Publish a private app

Apps published through the Google Play Custom App Publishing API can never be made public. They're subject to a lighter weight verification process than public apps as a result, reducing publishing time to as little as five minutes (compared to over two hours via the Play Console).

To publish a private app for an enterprise, call Accounts.customApps.create, passing the enterprise's developer account ID as a parameter. The only required fields in the request body are the title of the app and the app's default listing language. Make sure that any private app you publish also meets the following requirements:

• The package name is unique to Google Play (not just unique to the developer account).
• The title of the app is unique to the developer account.

Example

Path apkPath = Paths.get("PATH_TO_APK");
ByteArrayContent apk =
    new ByteArrayContent("application/octet-stream", Files.readAllBytes(apkPath));

CustomApp appMetadata =
    new CustomApp()
      .setTitle("APPLICATION TITLE")
      .setLanguageCode("en_US")
      .setOrganizations(
          List.of(
              new CustomAppOrganization()
                  .setOrganizationId("C0123wxyz")
                  .setOrganizationName("My organization")));

CustomApps.Create request =
    apiClient.accounts() // Playcustomapp apiClient
      .customApps()
      .create(DEV_ACCOUNT_ID, appMetadata, apk);

CustomApp response = request.execute();
System.out.println(response);

If successful, the app will appear in the developer account's list of published apps in the Play Console immediately. The app will be available for distribution to end users within five minutes.

By default, the published private app is only available to the organization linked to the developer account. To set the organizations to which the private app should be made available, add the organization IDs to the organizations property.

Distributing private apps

Note: You must be a member of the Android EMM Developer Community to use the Google Play EMM API to enable private app distribution. For more information, see the EMM developer's overview.

Private apps are automatically approved when published, but aren't automatically available to a user unless an enterprise IT admin explicitly grants them access to all approved apps. You can enable this feature in your EMM Console using Users.setAvailableProductSet (set productSetBehavior to "allApproved").

You can also use the same call to enable IT admins to allowlist specific apps for a user (set productSetBehavior to "whitelist"). For more information about how to add apps to a user's managed Google Play store, see Create custom store layouts.

Updating a private app

To provide the best possible user experience for your enterprise customers, we recommend integrating private app publishing alongside the app and store listing update features available through the Google Play Publishing API. Doing so gives IT admins the ability to publish, edit, and update private apps directly from your EMM console or IDE. You can use the same service account that you created for private app publishing to authorize Google Play Publishing API requests.

You or your enterprise customer can also update private apps and their store listing details from the Play Console (for more information, see the Play Console help center).

Start coding with our client libraries

Client libraries for the Google Play Custom App Publishing API are available in Java, Python, .NET, and Ruby.

Learn more about Android Enterprise

• For more information about developing an EMM solution for Android, see Android Enterprise.
• For information about best practices for developing Android apps for enterprise distribution, see Android for enterprise.