Prisoners of Google Android development
solutional.ee
Prisoners of Google Android development
1–10 of 318 posts
Re: Prisoners of Google Android development
#2TLDR; Written an article about a real-life case-study about Android app deployment/development problem where production version has a critical problem and update has been "in review" for 72h+ and there's nothing else we can do.
If there's some (ex)-Googlers who could help to speed up update approval process then I would be really helpful, if not then let it just be as a warning for anyone else being involved with mobile app development.
Re: Prisoners of Google Android development
#3Whatever you do do not touch anything related to the app in the Google play console. Any change will reset the review
Re: Prisoners of Google Android development
#4Whatever you do do not touch anything related to the app in the Google play console. Any change will reset the review
Thanks for the tip!
Re: Prisoners of Google Android development
#5Interesting, Apple allows for expedited reviews in case of a critical bug or something time sensitive. IIRC you can demand that twice a year. I assumed Google would have the same.
Re: Prisoners of Google Android development
#6I've started frequently getting reviewed (from submission to approval) within hours, sometimes even within 10-15 minutes of submitting to Apple App Store. But it still varies and can take a day.
I want to figure out a good cross plat strategy but would not want to ever deal with Play and Google.
Re: Prisoners of Google Android development
#7Based on the crash behaviour, it sounds like Google never bothered trying to log in to the application if it passed review.
This also makes me wonder, was the app already crashing on Android 13 before updating the target SDK version? I suppose the backwards compatibility layers must've kept the app alive on modern phones?
Personally, as a user, I like that Google forces developers to update their apps, because the old API designs were terrible for privacy, but they won't be enforced unless devs update their targetSdk. Breaking installed apps is not an option, but forcing the issue in Google Play works well. I'd also say their testing times were reasonable, if it weren't for the fact that they don't see obvious problems such as "app was never even tested on Android 13".
Re: Prisoners of Google Android development
#8> I personally have been against developing mobile apps for years now for the exact same reasons described in here and other similar articles — as soon as you decide to develop mobile apps then you give control of your product/service away
to a third party
Hard to disagree with that.
When "support" is hoping that HN or Twitter attracts helpful attention, we're going down the wrong path.
Re: Prisoners of Google Android development
#9It's a similar situation with Chrome extensions. Extension reviews are generally pretty quick (an hour or so), but every once in a while you get hit with a longer one (days+).
In this type of environment, you need to ensure every release is as rock-solid as possible. For our extension, we have beta extension with a sub-group of opted-in users that we test on for a week or so before doing a production release. Then we roll out the extension to production incrementally starting with 1% of users and slowly ramping that up to 100% (it seems Android has a similar staged rollout feature).
Re: Prisoners of Google Android development
#10> It's time to move back to open (web) standards and take control back into our own hands!
Wait till you discover that the web is also half controlled by the company that is causing your problem now (Google). And Apple who owns Safari, the only browser on iOS in the real sense, isn't really your friend either.