Literally yesterday I saw the Prompt users to update button in Google Play console, today the news went out. In connection with this, several thoughts.
The idea, at first glance, is excellent, you can show users in a certain selection a full-screen offer to update without implementing anything in the app. And all this works at the Google Play and system level, as far as I understand, not in your app. The idea is so excellent that the question arises why it wasn't done this way initially.
It looks exactly like Immediate In App Update, built into the app. And the main joke is that both are non-blocking, there's a cross button. That is, in the documentation itself they sell the idea "if you released a broken release, you can ask users to update", and then they let users bypass the update and enter the broken app with a cross. Security vulnerabilities, disabling old services, you can come up with many more examples when you can't do without forced update, but they let them through. 🤔
Besides Immediate in In App Update there's also a Flexible version with a bottom sheet. Besides the appearance, as you understand from the previous paragraph, it doesn't really differ much from Immediate. That you can close the bottom sheet, that the full screen, but it initially looks non-blocking at least. I see at least some sense in the bottom sheet, to gently nudge towards updating.
Because of this everyone writes their own hacks for force update, and they're terrible everywhere. They're extremely hard to maintain, since you need to make this feature much earlier than the moment when you'll need to use it, because users still need to manage to update. Because of this it's important not to screw up and not break this functionality, since updating takes many months. You need to understand if there's an update in the store for this specific user, because the rollout may not have reached them yet. In general there are a lot of nuances.
And Google can solve this problem with one move now, just by giving the ability to remove the cross. I understand the idea that forcing people to update is not a very good practice, but in life, unfortunately, you have to. Not very often, otherwise they'll get upset, but you really have to. In short, you need to try somewhere in the alpha channel, maybe I'm missing something.
PS. It's possible this feature was already there somewhere earlier, but they obviously stuck the button where it wasn't.