Google Play changes not sent for review, explained

In Play Console, every change that needs review lands in the Changes not yet sent for review section of the Publishing overview page, with a link to the change. Nothing in that list is reviewed until you choose Send for review, and you can save some changes for later while sending others.

The Google Play Developer API has a matching switch on the call that commits an upload, changesNotSentForReview. Google’s description: when a rejection happens, it makes sure the changes in that upload won’t be reviewed until they are explicitly sent for review from Play Console, and they join any other changes not yet sent. In practice, after a rejected update Google may refuse to send an upload’s changes for review automatically and ask you to send them from Play Console.

This is separate from managed publishing, which holds changes after approval rather than before review.

In VibeView. Turn on Don’t send for review in the Submit dialog (off by default, chosen for each release and never saved), or pass --changes-not-sent-for-review to vibeview submit (CLI 0.56.0 or later), or set "changesNotSentForReview": true in vibeview.json. The release is saved in Play Console and nothing is sent; send it from Publishing overview → Send for review. Without it, a release sent while Google is reviewing earlier changes cancels that review and starts it again with this release. See After the upload: Google Play.