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

261 points by inputmice 20d ago

skeledrew 20d ago
Sounds like a clear "find another store" message to me.
RicoElectrico 20d ago
Same happened for CoMaps (which unfortunately does not have 12+ years of presence going for it)
lecarore 20d ago
The google review process is the best advertising for f-droid there could ever be.
- allthetime 19d ago
  I have three apps on the Play Store, they all take a couple hours to pass review and their auto-testing/review systems often catch little bugs I didn't almost immediately. Getting a new app on the store is a bit cumbersome, but it should be.
jadar 19d ago
I haven't pushed an update since June, but this has not been my recent experience...
deleted 20d ago
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Pr0Ger 20d ago
Longer than an average App Store review (which is heavily criticized for being too long)? Hilarious
- gyomu 20d ago
  I believe the App Store has switched to automated reviews, at least for updates. I've had my app updates approved in <1h on a regular basis starting this summer.
  - hobofan 20d ago
    From what I was able to see from the outside, App Store has had semi-automated reviews for updates in basically forever (+ some random spot checks), presumably based on some introspection that only triggers a human review if a new system API was used.
  - hikashop-nicola 16d ago
    Yes. And the Play Store now takes several days for approval for updates of existing apps.
Jyaif 20d ago
I just updated 2 dormant apps for the first time in 10 years; It took 2 days, and the apps were approved on a sunday.
hnisjafx40 20d ago
F-Droid's great but their build queue has had multi week waits too, difference is you can see exactly where your build is stuck instead of guessing.
- collabs 20d ago
  You can also choose to host your own repositories like futo and new pipe do.
  - skeledrew 20d ago
    Hopefully the process is straight forward so others can easily pick it up.
  - account42 20d ago
    Part of the value of F-Droid is the curated distribution model that hopefully catches the worst behaving developers that think they have a god given right to your data though.
hollow-moe 20d ago
Now, let's compare with "google friendly" apps: https://www.apkmirror.com/uploads/?appcategory=youtube https://www.apkmirror.com/uploads/?appcategory=youtube :)
- eviks 20d ago
  It took the whole year before v21 was finally approved, so seems only fair they publish minor v21 revisions multiple times a day!
- cube00 20d ago
  21.37.42-SECONDARY is an interesting version number, don't they like final-final2 in their version numbers?
JimDabell 20d ago
The Google Play review process has been slower and more painful than the App Store review process for 5+ years at this point. At least you get to communicate with real people at Apple; it’s all bot-driven with Google.
- flerchin 19d ago
  What are bots doing for two weeks
tehlike 20d ago
Huh. On the flip side, googles release infra provides much more functionality for apps that already has scale. I wish apple were more production oriented too.
david_allison 20d ago
AnkiDroid (~17 years old) submitted our latest alpha on Sept 03, 2026, 4:40 am. Still pending review.
- RugnirViking 20d ago
  thanks for your app! using it for learning danish and finding it very useful.
  - david_allison 20d ago
    Team effort, but thank you!! I've just taken the next month and a half off to work on things full time. I'm excited! The next update won't be huge, (Google required us to make all screens 'edge to edge'[0], which took up most of my time last month). I'm hoping for some solid improvements now that's out the way, once the release pipeline has returned to normal. Feel free to get in touch if you fancy contributing. [0] https://developer.android.com/develop/ui/views/layout/edge-to-edge https://developer.android.com/develop/ui/views/layout/edge-t...
    - fhub 20d ago
      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 have this sort of baseline. A lot of changes are really quite pleasant. I often ask for an HTML gallery of screenshots covering a few device sizes as the step before I bother running it on a device myself.
      - david_allison 20d ago
        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 outcome. Given that my Pixel 9 Pro has system screens which are still broken under edge to edge, it's not an easy change, and takes up time which could have been going towards feature development. [0] https://github.com/takahirom/roborazzi/ https://github.com/takahirom/roborazzi/
gman83 20d ago
This isn't my experience. My updates usually get accepted within hours. Apple takes days usually.
wouldbecouldbe 20d ago
For new accounts yes, for older accounts it's much faster in my experience. Apple has it's own issues, they often just answer with a random question so they can kick the review down the line. "Are you sure this is your pricing?" "Can you confifrm you have not selected that country" and then you have to wait another 2 days.
- account42 20d ago
  TFA is a post from an established developer and showing a screenshot for the submission of an update to a longstanding app (Conversations XMPP chat client).
  - wouldbecouldbe 19d ago
    My experience. I submit about 20-30 apps per year
fhub 20d ago
Some reviews are clearly automated, some get a light human review, and some involve a human really looking hard. New apps seem to get a more rigorous human review for their first 2-4 submissions. Or at least humans looking over automated test screenshots etc. One reviewer apparently only looked at screenshots because they missed something that would be blindingly obvious on the prior screen if they did it themselves. The explosion in LLM app development has clearly created a bottleneck at the human review steps. Not only delays but much more “dumb” rejections from likely over-stressed humans.
Gareth321 20d ago
MAYBE operating systems shouldn't have gatekeepers which can deny access to billions of customers for any and no reason at all. Apple and Google are WELL past due for regulation in this space. The fact that we cannot download and install software from the internet onto our phones JUST like we can do with our computers is a symbol of our inept and ineffective politicians. And before someone says "well akshully you can technically do it on Android," Google has been working tirelessly to make it as onerous as possible for both developers and customers. For example, users need to separately authorise each app (browser, files manager, alternative store, etc) to install an APK from outside the Play Store. Google also does background scans using "Play Protect" which will periodically delete apps Google doesn't approve of. This happened to me with SmartTubeNext. I have a dozen other ways Google ensures users are discouraged from stepping outside the Play Store.
- deleted 20d ago
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- setgree 20d ago
  And what should we do about apps' getting hacked, sending out malicious updates that get auto-updated and thereby infecting tens of millions or billions of phones simultaneously? I'm not saying we have the perfect system but anything that slants the system towards "easier downloads" or "less gatekeeping" brings large, obvious risks. I don't see how regulation would address them.
  - post-it 20d ago
    How would a reviewer catch that?
  - Maskawanian 20d ago
    How about treating people like adults for a start? How about starting public awareness campaigns about proper digital hygiene. Not everything has to be nanny state garbage.
    - pjmlp 20d ago
polotics 20d ago
yeah my 'promptly AI' alarm clock almost always spends 7 days, as soon as the binary changes, even descriptions changes take several days
jmkni 20d ago
I've noticed this Google Play is regularly slower now than App Store Connect, which never used to be the case
calyhre 20d ago
Not sure how it works behind the scene, but our app (present on the store since 2018) is taking a couple hours at best with Google, and usually less than 24h with Apple. Very much likely an automated triage based on code change or complexity.
zoobab 20d ago
A public FTP server is next app store.
carlosjobim 20d ago
Why can't you wait for a week? That doesn't sound like a long time.
- randyrand 20d ago
  For a critical bug fix, a week can be a very long time.
  - cute_boi 19d ago
    with ai agents and everything even hours can be a long time. I think google playstore should be responsible for all the damages...
- tehlike 20d ago
  For apps with a scale, it's a long time
  - carlosjobim 20d ago
    Because? People wait far longer for much more important things in real life.
    - tehlike 20d ago
      Speed is money. Yes people wait for 9 months for having a baby, doesn't mean you should wait 9 months for an app release. That is not a sound logic.
      - carlosjobim 19d ago
        Yes, but one week to wait for your app is nothing to complain about.
        cute_boi 19d ago
