Are not-standalone (companion) Wear OS apps still allowed for submission on the Play Store, or are they always rejected?

Question

Our Wear OS application, which is not a standalone application (it is a companion app of our smartphone app, it cannot be used without the smartphone app) keeps getting rejected by Google Play Policy team for the following reason : "Your application requires phone interaction for the watch version to function." even if we have clearly explained in our Play Store description that it is not a standalone application and cannot work when the smartphone app is not available.

Our application was previously accepted and published on the Play Store but we suspect a Google policy change even if we haven't found it clearly anywhere (we have only found recommendations which encourage standalone apps).

=> Are not-standalone Wear OS apps still allowed for Play Store submission or must our Wear OS app include at least a standalone feature ?

Thanks in advance for your help.

Answer 1

TLDR for those who don't want to read the whole message: I had to set the following flag in the watch app's manifest to get my watch app approved:

   <meta-data
            android:name="com.google.android.wearable.standalone"
            android:value="false" />

The longer story

I don't believe that what they forced me to do makes any sense. My application is semi-independent according to Google's own documentation :

A watch app can be considered as one of the following:

Completely independent of a phone app Semi-independent (a phone app is not required and would provide only optional features) Dependent on a phone app If a watch app is completely independent or semi-independent, it is in the standalone category. You must indicate this categorization to the Google Play store by setting the value of this meta-data element to true:

My app requires an initial initialization of 2FA accounts, which can be done from an Android phone or from an iPhone. In the second case the Android phone is not required. Google requested to write a "disclaimer", which I've added to the app's description, but that didn't have any effect, they continued rejecting the app. I've asked three times about what was wrong with the disclaimer, but the best answer I've got was:

As much as I'd like to help, I'm not able to provide any more detail or a better answer to your question.

I've asked one more time about what's wrong with the disclaimer, didn't get any answer, set 'standalone' flag to false and got approved two days later.

The problem that Google created for me and my users was that going forward installing the watch app would be possible from an Android phone only and not from a watch directly. It means that iPhone users would either need to find an Android device to install the watch app or to use ADB, and I'm sure, the users will hate me for this change.

Once again, an impression is that Android is on its way to self destruction: new policies break the old apps, support doesn't exist and developers are forced to make changes that make customers unhappy.

It's not the first episode of this stupidly, just recently I had to disable GDrive functionality in my Android app because new policies broke the existing logic that worked for years, and all OAuth 2.0 processes that Google suggested to be compliant with the new policies were not feasible for a small company

Here is a fragment of my comms with Google that fell on their deaf ears