Well, this is an annoyance I was hoping to never have to deal with again. Back in November of last year, there was an epidemic of Chromebooks getting the “Uncertified” Play Store treatment. With Android still firmly a work in progress at the time, this was simply a speed bump in the road to a unified Android app experience.
The issue that arose back then and alerted most people to a problem was the lack of Netflix on their Chromebook. Certain apps will simply disappear from your device (phones do this as well) when the Play Store doesn’t meet the certified status. Not only do those apps disappear, they cannot even be found in the Play Store.
When big-name apps like Netflix start going MIA, people get upset, and things get attention.
This time around, however, it doesn’t seem that the “Uncertified” status is actually borking anything; at least not for me. We heard from a few readers that their Pixelbooks were showing the begrudged status, but we’ve yet to hear of any adverse effects from the current situation.
I’d love to tell you that you won’t have interruptions with this and additionally tell you that only Pixelbooks will have the problem, but we simply don’t know that at this point. This is clearly a bug, though, as my Pixelbook didn’t even have the section in settings at first when I went to check on my certification for the Play Store. It simply wasn’t there! Normally, you would see Device Certification: Certified.
24 hours later, the Device certification section was back in my settings and, much to my dismay, the “Uncertified” label was now applied. Again, I’ve not noticed anything out of place just yet, but “Uncertified” isn’t exactly something you want to see on a flagship device like the Pixelbook. For what it is worth, I’m currently on version 10.0.32 of the Play Store and Chrome OS 66.0.3359.181 that was just updated this morning.
If you want to check your certification status, simply go to the Play Store and hit your hamburger menu. Scroll down to settings, hit that button and then scroll to the bottom of that menu. Let us know what you Device Certification shows. If you are seeing “Uncertified” as well, please submit feedback by hitting ALT + SHIFT + I as this is the best way to submit feedback.
If we see this show up in the Google Bug Tracker, we’ll update the article, and as always, we’ll be ready to report when this gets fixed.