I’m encountering a new issue with my team. We recently attempted to publish an update for our application, but it was rejected for not complying with the FOREGROUND_SERVICES usage policy. It seems we had omitted the necessary usage details for this permission in our Play Store listing. After adding the required information and resubmitting, the update was accepted, and it’s currently at a 5% rollout.

However, we’ve now received a notification from the Google policy team indicating that the versions on our testing tracks were not compliant and needed to be deactivated. The notification also flagged both the newly accepted version and the previous version (let’s call them versions X and Y) as non-compliant.

We have since deactivated the testing tracks, which resolved part of the issue. However, we’re puzzled as to why the accepted update was flagged as non-compliant; if that were the case, shouldn’t it have been rejected again? Additionally, the policy status page no longer shows the errors that were originally flagged when we first updated.
They are telling us the following:

email_from_policy_team

It’s quite confusing when after a rejection, the apk got accepted, but also receive a message saying that it was flagged as not compliant.

We tried to receive explanation of why we received a non compliant message even if it was accepted. Moreover, we explained that the APK with version code Y will be overridden by X, which is the one that has the policy update.

We received the same message with different wording:

For deactivating the non-compliant VCs Y & X in the production track, please implement the policy fix in the new release with the upgraded APK version, and release this version to 100% of your users (full rollout) to completely deactivate the non-compliant version before submitting the app for our review.

So, basically our question is: how can we deal with this? On the other hand, let’s say that we produce a new version from Y with the updated policy, and roll out to 100%. this will override the release from X, and the 5% that got the update will see inconsistencies with the app.

Any insights or advice would be greatly appreciated!