Make it hard or impossible to upload to Google Play

[adolfintel]

I don't want this app to be distributed through Google Play so I'm looking for ideas on how to make it hard or impossible to do it. This is because I noticed that some assholes redistributed this as a paid app or with ads, without even crediting the original app, and I had to send several DMCA requests.

So far, here's what I came up with:

• The app already intentionally violates Google Play policies on disabling battery optimization but they don't seem to actually check this
• Setting the app's target SDK to less than 26 (minimum for Google Play) and make sure the background service breaks if SDK 26 or newer is used

Ideas?

[ceifa]

I don't understand, why you guys don't want it on Google play? Isn't it just a matter of fixing this battery optimization issue?

[adolfintel]

The battery optimization problem would get the app constantly banned/unbanned, but the most important reason is that I just don't want people uploading this to google play claiming that they made it, so the app can detect if it was downloaded from google play and break itself after a while.