Luke Jefferson, Google Play Product Manager, and Raz Lev, Google Play Trust & Security Product Manager

Google Play has grown dramatically over the past few years. Android apps and games have become an important part of people’s lives, created by developers around the world who either excel in their fields or add to the entertainment landscape.

To keep Google Play safe and better serve the developer community, we introduced two new security measures: additional identification requirements and two-step authentication. These measures will help improve the security of your account and help us better understand your needs.

Developer identification requirements

At this stage, when you create a New Google Play developer account, we will ask for your email address and phone number.

After this update, we will also ask developer account owners to provide:

  • Your account type: personal account or business/organization account
  • Contact Name
  • Your physical address
  • Verify your email address and phone number

Your contact information allows us to share important information and updates about your app with you, and helps us ensure that each account is created by a real user with real contact information, which helps us ensure that all users can safely use the Play Store.

The information you provide will not be made public and will only be used to confirm your identity and communicate with you.

Two steps to verify

In addition to learning more about our developer community, we will also require Google Play Admin users to use Google two-step login authentication to increase security and keep your account secure. Two-step authentication provides an additional measure of protection for your accounts, applications, and users.

You can visit the documentation to learn more about two-step authentication and how to set up two-step authentication for your account.

Update the plan

From now on, developer account owners can declare their account type and verify contact details. Declaring an account type is currently optional, but must be done if the account owner wants to update their contact details.

Starting in August, all new developer accounts will be required to specify their account type and verify their contact information when registering. We will also require owners of new developer accounts to perform two-step verification.

Later this year, we will require all existing developer account owners to declare their account types and provide and verify the required information. We will also require developers to use two-step login authentication.

Best practices

In addition to the above changes, we also provide you with some best practices to keep your account secure and not miss important information.

  • Make sure your contact information is valid and up to date. From time to time, we will use the details you provide to email or call the account owner to confirm that your account is valid. Please make sure the information is correct.
  • It is recommended that you use a different email address for your contact information than the one you used to create your Google account, especially if your developer account has multiple users or is used by organizations or businesses. For these purposes, you may want to set up a dedicated shared inbox so that relevant people in your team or organization can access these important messages. We recommend that you use your own domain email address (if any).
  • Email contact information for an organization or business account should not be a generic or personal email address. Be sure to use the email address associated with your organization.