Month: October 2018

I’ve received a Google Play Support email telling me that one of my apps has been removed from Google Play.

This happened because my app is using the Android Advertising ID.

The Android Advertising ID is a user-specific, unique, resettable ID for advertising, provided by Google Play services. It gives users better control and provides developers with a simple, standard system to continue to monetize your apps. It is an anonymous identifier for advertising purposes and enables users to reset their identifier or opt out of interest-based ads within Google Play apps.

Irresponsible me didn’t pay attention at the Google terms which state that all apps that use the Android Advertising ID, must provide a valid privacy policy in both the designated field in the Play Console, and from within the app.

If you just received this message for one of your apps, DON’T PANIC, I solved this problem very easily for my apps and here’s how I did it.

1. Get a valid Privacy Policy

Of course you can contact your legal expert to create a valid Privacy Policy specifically for your app but you may also use a generic generated Privacy Policy if it suits your needs.

I used this simple web app, Privacy Policy Generator. It allows you to set a few settings accordingly to the information of your app and the features and services it uses and it generates a Privacy Policy right away which you can download in text, HTML or markdown.

2. Made your Privacy Policy accessible

Now you have to make sure that your new Privacy Policy is accessible to everyone, there are a few options to do this:

• Your own website. If you already have a website I’ll recommend this option, just create a new page where you can host the HTML file or the text and you’re all set.
• GitHub Pages. Use the simple platform offered by GitHub to host your Privacy Policy.
• Any blog platform. Use any blog platform you prefer, there are some that are free where you can host your Privacy Policy and make it accessible.

Regardless of the method you prefer, once you have the public URL of your Privacy Policy you are ready to continue.

3. Set the URL in your Google Play Console

Go to your Google Play Console, select your unpublished application and go to Store presence > Store listing in the sidebar. Scroll to the bottom and there you should find the designated field to specify the Privacy Policy of your app. Set the public URL of your newly created Privacy Policy.

4. Integrate your Privacy Policy within your app

Now you need to make your Privacy Policy accessible from within your app, there are a few options to do this:

• Integrate your Privacy Policy information into your app and make it accessible through a designated view integrated into your app’s navigation.
• Load your accessible Privacy Policy within your app.
• Add a link which opens your Privacy Policy in the device browser.

5. Publish your new .apk

Finally, package and ship your new apk and after a few days, your app should be published again.

There are many examples of .gitignore files for Android Studio projects, some of them have .idea files in them and others don’t. Let’s figure this out.

What’s the .idea folder?

When using IntelliJ IDE (or another IntelliJ based IDE like Android Studio), the .idea directory contains a set of configuration data. Project settings are stored with each specific project as a set of xml files.

It contains many files and configuration values, it includes assets information, caches, code styles, dictionaries, project type information, workspace settings among many other data.

For more information take a look at this article: Deep dive into .idea folder in Android Studio.

Should the .idea folder be kept under version control?

This is the debate area, this official article states that all files under the .idea directory in the project root except the workspace.xml, usage.statistics.xml and tasks.xml files which store user specific settings should be under version control.

This may be helpful if you are working in a team that needs to be synchronized in terms of IDE configuration or want to share project configuration contained in these files, however, I personally do not like to make my repos IDE-dependent so I prefer not to include the .idea folder in my repos and ignore it from my initial commit, instead I use maven or gradle files to make configuration and dependencies available to everyone.

How to remove the .idea folder from your repo?

So if you have already committed your .idea folder to your repo you can remove it pretty easily.

1. Add the .idea folder to your .gitignore file in your master branch (You can do this by adding .idea to a new line in your .gitignore file) and commit the change.

   git commit -m "Add .idea folder to .gitignore"

2. In your current branch, check this file out from master to get the updated file. Skip this step if you’re working in your master branch.

   git checkout master -- .gitignore

3. Remove the .idea folder from the git tree.

   git rm --cached -r .idea

4. Commit this change.

   git commit -m "Remove .idea folder from repo"

Your project is now free from the IDE chains.