        Sometime there are 0 days etc.. So, maybe you should have broader view on things instead of simple assumption.
0dayman 20d ago
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basisword 20d ago
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.
- joshstrange 20d ago
  > 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)
  - bpx51 19d ago
    Same happened to me yesterday, I published a new app and it was reviewed and published within a few hours without any beta testing. but I think this is why I see people ready to buy old playstore accounts for real money, maybe this only affects new accounts
  - brewtide 19d ago
    I'm just working on my first app (thanks to AI...) and if you have a new dev account created sometime after 2023 they are making you do a 12 person, 14 day beta run before anything else occurs, apparently.
    - joshcartme 19d ago
      It gets worse! If Google decides the people in your test don't engage enough and/or you didn't respond to their feedback, they may not give you production access. I've got a game that's available on iOS, I released there first and did lots of testing to deal with the low-hanging bugs. After doing the 14 day test Google emailed me: Possible reasons why your production access could not be granted include: - Testers were not engaged with your app during your closed test - You didn't follow testing best practices, which may include gathering and acting on user feedback through updates to your app
  - 19d ago
mrjeeves 20d ago
Our app includes Android Auto, which I think is what causes it for us. Submitted 4 Sept, still in review. Was only 48-72 hours until this year, where it randomly jumped to 2 weeks or longer like it still is. It's really frustrating, and makes it very difficult to develop with, let alone reliably release features across platforms.
- rnotaro 19d ago
  I suspect the same issue; I added Android Auto to my application on the latest release and the version I pushed on Sept 3th is still under review.
pastk 20d ago
Yeap latest CoMaps update took ~16 days to review (the longest wait for us so far) and two support tickets (submitted first after ~9 days and got "we have expedited it", 5 days later still in review, so submitted one more ticket). Before that we had a hotfix update (a very small change) and still it took longer than a week and a support ticket (after which it had been approved in a day)...
tananaev 20d ago
I think inconsistency is really annoying. Hard to rely on it. Most of our reviews clear with a couple hours, but sometimes it gets stuck for days.
- Frieren 20d ago
  This is why goverments have appeal processes and layers of tribunals. To be judged and found guilty by a corporation takes away all your rights.
  - robocat 19d ago
    Do you happen to live in a country where your government departments are known for rapid processing? (not weeks of delay like we're talking about here). I generally see my legal system create severe delays (regardless of how much that victimises or costs everyone involved)
    - Frieren 19d ago
      > I generally see my legal system create severe delays Better a delay that getting your account closed without recourse. But you are right, years of conservative governments have starved the government and its services are slower than they should around the west world.
guzik 20d ago
We push updates for our app pretty frequently and they've been passing review in an average time of 1 hour (around 7 updates in the last 60 days). Hope it stays that way.
joshstrange 20d ago
Apple's App Review has also been slipping over the past few months. I have multiple apps that have taken days, up to a week to be approved. What's most galling is that if you use CapacitorJS or similar you can ship app updates instantly to your users but if you write native first-class OS citizen apps you are penalized. There is nothing quite so annoying as having a fix for a bug people are running into and have zero control over when it will get out to them.
abroszka33 20d ago
You would think that with the AGI that these companies are hyping the review happens in minutes. Weird.
- pintxo 20d ago
  Guess both are excused for not having up to the par approaches available.
Unified-Mentor 20d ago
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bryanwexler 20d ago
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abricq 20d ago
By the way, the same is happening for the Apple Store. Their review process is advocated as usually within 24 hours (and heavily advertised by Apple as such, see https://developer.apple.com/distribute/app-review/ https://developer.apple.com/distribute/app-review/) and it is taking now much longer. In the last month, I had to go through the review process twice, and twice I needed to contact them personally after waiting for 1 week of waiting. It did however helped, after every human contact I was reviewed within a few hours. I got this explanation from them... > We are currently experiencing a higher-than-normal amount of inquiries and have been unable to respond in the time frame that we would prefer. During these periods of high volume, the app review time will take longer than average, and we cannot currently provide a concrete timeline for when your specific app(s) will be finished with the process I'm guessing, AI slots invading the store.
- busymom0 20d ago
  I've had same experience. Brand new iOS apps are taking weeks. My latest all took 3 weeks to get reviewed and approved. Updates to existing apps are fast though (1-2 days). Also, sometimes, apps will go in review and then just stay in that state for 3-4 days before approval. No idea why.
- techterrier 19d ago
  theres's hordes of sloppycats in every vertical. Check out how many birding apps have come out in the last 12 months for example
- hbn 19d ago
  I'm sure submissions have absolutely skyrocketed with model advancements since the beginning of the year. I'd be curious to see the numbers. I know Github's commit numbers have been pretty staggering YoY.
  - trymas 19d ago
    Yup, my bets are on this. It’s not only github that gets ~order of magnitude more PRs and commits, but probably app stores too. Wonder how it will change app stores for the future.
nixarn 20d ago
I know this is quite the controversial idea. But I'd personally love a fee per app, just to counter spam, say 100usd/app.
micromacrofoot 20d ago
Everyone that ingests code is seeing an order of magnitude more of it thanks to LLMs, even existing apps are producing more updates. It's the same sort of thing github keeps failing to keep up with.
wklm 20d ago
Strong argument in favor of web vs native apps. If you need bluetooth on iOS checkout the web bluetooth iOS safari extension i've been working on recently: https://beacio.com https://beacio.com
- nchmy 20d ago
  Yes, a truly Open Web is the solution that we need. It already works everywhere with a single codebase, and is more secure and private than native apps. But Apple prevents that by forcing all browsers to use terrible WebKit on iOS. Endless more information on all of this at https://infrequently.org/series/browser-choice-must-matter/ https://infrequently.org/series/browser-choice-must-matter/ https://open-web-advocacy.org https://open-web-advocacy.org
  - CharlesW 19d ago
    Note that Alex Russell is a Blink partisan, currently supporting Blink at Microsoft and formerly having done so at Google. Folks like that don't take kindly to the idea that a Blink monoculture might not be a great thing, and definitely do not share the opinion that it's critical to the open web that Apple not cede the open web to Blink. Remember, Blink began as Google's 2013 fork of WebKit. They've embraced and extended it, but thankfully the "extinguish" step is taking longer than they thought. This makes the "open web, as long as it's my engine" people upset. Safari's PWA support is not as complete as Chrome's today, but it's as good as Firefox's support and perfectly capable of supporting rich, standards-based apps. https://pwascore.com/ https://pwascore.com/
    - nchmy 19d ago
      The fact that your "argument" rests upon baseless ad hominem, I'm mostly inclined to not even respond. I'll simply say that if you bothered reading anything (let alone objectively), you'd clearly see that no one is arguing for a blink monoculture. They're arguing for allowing everyone to choose whichever browser and browser engine that you want. Safari included. The math isnt mathing on that site... And, no, safari is NOT capable of PWAs - which is the primary point of contention (not obscure APIs, though safari generally lags in all of that as well). They deliberately hobble PWAs and make them very difficult to install. edit: also, your site is just obviously biased/poorly done, because there exist many better comparisons of web features, which show how vastly far behind Safari is, often even of Firefox. This is unsurprising given your chosen style of rhetoric https://wpt.fyi/ https://wpt.fyi/ https://webstatus.dev/ https://webstatus.dev/
surcap526 20d ago
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greysonp 20d ago
