You can fix many issues directly in Play Console, while others might require technical changes to your app, which may require you to build and upload a new app version. You might also need to make changes outside of Play Console, to your developer website, for example.

Some issues must be fixed before you can proceed. Others can be deferred by selecting Proceed anyway. To proceed with known issues, you may be asked to disclose why by selecting one or more reasons, for example, "I already have plans to resolve this issue" or "This issue is incorrect." This information will be logged in the Activity log, and we will use your response to help improve the reliability of our checks. Other times, you may be asked to confirm that you have fixed something outside of Play Console before you can proceed.

Your response won't directly affect your app review outcome, but if the issue makes your app non-functional, it might be rejected during review for failing to comply with Google Play's policies relating to app quality (such as the Minimum Functionality policy). Other issues still present during the review, are also likely to result in a rejection during the review.

If you proceed anyway without subsequently fixing detected issues, they may reappear in the future.

View an example screen capture of a detected issue

Required permissions to proceed with issues

Only users with one of the following permissions can proceed with known issues:

These are the same permissions used for other features on the Publishing overview page, including managed publishing, so you shouldn’t need to change your currently assigned user permissions.