Google Play Release Blocker Lint - target API 36, Billing 8, 16 KB

It reads your Gradle files, version catalogs, Android manifests and Expo app.json, and flags the exact lines that make Google Play refuse a release: a targetSdk below API 36, a Play Billing Library below 8, native libraries that cannot align to 16 KB pages, and permissions that need an approved Play declaration. Each finding carries the date that gate closed and the line to write instead.

Indie Android developers and small studios who ship Kotlin, Flutter, React Native or Expo apps to Google Play and do not have a release engineer. If you own the upload button and find out about a policy deadline when the Play Console rejects your bundle, this is written for you.

Android Lint and the Gradle warnings check API compatibility, not Google Play's publishing calendar, so they stay silent on a Billing Library 7 dependency. Play Console does know, but it only tells you after you have built and uploaded the bundle. A chatbot confuses API 35, the availability floor, with API 36, the publishing gate, and quotes last year's date.

Checking the file you have open is free and complete: all 31 rules, every line, every date, every suggested fix, with no watermark, no time limit and no locked results. The licence adds a different kind of work: scanning every module in the repo at once, failing your CI, re-checking on save, and exporting a dated report you can hand to a client.

Upwork publishes a $25 per hour median for Android developers, with a typical range of $15 to $35, and benchmarks for experienced freelance Android work run far above that. One rejected upload costs a rebuild, a re-upload and another review wait, which is more than an hour before anyone has fixed anything.