With Signal, the biggest issue we have is that review times are extremely inconsistent. Sometimes it's 4 hours, sometimes it's 5 days, and there's no visibility as to why. Our working theory is that there's automated and manual queues, and occasionally, for whatever reason, we fall into the manual queue. But when you work on an app that has weekly updates, randomly getting hit with a review time of several days really throws off your groove. And it can obviously be terrible for moments where you're fixing a critical issue.
- joshuakcockrell 19d ago
  I agree with this. I had a production Play Store submission approved within 4 hours last week. It feels so random.
- LilBytes 19d ago
  Thank you for Signal <3
- busymom0 19d ago
  Has it ever happened where your submission goes to review and then just sits in the "In Review" state for many days? I am talking 4-5 days? or sometimes longer than a week? And then it gets approved? That's been happening randomly to me.
- voakbasda 19d ago
  I hope someone will sue the ever-loving shit out of Apple when their foot dragging prevents a critical update from going out in time to prevent a 0-day from being widely exploited.
  - deleted 19d ago
    [deleted]
  - neilv 19d ago
    Interesting. And all the history of Kafkaesque review interactions that various developers have had could be subpoenaed, as evidence of a pattern: that delays aren't necessarily due to excellence and good faith.
davidmurdoch 20d ago
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 in serious trouble, rightfully so, and the app was removed by Google, then an investigation followed. A ton of copycat apps popped up immediately after, then a few months months later Google announced their app review process.
- DrammBA 19d ago
  I love how casually you're dropping this incredible piece of internet lore as if somebody asked you how's the weather.
  - davidmurdoch 19d ago
    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.
    - fnikacevic 19d ago
      If you're inspired to rehash it here or another blog you'll have at least this additional reader.
      - davidmurdoch 19d ago
        https://web.archive.org/web/20220119132757/https://davidmurdoch.com/2017/08/05/about-my-dead-side-project-cashify/ https://web.archive.org/web/20220119132757/https://davidmurd...
    - eks391 19d 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.
torutofu 20d ago
A week-plus review queue basically kills any chance of a quick hotfix for a free app.
dminor 20d ago
Our app rarely takes longer than a day, but it doesn't have Android Auto support so maybe that's the difference?
wiradikusuma 19d ago
Yea I noticed that as well. Even longer than Apple's. FYI Samsung's is even worse.. 6-8 weeks. Hope you get it right the first time you submit your app. I submitted Signage Sync (https://signagesync.app https://signagesync.app) last year, still on my third review. Fingers crossed:)
- sanitycheck 19d ago
  Yep, I always expect 2-3 months to get an app onto Samsung TVs and those are just variants of a white-label base which already passed their QA multiple times. LG is even worse for the initial review but they accept redirects to hosted apps so at least there's no need to ever deal with them again after launch.
tnolet 19d ago
That's quick. The Slack App review takes 10+ weeks.
BIGFOOT_EXISTS 19d ago
I'm not familiar with this space (new to Android), could someone explain why there hasn't been additional "app stores" appear that people can use?
- NickHirras 19d ago
  There have been, but most non-technical users don't care or don't go through the hassle of using them.
  - BIGFOOT_EXISTS 19d ago
    Is there any that I should be looking into?
    - jprjr_ 19d ago
      F-droid is the biggest one
      - freedomben 19d ago
        Check out droidify or neo store for a better front end to f-droid
        nosioptar 19d ago
        I use Foxy Droid. It's unfortunate the official f-droid client is an unusable mess. (I stopped using it years ago, maybe they fixed it.) There's also f-droid classic, can't remember why I use foxy droid over it.
      - charcircuit 19d ago
        The Huawei AppGallery is hundreds of times bigger.
- rnotaro 19d ago
  It's coming soon. Android have been pushed to accept third-party app stores. A new era for choice and openness : https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2026/03/a-new-era-for-choice-and-openness.html https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2026/03/a-new-era-...
shevy-java 19d ago
Why do people still want to make Google more powerful? I don't get it. Legislation must allow for break up of monopolies such as google play.
NickHirras 19d ago
Sometimes several weeks in my recent submissions.
mococa 19d ago
IMO/IME (as former mobile developer) mobile app development is obliterated. This is fight for big dogs now.
deleted 19d ago
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bilalq 19d ago
FWIW, this has not been my experience. Google Play usually approves within 24 hours for me still. Apple has been taking over a week though. When Shopify announced their shift from React Native, this is actually what was on top of mind for me. Week+ delays for critical bugfixes is insane. Being able to patch things with OTA updates is tablestakes at this point.
bpx51 19d ago
Interestingly, I published a completely new app yesterday, and it was reviewed and published in less than 2 hours.
p2detar 19d ago
We should write more web apps, more PWAs and have some sort of a way to distribute those without proprietary app stores. It's true not every mobile app can be a web app, but for a lot of cases web apps work great.
jimmydoe 19d ago
If you know how many get rich quick guru online are teaching people vibes code and submit apps and faceshift to other apps later, you won’t be surprised the App Store model is no longer sustainable.
deminature 19d ago
Maybe I'm just incredibly lucky, but my reviews on Google Play take roughly an hour and appear to be entirely automated. My initial review was about a week, but everything after that has been 1hr. My Apple reviews are still around a day and my initial review was one month. The Google process is painless and is almost as easy as a web deploy, the Apple process feels much less certain that it will go smoothly and Apple actually regularly opens the app even months after release. This is presumably to check for problematic UGC, but feels rather unnerving.
- ryantgtg 19d ago
  Exact same situation for us. Google just seems to fly through and fill out a bunch of forms (we had to include a condition where if the google tester credentials logs in, we switch the app to the staging API). And then it's live within the hour.
tzone 19d ago
This is one part where it should really just be done by AI for 99% of the cases. Just have a security focused AI model that is biased towards flagging things a bit more conservatively. Only apps that get flagged by the AI reviewer then have to go through a separate, slower human review process.
bbx 19d ago
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 a service to test my app. On iOS, the process is a bit more obscure. It's fairly easy to submit an app, but then you don't really know what's happening. You can only see a status like "Pending review". And then one day, you are approved. Overall, the iOS process felt easier for me. As long as your build succeeds and you provide the correct information, your game can be live within a week. The Android process took more than a month in total. [1] https://jgthms.com/hopera/ https://jgthms.com/hopera/
- hamilton_app 19d ago
  Finding 12 testers was a struggle for my app [1]. Had to use a mix of LinkedIn begging, work colleagues, friends, and people from random Whatsapp groups I was in. Once you get over that hurdle for your first release, at least you don't have to do it for every update. The Play Console is a bit fiddly and I'm always getting random warnings that I need to comply with some new rule by an arbitrary date or my app will get delisted. [1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.gads.hamilton https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.gads.hamil...
- Steve16384 19d ago
  > but can be overwhelming That's an understatement and a half. It's massively over engineered and complicated, especially when compared with (say) the dashboard on Itch.
- id00 19d ago
  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
okokwhatever 19d ago
This will only change once a new player rises. We live in a world full of blind consumers that won't look out of the Google and Apple walled gardens.
okokwhatever 19d ago
In fact, I'd support Google with this policies if they'd also take full accountability if my phone gets hacked. Do they? No, so it's unfair and a bad authoritarian way to create another walled garden.
adamddev1 19d ago
I just pulled a PWA app off the app store and I am going to keep it a pure PWA. It's installable, offline-first. I know I feel like I'm swimming against the current but I would love people to try to push for awareness of PWA installs more.
