How to deactivate the pre register feature of an android app

Question

I recently published on android app on the playstore and I had no problem or warning.

Although, people can't download the app because I had activated the "pre register feature"(without knowing what it was ....) and thinking It had no impact.

It looks easy to deactivate the feature on the play console developer dashboard, but every time I try to deactivate it, I am getting this error message :

"An unexpected error occurred. Please try again later. (668269003)"

I have successfully checked the "inactive" box all the countries but one hoping it will solve the issue but for now, I still can't download my own app.

Should I just wait and try again ? Any ideas ?

An other idea I had was to change the "Launch deadline: Nov 4, 2019" in order to make it shorter so that It would solve my issue, but I have no idea how to change that deadline date.... (I don't even remember seing that date when I uploaded my package on the store)

thanks for any help.

Answer 1

I received the same error #668269003 when trying to disable pre-registration for an app that I was trying to publish to the Open Beta track. Before disabling pre-registration, the console indicated that the Open Beta should be available and should override pre-registration for the pre-registered countries when using the SYNC WITH PRODUCTION setting.

To work around this, I did the same as you and disabled all but one country (not my country, or the countries I'm actually interested in for now) in pre-registration, which does appear to save without the error.

From there, I went into the release track for the release I'm interested in (in my case, Open Beta), and selected CUSTOMIZE AVAILABILITY and manually ticked the countries that used to be enrolled in pre-registration.

After saving and letting the Google server pixies do their "processing update" shenanigans, the app finally showed up with the option to install rather than pre-register.

I've opened a request with Google, if in the unlikely event they get back to me for some reason I'll update this reply.

I assume that these steps should also work for the production track, but I'm not yet in a position to test there.

Note that the launch deadline is the date you enable pre-registration in a given country, plus 90 days. I don't believe it is editable.