Posted by Luke Jefferson, Product Manager at Google Play & Raz Lev, Product Manager at Google Play Trust and Safety
Over the past few years, Google Play has seen tremendous growth. Android apps and games have become a critical part of people’s lives, built by developers of all sizes from all over the world, whether professionally or just for fun.
To keep Google Play safe and secure and to better serve our developer community, we are introducing two new security measures: additional identification requirements and 2-Step Verification. These measures will help strengthen your account security and will help us better understand your needs.
Developer identification requirements
Today, when you create a new Google Play developer account, we ask you for an email address and a phone number.
With this update, account owners of developer accounts will also be asked to provide:
- Your account type — whether it’s personal or belongs to an organization
- A contact name
- Your physical address
- Verification of your email address and phone number
Your contact information allows us to share important information and updates about your app. It also helps us make sure that every account is created by a real person with real contact details, which helps us keep the Play Store safe for all users.
This information will not be public-facing and is just to help us confirm your identity and communicate.
2-Step Verification
In addition to learning more about our developer community, we’re also taking steps to improve security and keep your accounts safer by mandating that users of Google Play Console sign in using Google’s 2-Step Verification. 2-Step Verification is an additional safeguard to help protect your account, your app, and your users.
Learn more about 2-Step Verification and how to set it up for your own account.
Timelines
Starting today, developer account owners will be able to declare their account type and verify their contact details. For now, declaring an account type is optional, but it will be required for any account owners who want to update their contact details.
In August, all new developer accounts will need to specify their account type and verify their contact information at sign-up. We will also make 2-Step Verification a requirement for the owners of new developer accounts.
Later this year, all existing developer account owners will be required to declare their account type, provide the required information, and verify their contact details. We will also require developers to sign in using 2-Step Verification.
Best practices
In addition to these changes, we’d like to remind you of some best practices to help keep your account in good health and make sure you don’t miss important information.
- Keep your contact information active and up to date. We may occasionally check if your account is active by emailing or calling the account owner using the details provided, so it is important that they are accurate.
- Consider using a contact email address different to the one that you use to create your Google account, especially if your developer account will have multiple users or is for an organization or business. You might want to consider setting up a dedicated shared inbox for this purpose, so that the right set of people within your team or organization can access these important messages. We encourage you to use an email address from your own domain if you have one.
- The contact email address for an organization or business account should not be a generic or personal email address. Make sure to use an email address associated with your organization.