- nosioptar 19d ago
  I'd love to see people distribute their apks directly. Itch.io is an option for people who don't want to set up a site or handle payments. While they focus on games, they're cool with distributing non-games: https://itch.io/blog/32835/itchio-isnt-just-for-games-check-out-our-non-gaming-content https://itch.io/blog/32835/itchio-isnt-just-for-games-check-...
  - hikashop-nicola 16d ago
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- rnotaro 19d ago
  I personally have a TrustedWebActivity. Most update doesn't need a review because I only need to update server-side. Behave like a PWA while being an Android App. (And you can implement Android Auto, other native stuff) It allows the users to discover my web app through the Google Play Store. My app was also available as a PWA but I mostly push the TWA currently.
shimfish 19d ago
Anecdata: I've pushed out dozens of small code fixes to My PlayHome Plus over the past month and none of them took more than a few hours to be reviewed.
gadders 19d ago
Can confirm. Took about 8 days for my last app update, and about 5 or 6 for the Play Store listing update. As someone new to the app publishing world I am surprised at how strict the requirements are, given the absolute dross you can find published.
maelito 19d ago
Meanwhile, the Web is ever more powerful. But now Android and iOS users expect to find things in the App store only.
m00dy 19d ago
I just submitted an open source android passive income app [0]. It's been two weeks and I'm still waiting. It's my first app though. [0]: https://github.com/proxybasehq/proxybase-gui https://github.com/proxybasehq/proxybase-gui
Shywim 19d ago
I think that the app targeting Android Auto should be pointed out. Google Play reviews are mostly automated and it shouldn't take more than a few hours. Android Auto is heavily curated for good reasons.
IvanK_net 19d ago
My tool is used by 1 million people a day https://www.photopea.com 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.org/show_bug.cgi?id=268816 https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=268816
- focusedone 19d ago
  If you are the photopea developer, you are a true hero. Thank you for your work!
  - IvanK_net 19d ago
    Thank you! :)
- egeozcan 19d ago
  I created a much more basic version of photopea (https://egeozcan.github.io/ketchup/ https://egeozcan.github.io/ketchup/) because I didn't even know it existed. This is very cool and fast!
  - IvanK_net 19d ago
    Nice! :)
    - egeozcan 18d ago
      It's nothing more than a "hello world" project in comparison to what you shipped. Photopea is crazy good! Anyway, thanks!
- IshKebab 19d ago
  In fairness is that really a bug? All apps are deliberately limited to a couple of GB on Android (depending on how much total RAM you have). It would be pretty annoying if a random website can just DoS your phone by using all your RAM.
h14h 19d ago
This is a big part of why React Native (and especially EAS) is still my preferred native development platform. The ability to ship OTA updates directly without depending on platform reviews & rollout schedules is a killer feature I'm not sure I could live without.
flcikfinder 19d ago
[flagged]
okasaki 19d ago
> AI is becoming part of how people experience the web every day. We want to make sure that doesn’t mean people are chained to one company’s self-serving pipeline. Ah yes, the extremely diverse offering of OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, Microsoft, and Mistral (a fake "euro" chatbot). Mozilla is truly a "people's" company.
postsantum 19d ago
Depends on how trusted account/apps are. I have some old apps that are reviewed in 2-3 hours every time
NeoByte 19d ago
[dead]
habosa 19d ago
Making Android apps was my introduction to publishing software. I remember in ~2011-2012 you could upload an APK and it would be published immediately and the Android Market had a "New" page which was just a chronological feed of recently published or updated apps. Just uploading your app update was an easy way to get ~500 free downloads which I found very exciting. At the time I couldn't imagine paying $99 for an Apple Developer account and waiting a week to publish my app...
BigBalli 19d ago
not my experience... I have most updates go through in <24h.
corentin88 19d ago
In the opposite, Google Chrome extensions are now reviewed in a few hours, sometimes less than one hour.
myko 19d ago
Google's review is complete horseshit. It has been darkly funny to watch them try to compete with Apple by adding strict review (way stricter than Apple's) and still terrible applications make it in while legitimate ones have trouble. Just go back to the way it was before, and scan the apps with static analysis tools. This security theater is stupid and always was (for Apple and Google).
masonwan 19d ago
If developers want to get the same processing speed, are we ready to pay as much as we pay for Apple App Store?
vesterde 19d ago
Still trying to get a Play Store page with stats onto my AI Impact page, but if their numbers are anything like Apple's (and they're likely much higher), then it's a tough life for them right now: https://vester.si/ai-impact/appstore/ https://vester.si/ai-impact/appstore/
Aulig 19d ago
I've published hundreds of apps over the past 6 years and Google's review times had a similar spike during covid. It took a very long time to recover but now it's back to being bad, I can confirm that. I wrote about it a while ago, might be time to upsate that post. https://webtoapp.design/blog/time-to-publish-apps https://webtoapp.design/blog/time-to-publish-apps
- jspann 19d ago
  Hang on. You've published hundreds of apps? As in the same thing slightly modified several times?
  - tredre3 19d ago
    Indeed their product is an app that is little more than a webview that only shows one website, with optional value-add features. They handle publishing for the client, hence the hundreds. https://webtoapp.design/ https://webtoapp.design/
dalemhurley 19d ago
Strange. I had an app the other day approved in hours on Google 15 days on Apple.
victords 19d ago
I started coding around 2013, picked up a book, learned Java and started building Android apps. It was fun at the time, and pretty painless to get your app in the store. Fast forward to last year, with all the rage about coding tools, I got into building small projects again, and built a simple app. After a decade from posting my last app on Google Play I resurrected my account, and started going through the process of publishing an app today... And how awful things got! Back then it was essentially, title, description, upload your Apk and some screenshots and you're done! Now there are reviews, privacy policy, endless amount of forms and information you need to fill out. I get why (some) things are the way they are today, but when you just want to make an app for fun, getting it out there just feels like work. I gave up on the app, made it into a website, and in the end it actually felt better (and so much easier).
mvdtnz 19d ago
Stop deploying software onto closed platforms. There's no excuse.
- oblio 19d ago
  I find it super funny that all sorts of garbage goes into the AppStore, PlayStore. They both make ridiculous amounts of money, immense profit margins, I don't remember how much, they never publish the numbers, but likely in the 60-70%. And yet there are STILL tons of developers defending app stores.
lta 19d ago
The joy of a world with a duopoly reigning over a strategic core market We're really into the South Park cliché: Anal douche or Shit Sandwich. I wish regulators across the world did something about this, but even Europe shy attempts aren't moving the market in a better direction. It's depressing to see a company that thrived from the open internet becoming such an evil piece of cyberpunk lore. I mean... Nobody really expected Apple to care about anything else than its bottom line. But I'm not alone to have had hopes about Google. When I die, I think not fighting Google when it was still time will be one of the regrets I'll drag into my grave.
Studui81Labs 19d ago
[flagged]
vnetmap 18d ago
Could this be partly caused by the explosion of AI-assisted app development? It feels like almost anyone can now build an app and get something publishable within a few days. If the number of submissions has grown significantly, it would make sense that the Play Store review queue is getting longer. AI may have made building the app much faster, while unintentionally making the final step slower for everyone. Personally, I think the review process should prioritize updates to apps that have already been published for a long time over completely new apps or apps that were only submitted recently. At least that would make it less painful for established apps waiting for a routine update to get through the review process.
ibrahmAly 18d ago
yo, it was usually taking two hours max..now i released two ios verosions while android one still under review.. w.t.f google

