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The Google Play app review process now regularly takes longer than a week

gultsch.social

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Re: The Google Play app review process now regularly takes longer than a week

#331

Post by oblio »

IvanK_net wrote: post #211

My tool is used by 1 million people a day https://www.photopea.com This is the reason I never made a mobile version and all mobile users use it in a browser. The biggest problem (bug) with this approach is that iOS limits the RAM usage to 2 GB per website. I have to tell many of my users to ditch their $1000 iPads and get a used $150 Macbook for better experience. I think Apple does it on purpose https://bugs.webkit.…

https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=268816#c19

> This issue is considered resolved. Per the above discussion, there are multiple restrictions at multiple levels that affect different scenarios, so it is not surprising that you are still seeing similar issues.

> Please file a new bug with your use case. Providing a deeper explanation for the need than a synthetic test case would help us prioritize it higher.

This is just shameful. 2 and a half years later, just resolving it like it's been 2 days.

Re: The Google Play app review process now regularly takes longer than a week

#332

Post by oblio »

yacthing wrote: post #217
rock_artist wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We already had enough proof of vulnerabilities in the OS code and Manufacturers (eg. Samsung/Lenovo/etc privileged apps), there were enough reviewed apps that were used for fraud or access as bad actors. My banking works in my 'unprotected' computer browser. So I'd expect giving anyone equivalent freedom. I don't mind if there's a default for gate-keepers as long as they allow competition. but I would expect to have…

Do people not remember the days of viruses destroying computers? They were a massive issue before, and now they're barely a thought for most people. These review processes have been good for the general population.

> They were a massive issue before, and now they're barely a thought for most people.

Even on desktops... where there are no such review processes. Apparently we've found other mechanisms to reduce those issues, without app stores everywhere.

Re: The Google Play app review process now regularly takes longer than a week

#333

Post by basisword »

joshstrange wrote: post #45
basisword wrote: post #31

For all the complaining about Apple's store, the Play Store has always been worse imo. You can't even release an app without first doing a beta test with at least a dozen people.

> You can't even release an app without first doing a beta test with at least a dozen people. Perhaps I'm misunderstanding what you are saying here but less than a month ago I released a brand new app with no beta period, direct to production (white labeled app, which is why I didn't need a beta)

I think it only applies to newer accounts and individual rather than company accounts. To make things worse, Google doesn't allow you to switch an account from individual > company. You need to create a whole new account.

Re: The Google Play app review process now regularly takes longer than a week

#334

Post by pjmlp »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #299
pjmlp wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All humans face scrutiny in their interactions with others. Software only got this bad, because we educated users broken tools are acceptable and fixable with computer reboots and anti-virus.

I dunno, people seem to accept most kinds of tool being fussy or flaky. But the special thing about security flaws is that they turn a one in a billion error into a guaranteed attack. It's moderately hard to make something that doesn't feel buggy, but ridiculously hard to be secure. If you hold to the standards of a bake sale it's the former. If you want full security then nobody releases anything outside very strict…

Thankfully industry is changing,

- https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX:32...

- https://www.nsa.gov/Press-Room/News-Highlights/Article/Artic...

And I could keep listing several other world regions.

Re: The Google Play app review process now regularly takes longer than a week

#335

Post by forgotmypw17 »

eks391 wrote: post #243
davidmurdoch wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Haha. I used to have some blog posts detailing things a bit more, but I let it die when Heroku cancelled their original free tier years ago.

A domain is only ~$12/year if you don't buy it through a scammy site like godaddy that adds fake fees or quadruples the cost after a year. WordPress is easy for blogs, or you can just vibe code something in an afternoon if you don't care to have comments. Even embedding forms or an emailing tool can be done statically. Heck, there's probably a free option out there for simple posting that I don't know about.

The biggest costs are not the money, but the work and cognitive load of the thousand cuts it takes to not only bring all of this up, but keep it running, not to mention migrating the content.

However/also, "only" $12 to some is a considerable amount of money to others.

