Shipping a mobile game as a sole trader in Portugal
If you are publishing from Portugal as a pessoa singular, the question that matters is not tax. It is which of your details become public, and when.
The asymmetry nobody warns you about
Apple lets an individual keep a home address off the public listing. Google does not. Those are two different verification systems, and the difference is not a formatting detail.
Google has required a public physical address from monetising developers since 2014. It is worldwide, not EU-only, and it predates the Digital Services Act by a decade. You cannot avoid it by removing Portugal or the EU from your release. On a Personal payments profile, that published address is your home.
What triggers it
Monetisation. A free app with no purchases does not put you there. The moment you add a paid product, the developer profile becomes public, and it is account-level rather than per-app, so it applies retroactively to anything else you have already published.
The route out, and its price
The lever that moves the address on Google is the payments profile type, not any setting in the console. An Organization profile can carry a business address instead of a home one, but it requires a D-U-N-S number, which means a registered entity and a verification cycle measured in weeks, not days.
A virtual office with a real street address solves Apple and can be the address on the D-U-N-S record for Google. One purchase, both stores. Do not buy a CTT Apartado for this: it satisfies Apple and is rejected outright by Google.
Whatever you do, keep the address string byte-identical across the office contract, the Finanças declaration, the D-U-N-S record and the payments profile. Formatting mismatches are the single most reported cause of verification loops.
Things that surprise people
- Apple publishes a phone number and an email alongside the address under the DSA trader rules. Both are verified, so both must be live lines you control. Do not use your personal mobile.
- DSA trader status is not triggered by monetisation. It applies to every EU-distributed app, free or not, and has done since February 2025.
- Your domicílio fiscal stays your home as a matter of law. A virtual office is your local de exercício da atividade, a separate field. Do not misdeclare it; the providers themselves refuse to be used that way.
- Staying out of the registo comercial does not keep you private once you monetise in the EU. The store listing publishes more than the registry would have.
The practical sequence
Get the Apple Paid Applications agreement to Active before submitting anything with a purchase in it. Submitting while it is still pending does not get rejected; it sits silently in review, and one documented case sat there twenty-three days.
Decide the Google payments profile type before you monetise, not after. Changing a Personal profile to an Organization one after the fact is a multi-week path, and the address is public in the meantime.