261 points by inputmice 20d ago

skeledrew 20d ago

Sounds like a clear "find another store" message to me.

RicoElectrico 20d ago

Same happened for CoMaps (which unfortunately does not have 12+ years of presence going for it)

lecarore 20d ago

The google review process is the best advertising for f-droid there could ever be.

allthetime 19d ago
I have three apps on the Play Store, they all take a couple hours to pass review and their auto-testing/review systems often catch little bugs I didn't almost immediately. Getting a new app on the store is a bit cumbersome, but it should be.

jadar 19d ago

I haven't pushed an update since June, but this has not been my recent experience...

deleted 20d ago

[deleted]

Pr0Ger 20d ago

Longer than an average App Store review (which is heavily criticized for being too long)? Hilarious

gyomu 20d ago
I believe the App Store has switched to automated reviews, at least for updates. I've had my app updates approved in <1h on a regular basis starting this summer.
- hobofan 20d ago
  From what I was able to see from the outside, App Store has had semi-automated reviews for updates in basically forever (+ some random spot checks), presumably based on some introspection that only triggers a human review if a new system API was used.
- hikashop-nicola 16d ago
  Yes. And the Play Store now takes several days for approval for updates of existing apps.

Jyaif 20d ago

I just updated 2 dormant apps for the first time in 10 years; It took 2 days, and the apps were approved on a sunday.

hnisjafx40 20d ago

F-Droid's great but their build queue has had multi week waits too, difference is you can see exactly where your build is stuck instead of guessing.

collabs 20d ago
You can also choose to host your own repositories like futo and new pipe do.
- skeledrew 20d ago
  Hopefully the process is straight forward so others can easily pick it up.
- account42 20d ago
  Part of the value of F-Droid is the curated distribution model that hopefully catches the worst behaving developers that think they have a god given right to your data though.

hollow-moe 20d ago

Now, let's compare with "google friendly" apps: https://www.apkmirror.com/uploads/?appcategory=youtube https://www.apkmirror.com/uploads/?appcategory=youtube :)

eviks 20d ago
It took the whole year before v21 was finally approved, so seems only fair they publish minor v21 revisions multiple times a day!
cube00 20d ago
21.37.42-SECONDARY is an interesting version number, don't they like final-final2 in their version numbers?

JimDabell 20d ago

The Google Play review process has been slower and more painful than the App Store review process for 5+ years at this point. At least you get to communicate with real people at Apple; it’s all bot-driven with Google.

flerchin 19d ago
What are bots doing for two weeks

tehlike 20d ago

Huh. On the flip side, googles release infra provides much more functionality for apps that already has scale. I wish apple were more production oriented too.

david_allison 20d ago

AnkiDroid (~17 years old) submitted our latest alpha on Sept 03, 2026, 4:40 am. Still pending review.

RugnirViking 20d ago
thanks for your app! using it for learning danish and finding it very useful.
- david_allison 20d ago
  Team effort, but thank you!! I've just taken the next month and a half off to work on things full time. I'm excited! The next update won't be huge, (Google required us to make all screens 'edge to edge'[0], which took up most of my time last month). I'm hoping for some solid improvements now that's out the way, once the release pipeline has returned to normal. Feel free to get in touch if you fancy contributing. [0] https://developer.android.com/develop/ui/views/layout/edge-to-edge https://developer.android.com/develop/ui/views/layout/edge-t...
  - fhub 20d ago
    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 have this sort of baseline. A lot of changes are really quite pleasant. I often ask for an HTML gallery of screenshots covering a few device sizes as the step before I bother running it on a device myself.
    - david_allison 20d ago
      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 outcome. Given that my Pixel 9 Pro has system screens which are still broken under edge to edge, it's not an easy change, and takes up time which could have been going towards feature development. [0] https://github.com/takahirom/roborazzi/ https://github.com/takahirom/roborazzi/

gman83 20d ago

This isn't my experience. My updates usually get accepted within hours. Apple takes days usually.

wouldbecouldbe 20d ago

For new accounts yes, for older accounts it's much faster in my experience. Apple has it's own issues, they often just answer with a random question so they can kick the review down the line. "Are you sure this is your pricing?" "Can you confifrm you have not selected that country" and then you have to wait another 2 days.

account42 20d ago
TFA is a post from an established developer and showing a screenshot for the submission of an update to a longstanding app (Conversations XMPP chat client).
- wouldbecouldbe 19d ago
  My experience. I submit about 20-30 apps per year

fhub 20d ago

Some reviews are clearly automated, some get a light human review, and some involve a human really looking hard. New apps seem to get a more rigorous human review for their first 2-4 submissions. Or at least humans looking over automated test screenshots etc. One reviewer apparently only looked at screenshots because they missed something that would be blindingly obvious on the prior screen if they did it themselves. The explosion in LLM app development has clearly created a bottleneck at the human review steps. Not only delays but much more “dumb” rejections from likely over-stressed humans.

Gareth321 20d ago

MAYBE operating systems shouldn't have gatekeepers which can deny access to billions of customers for any and no reason at all. Apple and Google are WELL past due for regulation in this space. The fact that we cannot download and install software from the internet onto our phones JUST like we can do with our computers is a symbol of our inept and ineffective politicians. And before someone says "well akshully you can technically do it on Android," Google has been working tirelessly to make it as onerous as possible for both developers and customers. For example, users need to separately authorise each app (browser, files manager, alternative store, etc) to install an APK from outside the Play Store. Google also does background scans using "Play Protect" which will periodically delete apps Google doesn't approve of. This happened to me with SmartTubeNext. I have a dozen other ways Google ensures users are discouraged from stepping outside the Play Store.

deleted 20d ago
[deleted]
setgree 20d ago
And what should we do about apps' getting hacked, sending out malicious updates that get auto-updated and thereby infecting tens of millions or billions of phones simultaneously? I'm not saying we have the perfect system but anything that slants the system towards "easier downloads" or "less gatekeeping" brings large, obvious risks. I don't see how regulation would address them.
- post-it 20d ago
  How would a reviewer catch that?
- Maskawanian 20d ago
  How about treating people like adults for a start? How about starting public awareness campaigns about proper digital hygiene. Not everything has to be nanny state garbage.
  - pjmlp 20d ago

polotics 20d ago

yeah my 'promptly AI' alarm clock almost always spends 7 days, as soon as the binary changes, even descriptions changes take several days

jmkni 20d ago

I've noticed this Google Play is regularly slower now than App Store Connect, which never used to be the case

calyhre 20d ago

Not sure how it works behind the scene, but our app (present on the store since 2018) is taking a couple hours at best with Google, and usually less than 24h with Apple. Very much likely an automated triage based on code change or complexity.

zoobab 20d ago

A public FTP server is next app store.

carlosjobim 20d ago

Why can't you wait for a week? That doesn't sound like a long time.

randyrand 20d ago
For a critical bug fix, a week can be a very long time.
- cute_boi 19d ago
  with ai agents and everything even hours can be a long time. I think google playstore should be responsible for all the damages...
tehlike 20d ago
For apps with a scale, it's a long time
- carlosjobim 20d ago
  Because? People wait far longer for much more important things in real life.
  - tehlike 20d ago
    Speed is money. Yes people wait for 9 months for having a baby, doesn't mean you should wait 9 months for an app release. That is not a sound logic.
    - carlosjobim 19d ago
      Yes, but one week to wait for your app is nothing to complain about.
      - cute_boi 19d ago
        Sometime there are 0 days etc.. So, maybe you should have broader view on things instead of simple assumption.

