4 ms·

this is like a kid waiting until 11:59 Pm to submit his homeowrk, and then blaming the professor when the upload process takes 5 mins and his submission is late

• dfabulich 7y ago
  OP here. Google offers no way to submit an app for approval in advance. You can upload a build as early as you like, but they won't start reviewing it until you try to go live. Then the app will go live immediately after approval. In the past, we've handled this by submitting the app for review 24 hours in advance; luckily, that turned out to be just enough time to make our app go live this afternoon. Google offers a “timed publishing” feature, but it only works for app updates, not for new apps. If Google is going to put apps through a multi-day review process, we need timed publishing for new apps as well.
  • cameronbrown 7y ago
    I know it's definitely a hotfix solution until Google fixes things, but would a soft-launch followed by a properly timed launch a few weeks later be better?
    • mfduffy 7y ago
      I mean, that’s sort of what we’ve been doing. (Hi, OP’s coworker here.) We’re a bit unusual in that we release games on Thursdays. In our busy season, that can be every other Thursday, with an email and social blast accompanying it. In the past we’ve submitted and been approved on Wednesdays so our customers know they can often sneak in Wednesday night and find our release before the marketing blast. In future, our soft launch will be two days or more, I guess, but we will submit according to that three day buffer. It’s totally doable. The problem is we can’t market a new game until it’s available on all platforms, which we time on each platform to the day. Ie we know how long ahead of time for iOS and Steam, and we (until now) also knew when to submit for Google. And a quick word on soft launch periods: It’s ok, it’s not the worst thing, but it’s not preferable itself. Hence the need for a timed release tool.
      • jayd16 7y ago
        Have you tried launching early in no regions or excluding every device then enabling everything on launch day?
        • mfduffy 7y ago
          I don’t know about the feasibility of that, but I’m intrigued...
          • MaulingMonkey 7y ago
            I haven't heard of doing 0-region releases, but 1-region soft launches are common - e.g. soft launching in a smaller, possibly english speaking country like New Zeland - fixing and tweaking based on the feedback and data you get from that - before hard launching with the marketing push to the wider world.
• crazygringo 7y ago
  > If your app needs to launch on a specific day (it doesnt) Wow that's pretty presumptuous of you. Or maybe it absolutely does? There are so many valid business reasons for deadlines whether due to contracts, school years, laws, whatever it is. Likewise that an app can't launch until a certain date due to licenses, agreements, tie-ins, servers, etc.
• mLuby 7y ago
  >If your app needs to launch on a specific day (it doesnt), it should have been uploaded and field tested at least a couple of weeks in advance. That's silly. Coordinated marketing around app releases is a big deal, and plenty of teams are cramming in features and bugfixes till the last minute. ~~~ The only thing a student can do is choose when to submit. Therefore the upload time should either be 1. given, (what a nice prof!) 2. unsurprising (i.e. on par with similar UX's of the age) 3. fuzzy (12:03am is okay, 8:57am is not) 4. determinable (e.g. via overwritable submission and a success notification) There are a handful of important, ambiguous, and strict deadlines in the real world, so if that's what the prof is trying to teach, bravo. Or if they're trying to get students to do the test in #4. But that's rarely what's going on. Disclaimer obviously I was one of those… X~D