Is there any way to disable Google Play Protect (GPP) from an EMM or to otherwise whitelist apps from scanning?

Could just be ignorance on my part, for which I apologise, but the frustration arose when I could see an option (blue slider button style) to turn off GPP from its settings and a pop up asking whether to turn off or cancel would come up, but even if I clicked on the turn off option it just wouldn't actually do it - not even any error message to say why. What's the point of showing it as a changeable setting when it can't change was the frustration. As others have said, no problem if you want to have protection for apps through the Google Play channel, but for various reasons it is often the case where Android is used to implement a dedicated device that you don't want the risk of application instability (or becoming vapour ware) due to some unsolicited intervention

Hello, I'm new to this conversation but found it because I've having this issue with Apps being yanked off our devices.   I don't have the same chops many of the other posters have when it comes to Android, I've mostly been managing iOS devices via MDM for the past several years, but we were purchased last year and now I'm scrambling to learn both Intune and Android.

In our case, we use a third party software product that has a couple mobile apps available from within it.   Their apps are not on the Play Store because one of their customers pushed the APKs out to a private Play Store instance and Google won't let the same APK exist in different Play Store environments (this is what the software vendor tells me).

We set a policy in Intune to allow sideloading for this one group of users, and that works -- they can sideload the apps.    But the app gets deleted without fail.  It just pops a notification with the App name and says "Deleted by your admin"

We've combed through every compliance policy and conditional access policy in Intune we can find.  I've even gone so far as to exclude the user group from each policy that applies to it to see if that policy is the one causing the removal, but it always removes.   On my test device, I can look at "Play Protect settings" and the option for 'Scan apps with Play Protect' is switched off, but that app still gets removed.

Now I'm mad at everyone.  I'm mad at the software vendor because they really ought to fix the problem on their side and publish the #$%& apps to the Play Store.   I'm mad at Intune because there's nothing in their logs that tells me what on earth is initiating the removal process.   I'm mad a Google because the device does not log the process that initiates the removal either -- and frankly, we should be able to push the APKs to a private instance for ourselves but we can't.

It was added to the Android Management API in the last hour 🙂 

Thanks for the tip, unfortunately this won't help a lot of our customers as they have closed networks

I'd also like to add a special thanks to @mattdermody for starting this topic and also for taking the time to join a call with myself and a couple of members of our team. 

I know this is just a starting point, as much has been mentioned above, but I wanted to highlight Melanie's update here and also add my thanks: @jasonbayton, @BenMcc, @ian, @davidguill, @Timmy, @Michel, @RamShear, @tbrowne, @benoit, @JamesKnight, @RickB, @karam, @crystal11232, @davidguillaume 

Could you share a screen-print or the text of the warning please?

To clarify, GPP is still running on these devices - so high risk apps will still be flagged as such with a block or warning.