False positive for AdMob detection by GooglePlay

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In Google Play Console, under AppContent, we found a warning under Ads section stating:

We found ad SDKs in your app

Although we still can publish our app for now, this warning is bothering us.

It does not allow us to declare No, my app does not contain ads. The save button is greyed out.

The problem is, we did not integrate AdMob in our app! So what could trigger this false positive?

I have ran gradlew -q app:dependencies and extracted out our productionRelease section. A copy of the full dependency list can be found here: http://axzae.com/dependency.txt

The only "ads" related dependency we found is:

com.google.android.gms:play-services-ads-identifier:{strictly 17.0.0} -> 17.0.0 (c)

But we are just using adid as a unique identifier for identifying user. Could this be the false positive reason?

Any helps would be appreciated. Thanks.

google-play-console admob google-play
1 Answers

If you or one of the libraries in your app are using Identifier for Advertisers (IDFA), Google play will tell you We found ad SDKs in your app

But if you are not showing ads do not worry about it, in this case it is indeed a false positive and Google know that and tell you to leave it as is (see the image below)

enter image description here

It is just for Google Play to check if you lied about the ads in your app, so they can later remove your app.

I found that some analytics SDKs uses this technique to identify unique users more efficiently.

for example OneSignal SDK uses this.

user_169302390
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