I've been working on a personal finance app called FinVantage, and I recently hit a roadblock

The App
FinVantage is an expense tracker with some features I'm pretty proud of:

• Receipt scanning with OCR - point camera at any bill, AI extracts everything
• Voice input - say "spent 500 on groceries" and it's logged
• AI insights - actual useful spending analysis, not just pie charts
• Full financial suite - budgets, investments, loans, tax planning
• 100% offline - all data stays on device, optional encrypted Google Drive backup

Built with Flutter, using TFLite and ONNX for on-device AI. Everything works great locally.

The Problem
One killer feature was SMS auto-import - automatically reading bank transaction SMS and parsing them into transactions. Super useful in India where every bank sends SMS for debits/credits.

Google Play rejected it.🙃

They said SMS/Call Log permissions require an approved Restricted Permission Declaration Form, and my use case (reading SMS for financial data) doesn't qualify for the exceptions.

What I've Tried

1. Made SMS the core feature argument (rejected - they said manual input is an alternative)
2. Removed the permissions and disabled the feature (app approved, but feature is now "Coming Soon")

My Questions

1. Has anyone here successfully gotten Google Play approval for SMS reading in a finance/expense app?
2. Is there a legitimate path forward, or is this basically impossible without being a banking app?
3. Any alternative approaches? (I've seen some apps use Accessibility Services, but that seems even riskier)
4. Should I just wait and build user base first, then reapply?

The app is live without SMS: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.finvantage.app

Would really appreciate any insights from those who've dealt with Google's restricted permissions process. It's frustrating to have a working feature that users want but can't ship it. 😅

Built a finance app with SMS auto-import, but Google Play rejected it. Anyone successfully gotten SMS permission approval?

Comments

[devto]

This is great. The app looks promising. I will download. I don't know the answer to your question. I am a learner and have developed a anroid app but the process to deploy to playstore is very tedious. I am stuck. Any tutorial/link on playstore deployment would be apprcieated. thank you