0dayman 20d ago

[dead]

basisword 20d ago

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.

joshstrange 20d ago
> 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)
- bpx51 19d ago
  Same happened to me yesterday, I published a new app and it was reviewed and published within a few hours without any beta testing. but I think this is why I see people ready to buy old playstore accounts for real money, maybe this only affects new accounts
- brewtide 19d ago
  I'm just working on my first app (thanks to AI...) and if you have a new dev account created sometime after 2023 they are making you do a 12 person, 14 day beta run before anything else occurs, apparently.
  - joshcartme 19d ago
    It gets worse! If Google decides the people in your test don't engage enough and/or you didn't respond to their feedback, they may not give you production access. I've got a game that's available on iOS, I released there first and did lots of testing to deal with the low-hanging bugs. After doing the 14 day test Google emailed me: Possible reasons why your production access could not be granted include: - Testers were not engaged with your app during your closed test - You didn't follow testing best practices, which may include gathering and acting on user feedback through updates to your app
- 19d ago

mrjeeves 20d ago

Our app includes Android Auto, which I think is what causes it for us. Submitted 4 Sept, still in review. Was only 48-72 hours until this year, where it randomly jumped to 2 weeks or longer like it still is. It's really frustrating, and makes it very difficult to develop with, let alone reliably release features across platforms.

rnotaro 19d ago
I suspect the same issue; I added Android Auto to my application on the latest release and the version I pushed on Sept 3th is still under review.

pastk 20d ago

Yeap latest CoMaps update took ~16 days to review (the longest wait for us so far) and two support tickets (submitted first after ~9 days and got "we have expedited it", 5 days later still in review, so submitted one more ticket). Before that we had a hotfix update (a very small change) and still it took longer than a week and a support ticket (after which it had been approved in a day)...

tananaev 20d ago

I think inconsistency is really annoying. Hard to rely on it. Most of our reviews clear with a couple hours, but sometimes it gets stuck for days.

Frieren 20d ago
This is why goverments have appeal processes and layers of tribunals. To be judged and found guilty by a corporation takes away all your rights.
- robocat 19d ago
  Do you happen to live in a country where your government departments are known for rapid processing? (not weeks of delay like we're talking about here). I generally see my legal system create severe delays (regardless of how much that victimises or costs everyone involved)
  - Frieren 19d ago
    > I generally see my legal system create severe delays Better a delay that getting your account closed without recourse. But you are right, years of conservative governments have starved the government and its services are slower than they should around the west world.

guzik 20d ago

We push updates for our app pretty frequently and they've been passing review in an average time of 1 hour (around 7 updates in the last 60 days). Hope it stays that way.

joshstrange 20d ago

Apple's App Review has also been slipping over the past few months. I have multiple apps that have taken days, up to a week to be approved. What's most galling is that if you use CapacitorJS or similar you can ship app updates instantly to your users but if you write native first-class OS citizen apps you are penalized. There is nothing quite so annoying as having a fix for a bug people are running into and have zero control over when it will get out to them.

abroszka33 20d ago

You would think that with the AGI that these companies are hyping the review happens in minutes. Weird.

pintxo 20d ago
Guess both are excused for not having up to the par approaches available.

Unified-Mentor 20d ago

[dead]

bryanwexler 20d ago

[dead]

abricq 20d ago

By the way, the same is happening for the Apple Store. Their review process is advocated as usually within 24 hours (and heavily advertised by Apple as such, see https://developer.apple.com/distribute/app-review/ https://developer.apple.com/distribute/app-review/) and it is taking now much longer. In the last month, I had to go through the review process twice, and twice I needed to contact them personally after waiting for 1 week of waiting. It did however helped, after every human contact I was reviewed within a few hours. I got this explanation from them... > We are currently experiencing a higher-than-normal amount of inquiries and have been unable to respond in the time frame that we would prefer. During these periods of high volume, the app review time will take longer than average, and we cannot currently provide a concrete timeline for when your specific app(s) will be finished with the process I'm guessing, AI slots invading the store.

busymom0 20d ago
I've had same experience. Brand new iOS apps are taking weeks. My latest all took 3 weeks to get reviewed and approved. Updates to existing apps are fast though (1-2 days). Also, sometimes, apps will go in review and then just stay in that state for 3-4 days before approval. No idea why.
techterrier 19d ago
theres's hordes of sloppycats in every vertical. Check out how many birding apps have come out in the last 12 months for example
hbn 19d ago
I'm sure submissions have absolutely skyrocketed with model advancements since the beginning of the year. I'd be curious to see the numbers. I know Github's commit numbers have been pretty staggering YoY.
- trymas 19d ago
  Yup, my bets are on this. It’s not only github that gets ~order of magnitude more PRs and commits, but probably app stores too. Wonder how it will change app stores for the future.

nixarn 20d ago

I know this is quite the controversial idea. But I'd personally love a fee per app, just to counter spam, say 100usd/app.

micromacrofoot 20d ago

Everyone that ingests code is seeing an order of magnitude more of it thanks to LLMs, even existing apps are producing more updates. It's the same sort of thing github keeps failing to keep up with.

wklm 20d ago

Strong argument in favor of web vs native apps. If you need bluetooth on iOS checkout the web bluetooth iOS safari extension i've been working on recently: https://beacio.com https://beacio.com

nchmy 20d ago
Yes, a truly Open Web is the solution that we need. It already works everywhere with a single codebase, and is more secure and private than native apps. But Apple prevents that by forcing all browsers to use terrible WebKit on iOS. Endless more information on all of this at https://infrequently.org/series/browser-choice-must-matter/ https://infrequently.org/series/browser-choice-must-matter/ https://open-web-advocacy.org https://open-web-advocacy.org
- CharlesW 19d ago
  Note that Alex Russell is a Blink partisan, currently supporting Blink at Microsoft and formerly having done so at Google. Folks like that don't take kindly to the idea that a Blink monoculture might not be a great thing, and definitely do not share the opinion that it's critical to the open web that Apple not cede the open web to Blink. Remember, Blink began as Google's 2013 fork of WebKit. They've embraced and extended it, but thankfully the "extinguish" step is taking longer than they thought. This makes the "open web, as long as it's my engine" people upset. Safari's PWA support is not as complete as Chrome's today, but it's as good as Firefox's support and perfectly capable of supporting rich, standards-based apps. https://pwascore.com/ https://pwascore.com/
  - nchmy 19d ago
    The fact that your "argument" rests upon baseless ad hominem, I'm mostly inclined to not even respond. I'll simply say that if you bothered reading anything (let alone objectively), you'd clearly see that no one is arguing for a blink monoculture. They're arguing for allowing everyone to choose whichever browser and browser engine that you want. Safari included. The math isnt mathing on that site... And, no, safari is NOT capable of PWAs - which is the primary point of contention (not obscure APIs, though safari generally lags in all of that as well). They deliberately hobble PWAs and make them very difficult to install. edit: also, your site is just obviously biased/poorly done, because there exist many better comparisons of web features, which show how vastly far behind Safari is, often even of Firefox. This is unsurprising given your chosen style of rhetoric https://wpt.fyi/ https://wpt.fyi/ https://webstatus.dev/ https://webstatus.dev/

surcap526 20d ago

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greysonp 20d ago

With Signal, the biggest issue we have is that review times are extremely inconsistent. Sometimes it's 4 hours, sometimes it's 5 days, and there's no visibility as to why. Our working theory is that there's automated and manual queues, and occasionally, for whatever reason, we fall into the manual queue. But when you work on an app that has weekly updates, randomly getting hit with a review time of several days really throws off your groove. And it can obviously be terrible for moments where you're fixing a critical issue.

