Not making this one, just a random dev passing by. Play Store is notoriously horrible to deal with these days, from developer standpoint. I have a game and you can just leave it be on itch. Google though keeps hammering me "pls update!! your api from last month is deprecated!" "pls update!! we updated privacy policy, you need to keep up"
This will unfortunately not be possible on newer Android versions soon since Google Decided you can't install APKs unless it's from a verified publisher. Idk if it's actually in effect yet or not but as far as I know, it should be ok at the time of writing this or if you have slightly older android versions.