>Attempts to raise the issue with Google resulted in little more than copy-and-pasted sections of the developer guide<p>My exact same experience. We had two very simillar apps for a brief time, the old version that interfaces to the old hardware, for old phones, and the new version which was basically redesigned from scratch but kept the same UI. We wanted at least to have a fallback version in case users had any issue, for whatever reason.<p>From the top of my head, i can name at least a dozen apps that i use daily that have multiple versions of them on the store, for the same reason we did.<p>However, we received a complaint from google, which froze both our apps, because apparently you can't make one app that looks too simillar to another one.<p>First, it's our APP. We are not trying to copy anyone (the chief reason for this rule, you don't want fake malicious clones of apps)
Second, it's only the first page that looks the same (a video was provided showing the differences once you connected to a companion device. Also ALL our apps have the same first page)
Third, what about all the free/pro app pairs you can find? Not every developer chose to follow the in-app-purchase route for unlocking features.<p>For at least two weeks i kept receiving copypasted responses. All the same wording, all copypasting pieces of the guidelines which can be interpreted in many different ways.
After two weeks, they either escalated to a human being, or to a less useless one and we started chatting. We could convince them to at least unlock one of the Apps while deciding what to do with the other one.<p>Re: second point, they were immovable.
Re: third point, when i was asking why the other developer's apps are still there, and what could i do to make the same, the answer was invariably the same: "I can't comment for the other apps, but if you think they violate the guidelines you can report them", so the exact opposite of what i was asking.
Which is proof enough to me: they don't stop anything unless reported, and we had a third party attack us with a swarm of fake reports on behalf of a competitor, which already happened in the past. Human beings - or at least with a functioning brain - are not working at google's developer support.<p>In the meantime we had to distribute the APK, which is <i>not</i> great the moment you need to update.<p>Apple gave zero fuss, we have had both versions on the store since day one.