joshuakcockrell 19d ago
I agree with this. I had a production Play Store submission approved within 4 hours last week. It feels so random.
LilBytes 19d ago
Thank you for Signal <3
busymom0 19d ago
Has it ever happened where your submission goes to review and then just sits in the "In Review" state for many days? I am talking 4-5 days? or sometimes longer than a week? And then it gets approved? That's been happening randomly to me.
voakbasda 19d ago
I hope someone will sue the ever-loving shit out of Apple when their foot dragging prevents a critical update from going out in time to prevent a 0-day from being widely exploited.
- deleted 19d ago
  [deleted]
- neilv 19d ago
  Interesting. And all the history of Kafkaesque review interactions that various developers have had could be subpoenaed, as evidence of a pattern: that delays aren't necessarily due to excellence and good faith.

davidmurdoch 20d ago

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 in serious trouble, rightfully so, and the app was removed by Google, then an investigation followed. A ton of copycat apps popped up immediately after, then a few months months later Google announced their app review process.

DrammBA 19d ago
I love how casually you're dropping this incredible piece of internet lore as if somebody asked you how's the weather.
- davidmurdoch 19d ago
  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.
  - fnikacevic 19d ago
    If you're inspired to rehash it here or another blog you'll have at least this additional reader.
    - davidmurdoch 19d ago
      https://web.archive.org/web/20220119132757/https://davidmurdoch.com/2017/08/05/about-my-dead-side-project-cashify/ https://web.archive.org/web/20220119132757/https://davidmurd...
  - eks391 19d 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.

torutofu 20d ago

A week-plus review queue basically kills any chance of a quick hotfix for a free app.

dminor 20d ago

Our app rarely takes longer than a day, but it doesn't have Android Auto support so maybe that's the difference?

wiradikusuma 19d ago

Yea I noticed that as well. Even longer than Apple's. FYI Samsung's is even worse.. 6-8 weeks. Hope you get it right the first time you submit your app. I submitted Signage Sync (https://signagesync.app https://signagesync.app) last year, still on my third review. Fingers crossed:)

sanitycheck 19d ago
Yep, I always expect 2-3 months to get an app onto Samsung TVs and those are just variants of a white-label base which already passed their QA multiple times. LG is even worse for the initial review but they accept redirects to hosted apps so at least there's no need to ever deal with them again after launch.

tnolet 19d ago

That's quick. The Slack App review takes 10+ weeks.

BIGFOOT_EXISTS 19d ago

I'm not familiar with this space (new to Android), could someone explain why there hasn't been additional "app stores" appear that people can use?

NickHirras 19d ago
There have been, but most non-technical users don't care or don't go through the hassle of using them.
- BIGFOOT_EXISTS 19d ago
  Is there any that I should be looking into?
  - jprjr_ 19d ago
    F-droid is the biggest one
    - freedomben 19d ago
      Check out droidify or neo store for a better front end to f-droid
      - nosioptar 19d ago
        I use Foxy Droid. It's unfortunate the official f-droid client is an unusable mess. (I stopped using it years ago, maybe they fixed it.) There's also f-droid classic, can't remember why I use foxy droid over it.
    - charcircuit 19d ago
      The Huawei AppGallery is hundreds of times bigger.
rnotaro 19d ago
It's coming soon. Android have been pushed to accept third-party app stores. A new era for choice and openness : https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2026/03/a-new-era-for-choice-and-openness.html https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2026/03/a-new-era-...

shevy-java 19d ago

Why do people still want to make Google more powerful? I don't get it. Legislation must allow for break up of monopolies such as google play.

NickHirras 19d ago

Sometimes several weeks in my recent submissions.

mococa 19d ago

IMO/IME (as former mobile developer) mobile app development is obliterated. This is fight for big dogs now.

deleted 19d ago

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bilalq 19d ago

FWIW, this has not been my experience. Google Play usually approves within 24 hours for me still. Apple has been taking over a week though. When Shopify announced their shift from React Native, this is actually what was on top of mind for me. Week+ delays for critical bugfixes is insane. Being able to patch things with OTA updates is tablestakes at this point.

bpx51 19d ago

Interestingly, I published a completely new app yesterday, and it was reviewed and published in less than 2 hours.

p2detar 19d ago

We should write more web apps, more PWAs and have some sort of a way to distribute those without proprietary app stores. It's true not every mobile app can be a web app, but for a lot of cases web apps work great.

jimmydoe 19d ago

If you know how many get rich quick guru online are teaching people vibes code and submit apps and faceshift to other apps later, you won’t be surprised the App Store model is no longer sustainable.

deminature 19d ago

Maybe I'm just incredibly lucky, but my reviews on Google Play take roughly an hour and appear to be entirely automated. My initial review was about a week, but everything after that has been 1hr. My Apple reviews are still around a day and my initial review was one month. The Google process is painless and is almost as easy as a web deploy, the Apple process feels much less certain that it will go smoothly and Apple actually regularly opens the app even months after release. This is presumably to check for problematic UGC, but feels rather unnerving.

ryantgtg 19d ago
Exact same situation for us. Google just seems to fly through and fill out a bunch of forms (we had to include a condition where if the google tester credentials logs in, we switch the app to the staging API). And then it's live within the hour.

tzone 19d ago

This is one part where it should really just be done by AI for 99% of the cases. Just have a security focused AI model that is biased towards flagging things a bit more conservatively. Only apps that get flagged by the AI reviewer then have to go through a separate, slower human review process.

bbx 19d ago

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 a service to test my app. On iOS, the process is a bit more obscure. It's fairly easy to submit an app, but then you don't really know what's happening. You can only see a status like "Pending review". And then one day, you are approved. Overall, the iOS process felt easier for me. As long as your build succeeds and you provide the correct information, your game can be live within a week. The Android process took more than a month in total. [1] https://jgthms.com/hopera/ https://jgthms.com/hopera/

hamilton_app 19d ago
Finding 12 testers was a struggle for my app [1]. Had to use a mix of LinkedIn begging, work colleagues, friends, and people from random Whatsapp groups I was in. Once you get over that hurdle for your first release, at least you don't have to do it for every update. The Play Console is a bit fiddly and I'm always getting random warnings that I need to comply with some new rule by an arbitrary date or my app will get delisted. [1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.gads.hamilton https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.gads.hamil...
Steve16384 19d ago
> but can be overwhelming That's an understatement and a half. It's massively over engineered and complicated, especially when compared with (say) the dashboard on Itch.
id00 19d ago
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

okokwhatever 19d ago

This will only change once a new player rises. We live in a world full of blind consumers that won't look out of the Google and Apple walled gardens.

okokwhatever 19d ago

In fact, I'd support Google with this policies if they'd also take full accountability if my phone gets hacked. Do they? No, so it's unfair and a bad authoritarian way to create another walled garden.

adamddev1 19d ago

I just pulled a PWA app off the app store and I am going to keep it a pure PWA. It's installable, offline-first. I know I feel like I'm swimming against the current but I would love people to try to push for awareness of PWA installs more.

