Google Play reject my wear os companion app with crashed when launch on phone

Question

Can anyone help me clarify what does "Your application crashed when launch on phone" means for a wear os companion app? I tested my wear os app on API 28 and API 30, everything works fine. It is just an incremental update, but it keeps getting rejected recently by google play.

Answer 1

You have any update on this? Same thing just happened to me, got rejected on an incremental update. I then tried preventing the installation on a phone like this:

<uses-library android:name="com.google.android.wearable" android:required="true" />

Then it got rejected because they couldn't install it on a phone anymore

Answer 2

To post an update on this issue, long story short. For my android app with wear os companion, It was my android apps' problem with the release build using minification and shrinkResources with proguardFiles getDefaultProguardFile('proguard-android-optimize.txt'), 'proguard-rules.pro' following the android doc. The proguard-android-optimize renamed a couple of class names so that the start of explicit intent crash on all android devices.

The unfortunate things are:

• I didn't test the release build from playstore manually. (all on me, now I am testing with play internal test)
• All apps with wear os companion component on play store are called wear os apps, which gives a lot of confusion
• My release build with code minification problem had passed all prelaunch report tests on google play initially, and I didn't see any crash report on google play. (I don't know why this is possible)
• I managed to found out this issue totally by accident and my root cause might not be applicable for all other apps with the same reject text.