April 26, 2018 · android oss

Google Play Library Batch Removal

A small weekend project motivated by frustration. Sometimes I forget to use a test device with a test account when trying different apps while working on SD Maid. These apps then collect on my personal Google Account in the "history" that is displayed in the Google Play app.

I could distinctly remember that the was a batch-selection option for this view on previous Google Play versions, and that's not longer there.

After some research it turns out that this option was indeed removed and there is no other way to clear this list, but to manually go through each app 1 by 1.

So why spend half an hour going through this list manually when I can spend a whole day automating it...

Turns out I'm not the only one annoyed by this though, so it will still time well invested.

The app itself uses the accessibility service to automate UI interaction, I had previous experience with this due to using similar techniques in SD Maid so it wasn't completely from scratch.

You can find the source code for gplay-batchtool and an APK to download on GitHub: