Hello, I have android permissions in my game that I don’t want, I did the process explained in the answer of [this question][1].
I just want that my game appears on the Play Store with the tag “this app uses advertising” but not the tag “contains in-app purchases” as there are not. I removed the line com.android.vending.BILLING in a ManifestRequirementsOverride.txt in my GAME/Build/Android. But when I upload the app bundle (.aab) on the Play Console (new) and I check the details we can see that the permission is still here:
How to get rid of that?
I am also wondering what are the use of all the permissions. I can’t figure if some permissions are needed in my case. My game is a simple 1-player game offline, but I use adverts.
So do I need these: android.permission.INTERNET, android.permission.ACCESS_NETWORK_STATE, android.vending.CHECK_LICENSE, android.permission.ACCESS_WIFI_STATE ?
I use the Unreal basic functionnality to save game (save slot), do I need READ_EXTERNAL_STORAGE and WRITE (idk if it its internal or external)?
Nope, I had to publish my game with this tag. Since these were my first games and hardly any downloads, I didn’t care. I temporarily chose a different engine for my next mobile games because I don’t think Epic bother to fix mobile game support issues in the next few years.
If this is your first game and you think there is no high chance that it get a lot of downloads, I suggest to don’t care about this tag. And if your game encounter big success, I guess you should have a contact with Epic to solve this. For your next games, if you want to create mobile games in the future, generally I suggest to switch to another game engine, there is better support for mobile games elsewhere. I like the Unreal Engine but for mobile games or 2D it’s really not ideal (for indies)
I got the same issue. Not sure why billing permission turns up. I did include it before but then removed it as I didn’t need it but the aab still has the permission in the manifest. Did anyone try extracting and editing the aab before uploading? I have not tried yet. Not the best way though.
Ran into the GPS In-App Purchases issue for UE 5.0. The com.android.vending.BILLING permission is what was apparently causes the GPS issue. It is inserted into AndroidManifest.xml file by default.
The following solved the issue for my C++ based Neuraptobot game which doesn’t use ads, subscriptions or in-app purchases:
UE5 has two plugins that are enabled by default that need to be disabled or the build Android process will automatically insert the permission: AndroidPlayBilling and OnlineSubsystemGooglePlay.
The com.android.vending.BILLING permission is inserted by default even if the two plugins are disabled thus step 2 was required. Step 2 actually removes it from the Intermediate\Android\arm64\AndroidManifest.xml which is what I did first. The enabled plugins, however, were causing it to be re-inserted into the aab bundle AndroidManifest.xml even though it wasn’t in the Intermediate build AndroidManifest.xml.
Not sure why all this stuff is enabled by default given that there is an ‘Advanced APK Packaging’ subsection in ‘Project Settings’ to add permissions. If a certain Feature is desired, a simple tutorial to add permissions and/or enable the necessary plugins would seemingly be a better approach but I digress.