nosioptar 19d ago
I'd love to see people distribute their apks directly. Itch.io is an option for people who don't want to set up a site or handle payments. While they focus on games, they're cool with distributing non-games: https://itch.io/blog/32835/itchio-isnt-just-for-games-check-out-our-non-gaming-content https://itch.io/blog/32835/itchio-isnt-just-for-games-check-...
- hikashop-nicola 16d ago
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rnotaro 19d ago
I personally have a TrustedWebActivity. Most update doesn't need a review because I only need to update server-side. Behave like a PWA while being an Android App. (And you can implement Android Auto, other native stuff) It allows the users to discover my web app through the Google Play Store. My app was also available as a PWA but I mostly push the TWA currently.

shimfish 19d ago

Anecdata: I've pushed out dozens of small code fixes to My PlayHome Plus over the past month and none of them took more than a few hours to be reviewed.

gadders 19d ago

Can confirm. Took about 8 days for my last app update, and about 5 or 6 for the Play Store listing update. As someone new to the app publishing world I am surprised at how strict the requirements are, given the absolute dross you can find published.

maelito 19d ago

Meanwhile, the Web is ever more powerful. But now Android and iOS users expect to find things in the App store only.

m00dy 19d ago

I just submitted an open source android passive income app [0]. It's been two weeks and I'm still waiting. It's my first app though. [0]: https://github.com/proxybasehq/proxybase-gui https://github.com/proxybasehq/proxybase-gui

Shywim 19d ago

I think that the app targeting Android Auto should be pointed out. Google Play reviews are mostly automated and it shouldn't take more than a few hours. Android Auto is heavily curated for good reasons.

IvanK_net 19d ago

My tool is used by 1 million people a day https://www.photopea.com 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.org/show_bug.cgi?id=268816 https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=268816

focusedone 19d ago
If you are the photopea developer, you are a true hero. Thank you for your work!
- IvanK_net 19d ago
  Thank you! :)
egeozcan 19d ago
I created a much more basic version of photopea (https://egeozcan.github.io/ketchup/ https://egeozcan.github.io/ketchup/) because I didn't even know it existed. This is very cool and fast!
- IvanK_net 19d ago
  Nice! :)
  - egeozcan 18d ago
    It's nothing more than a "hello world" project in comparison to what you shipped. Photopea is crazy good! Anyway, thanks!
IshKebab 19d ago
In fairness is that really a bug? All apps are deliberately limited to a couple of GB on Android (depending on how much total RAM you have). It would be pretty annoying if a random website can just DoS your phone by using all your RAM.

h14h 19d ago

This is a big part of why React Native (and especially EAS) is still my preferred native development platform. The ability to ship OTA updates directly without depending on platform reviews & rollout schedules is a killer feature I'm not sure I could live without.

flcikfinder 19d ago

[flagged]

okasaki 19d ago

> AI is becoming part of how people experience the web every day. We want to make sure that doesn’t mean people are chained to one company’s self-serving pipeline. Ah yes, the extremely diverse offering of OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, Microsoft, and Mistral (a fake "euro" chatbot). Mozilla is truly a "people's" company.

postsantum 19d ago

Depends on how trusted account/apps are. I have some old apps that are reviewed in 2-3 hours every time

NeoByte 19d ago

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habosa 19d ago

Making Android apps was my introduction to publishing software. I remember in ~2011-2012 you could upload an APK and it would be published immediately and the Android Market had a "New" page which was just a chronological feed of recently published or updated apps. Just uploading your app update was an easy way to get ~500 free downloads which I found very exciting. At the time I couldn't imagine paying $99 for an Apple Developer account and waiting a week to publish my app...

BigBalli 19d ago

not my experience... I have most updates go through in <24h.

corentin88 19d ago

In the opposite, Google Chrome extensions are now reviewed in a few hours, sometimes less than one hour.

myko 19d ago

Google's review is complete horseshit. It has been darkly funny to watch them try to compete with Apple by adding strict review (way stricter than Apple's) and still terrible applications make it in while legitimate ones have trouble. Just go back to the way it was before, and scan the apps with static analysis tools. This security theater is stupid and always was (for Apple and Google).

masonwan 19d ago

If developers want to get the same processing speed, are we ready to pay as much as we pay for Apple App Store?

vesterde 19d ago

Still trying to get a Play Store page with stats onto my AI Impact page, but if their numbers are anything like Apple's (and they're likely much higher), then it's a tough life for them right now: https://vester.si/ai-impact/appstore/ https://vester.si/ai-impact/appstore/

Aulig 19d ago

I've published hundreds of apps over the past 6 years and Google's review times had a similar spike during covid. It took a very long time to recover but now it's back to being bad, I can confirm that. I wrote about it a while ago, might be time to upsate that post. https://webtoapp.design/blog/time-to-publish-apps https://webtoapp.design/blog/time-to-publish-apps

jspann 19d ago
Hang on. You've published hundreds of apps? As in the same thing slightly modified several times?
- tredre3 19d ago
  Indeed their product is an app that is little more than a webview that only shows one website, with optional value-add features. They handle publishing for the client, hence the hundreds. https://webtoapp.design/ https://webtoapp.design/

dalemhurley 19d ago

Strange. I had an app the other day approved in hours on Google 15 days on Apple.

victords 19d ago

I started coding around 2013, picked up a book, learned Java and started building Android apps. It was fun at the time, and pretty painless to get your app in the store. Fast forward to last year, with all the rage about coding tools, I got into building small projects again, and built a simple app. After a decade from posting my last app on Google Play I resurrected my account, and started going through the process of publishing an app today... And how awful things got! Back then it was essentially, title, description, upload your Apk and some screenshots and you're done! Now there are reviews, privacy policy, endless amount of forms and information you need to fill out. I get why (some) things are the way they are today, but when you just want to make an app for fun, getting it out there just feels like work. I gave up on the app, made it into a website, and in the end it actually felt better (and so much easier).

mvdtnz 19d ago

Stop deploying software onto closed platforms. There's no excuse.

oblio 19d ago
I find it super funny that all sorts of garbage goes into the AppStore, PlayStore. They both make ridiculous amounts of money, immense profit margins, I don't remember how much, they never publish the numbers, but likely in the 60-70%. And yet there are STILL tons of developers defending app stores.

lta 19d ago

The joy of a world with a duopoly reigning over a strategic core market We're really into the South Park cliché: Anal douche or Shit Sandwich. I wish regulators across the world did something about this, but even Europe shy attempts aren't moving the market in a better direction. It's depressing to see a company that thrived from the open internet becoming such an evil piece of cyberpunk lore. I mean... Nobody really expected Apple to care about anything else than its bottom line. But I'm not alone to have had hopes about Google. When I die, I think not fighting Google when it was still time will be one of the regrets I'll drag into my grave.

Studui81Labs 19d ago

[flagged]

vnetmap 18d ago

Could this be partly caused by the explosion of AI-assisted app development? It feels like almost anyone can now build an app and get something publishable within a few days. If the number of submissions has grown significantly, it would make sense that the Play Store review queue is getting longer. AI may have made building the app much faster, while unintentionally making the final step slower for everyone. Personally, I think the review process should prioritize updates to apps that have already been published for a long time over completely new apps or apps that were only submitted recently. At least that would make it less painful for established apps waiting for a routine update to get through the review process.

ibrahmAly 18d ago

yo, it was usually taking two hours max..now i released two ios verosions while android one still under review.. w.t.f google