Re: The Google Play app review process now regularly takes longer than a week

#336

Post by Gigachad »

nemomarx wrote: post #280
davidmurdoch wrote: post #84

I'm partly to blame. I accidentally ran an illegal unregulated money transference service over Google Play. It let users cash out their Google Play Credits for real cash, which I automatically wired them. Someone then hacked in to a major bookstore chain, stole piles of Google Play Gift cards, activated them using their access, and used my app to get cash for them. Luckily, the whole thing blew up on me before I got…

> It let users cash out their Google Play Credits for real cash, which I automatically wired them. I really want to know what the intended design or use case was for this? This is why people usually only let you turn credits into in app balances right

Cashing out unwanted gift cards

Re: The Google Play app review process now regularly takes longer than a week

#337

Post by Onawa »

forgotmypw17 wrote: post #335
eks391 wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A domain is only ~$12/year if you don't buy it through a scammy site like godaddy that adds fake fees or quadruples the cost after a year. WordPress is easy for blogs, or you can just vibe code something in an afternoon if you don't care to have comments. Even embedding forms or an emailing tool can be done statically. Heck, there's probably a free option out there for simple posting that I don't know about.

The biggest costs are not the money, but the work and cognitive load of the thousand cuts it takes to not only bring all of this up, but keep it running, not to mention migrating the content. However/also, "only" $12 to some is a considerable amount of money to others.

If its a static or client-side website, GitHub Pages is free and allows you to use whatever domain you have already own. Almost all of the websites I run are hosted on GitHub Pages. No maintenance required, and updates are as easy as `git push`.

Re: The Google Play app review process now regularly takes longer than a week

#338

Post by killerstorm »

mrguyorama wrote: post #297
killerstorm wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Back in early 2000s, pretty much all Windows machines were infested with malware. Do you want to bring back those glorious days? Back in the day users didn't really have much valuable and sensitive stuff on their machines and malware was rather benign - just sending spam, not trying to fuck up that specific user. Could be a bit different when it's a smartphone user depends on.

The reason that modern computers are no longer filled with malware has nothing to do with completely irrelevant locked garden app stores on phones. The reason is because Bill Gates put out a memo because it was fucking embarrassing that you could trivially smash the stack on default open API endpoints for services that consumers never used and shouldn't have been trivially routable from the open web in the first plac…

Interesting that you mention LG and Samsung TVs.

Does it happen on Google Pixel phones?

Obviously, the quality of the walled garden depends on the maintainer. Google's quality standards are lower than Apples, but higher than LGs.

Re: The Google Play app review process now regularly takes longer than a week

#339

Post by xethos »

david_allison wrote: post #38
fhub wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you can get your agent of choice to run up the app in an emulator and navigate the whole thing taking screenshots then tasks like edge-to-edge can be pretty hands off. The way I did it was to firstly get accessibility identifiers on everything. Then have it record everything I do on an emulator to navigate the entire app. Then left it for a while to work out how to actually use the app via the emulator. Once you h…

We use Roborazzi[0], which is an excellent screenshot library, but: * We target minSdk 24 * We're still using XML views * We target a large variety of form factors * We have a lot of screens, and these have a lot of configuration options. I really wish it was "point an agent at it, and walk away", but many screens ended up being hours of iteration with Fable driving my phone/an emulator to produce an acceptable outco…

A tangent, but a big thank you (to you, and all other developers) for supporting older API levels from someone with devices ranging from Android 8.1 (BlackBerry Key2LE, at minSdk 27) to Android 16 (BlackBerry "Q25", at minSdk 36.1) <3

Re: The Google Play app review process now regularly takes longer than a week

#340

Post by id00 »

bbx wrote: post #157

I just released a game [1] on both iOS and Android. The Google Play process is more thorough. There are a lot of steps and you need to clear them one by one. This means waiting several days between each step. The Play Console dashboard is quite well documented to be honest but can be overwhelming. The main obstacle is that you need to find at least 12 testers to play your game for 2 weeks straight. I ended up paying…

Released my game a few months back. I generally agree with you, however Apple process was more painful / took longer when you start adding in-app-purchases and providing all the financial info required for that to be approved.

And, as I'm doing weekly updates, I found both stores approving builds typically within 12-14 hours which was a nice surprise

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