API surfaces & coverage
"The Google Play API" is actually several Google services. Knowing which one owns a capability tells you whether gplay covers it today, will cover it, or never will.
The five APIs
Section titled “The five APIs”| API | Service | What it owns | gplay |
|---|---|---|---|
| Android Publisher | androidpublisher | Publication (listings, images, releases, tracks, testers), monetization, reviews, compliance, team | Core — covered, long tail planned |
| Play Developer Reporting | playdeveloperreporting | Post-launch observability: crash/ANR rates, errors, slow start/rendering, wakeups/wakelocks | Planned (vitals) |
| Play Games Services Publishing | gamesConfiguration | Achievements & leaderboards configuration for games | Planned (games) |
| Play Custom App Publishing | playcustomapp | Private enterprise apps via managed Google Play — the only API that can create an app | Planned (customapps) |
| Play Integrity | playintegrity | Runtime device/binary verification | Never (see below) |
A few things have no API at all — public app creation, content rating, store listing experiments — and stay manual in the Play Console. Where gplay stops because Google's API stops, that limit is documented, not silent.
The coverage policy
Section titled “The coverage policy”gplay's rule is simple: if a Play admin API exposes it, gplay wraps it.
An admin API is one you (or your agent, or your CI) call about your app
— configuration, publication, distribution, reporting, team. With agent
skills, no command is "too obscure to find": you ask in natural language. And
because --output json is verbatim API pass-through, every wrapped endpoint
doubles as a data source for your own dashboards and automations.
The only exclusions are by nature, not priority: runtime APIs, the ones your app or backend calls while serving end users. Play Integrity is the canonical case — its tokens are generated on-device and consumed server-side within minutes, so no terminal session could ever hold one. A CLI wrapper would be structurally unusable.
New surfaces ship with the [experimental] stability label first and
graduate into the public contract once their shape settles.
Sizing it against App Store Connect
Section titled “Sizing it against App Store Connect”Apple exposes one giant API (≈1,200 endpoints) covering everything from signing to Game Center. Google splits the same ground across the smaller services above — Android Publisher alone is ~137 methods. The honest comparison is not endpoint counts but coverage: gplay targets 100% of what Google's admin APIs allow.