Right, they had a deadline for apps that required them to update the target SDKs or the apps would be removed from the Store.

Mine was mid-last year. It was a huge pain, since my apps are really a PWA with a wrapper around it and is updated through the web. This means that I hadn't update the apps in the app store in a few years, as it wasn't necessary.

And of course, the wrapper I was using (cordova) didn't support some things from the new SDK, so I had to upgrade to a new major version. Anyway, it was a huge pain to upgrade all that for no functional changes for the end user, for the 10-ish open source apps I built and maintain.

Slightly off-topic, but Android does now support a much better method for submitting PWAs[1] that I'll move to the next time Android requires me to update the target SDK of every app. Hopefully, they'll continue supporting that and it won't require new submissions after that.

[1] https://developers.google.com/codelabs/pwa-in-play#0

This is the most likely reason for that app to get a warning like that. They have made a lot of changes to their 3rd party app security model that would require apps to be updated, even if they were well-behaved under the old model. It's unfortunate that could not have been done with forward compatibility.

Agree that this is the reason.

I have an app in the Play store and starting in June I have to get a D-U-N-S number, have a phone & email for users to contact me, a phone & email for Google to contact me and documents to verify my identity and my business.

Since there are also Google apps on the store, does it means that we will finally have a phone and an email to contact Google ? :-)

Rules for thee, etc.

The exact reason I am planning to dump Android entirely. Every new Android version is worse than the previous and enforces new compliance measures. Exceptionally developer-unfriendly and increasingly reliant on centralised cloud APIs for features as basic as push notifications.

Another topic is how aggressively anti-freedom Android has gotten with the standard practice of root detection. It feels like more tech overall is becoming a walled garden as of late.

Suddenly, they started doing this? I don't rely on Google Play in any capacity, but it is terrifying. Anyone not determined enough to sideload a third party app store or apps in general will find themselves unable to use a substantial amount of projects that relied on outdated SDK or just couldn't keep the pace, even if the code is out there and can be audited.