I want to protect the privacy of my users as much as possible and I don't need Firebase Analytics to get insights, so I'm thinking of removing it. It'd be a problem tho if it's a secret ranking factor in the Play Store. I already know that AdWord conversions won't work without it.
Does anyone of you know? And if you don't know, what are your thoughts?
It is most certainly not a ranking factor. Google does not use third party GA/FB data for ranking in Play Store or in Google Search Results, or on YouTube. It's way too easy to inflate. By third parties, too.
No, your analytics data is generally presumed unusable by anyone but you. Another reason for it is that it's not normalized across the clients, despite the looks. You may double- or quadruple-track your screenviews, now know about it and still make perfect use of your data. Or you may explicitly encryp data flowing to GA, so that nobody would ever be able to make sense of it, and then ETL that data to your data lake, decrypting it in the process.
There are too many things you can do with your data for it to become unusable or even dangerous to use on the global scope.
That said, Play Store still has its internal tracking (which you can access). It's not as detailed and not meant to be very detailed, but it contains real signals on your app impressions, downloads, installs and uninstalls. It lacks attribution or other things like that, but now that data is normalized and perfectly suitable to be used for ranking.
Although, to my knowledge, the most powerful ranking factor on app store, given that there are no distinct problems with the app info, would be the reviews in comparison to other apps that share particular search results.
