Google Console closed testing requirements are awful
I have been coding for 2-3 years and decided to make my first mobile app, just something small and simple to get a feel for it.
I wanted to publish it to the play store, get exposure and share what I have made. I paid the $25 fee, submitted my passport and bank statements for ID verification, and started the process to get my app published.
Well, what a terrible experience. It is not user friendly at all, and the requirement of 20 testers opting in to your closed testing for 14 days makes very little sense. I have spent the last few days messaging people, doing the test swaps, and generally wasting my time.
I have seen, from searching to find places that I can recruit testers, a number of 'services' where you can simply pay to have your app 'tested'. The whole thing has been really off-putting, what is the point..?
I wanted to make a flutter app next, something more detailed and complex.. but I am dreading having to go through this process of 'closed testing', after spending months making a project, essentially spamming forums and chat groups for testers. I paid for access to the store, I submitted my ID documents, this arbitrary barrier is so frustrating and again, really puts me off making a mobile app..
I know I am shouting into the void here, I suppose I just wanted to vent. I think Google may just no longer want small/indie apps on the store. Only apps with sufficient monetary or corporate backing to have people test and maintain them. It's the end of an era for small developers. They can go submit their apps to F-Droid or Aptoide or whatever. That said, these alternative app stores need to be able to function properly on Android, without their apps being removed by Google Play Protect (which I think I've heard of happening). It's a dumb & very counter-productive policy and will choke off the supply of new Android devs. Ironically it's now much easier to launch a new app on the Apple App Store than it is on Android. I've done both and I'd say Apple is still lagging behind even with this stupid move from Google. It's hard to understate how little sense everything related to appstoreconnect and the dev account makes. I recently launched a new app on both app stores. I was up and running in a day on iOS. It took me almost three weeks and a huge amount of red tape on Android. Since launch I've done a number of updates and the review process is always faster on iOS too. Apple has its own unnecessary hurdles. Mostly around requiring xcode, which requires a mac. But yeah, both stores need to be forcefully opened. They're sitting on their laurels inside their moats. The XCode requirement makes some sense because it would take Apple a lot of extra work to port and support their tools on other platforms. Work that they have no incentive to do. But I think the native app market in general has peaked. Most things can be done in a web app now. The underlying assumption is that Apple is expected to port XCode to some other platform, rather than just using a third party tool on that platform like gcc or VSCode to make iOS apps. Publish a spec and people who want to will make their own tools. As someone who had to get a MacBook and an iPhone just to develop a mobile app for their ecosystem, it did leave a bit of a sour taste in my mouth and I wish that weren't the case! Surely there could be an open source cross platform IDE and emulator, like Android Studio, which would get me most of the way there regardless of the platform. Kind of wish they'd partner with JetBrains and we'd get Apple Studio or something. There was a time: https://www.jetbrains.com/objc/ Xcode not being required doesn't mean Apple is required to provide alternatives. There are some alternative, compatible signing tools already out there for example. They'd just need to stop being control freaks for a little bit. Distribution and retention still vastly better on the app stores. Haven’t seen a successful web app match polish on mobile either - react native etc. do though but only when distributed as a native bundle. Maybe but still the overwhelming majority of app store apps never find an audience or make any real revenue. And polish only matters for certain kinds of apps and even then only after you've identified a real market. Targeting both mobile platforms + all desktops is so much easier on the web. I'm not sure about a lot. There are tools available that let you just extract some files from Xcode and build on Windows. These work a treat and are maintained by a single guy. I'm more hopeful about Apple porting a proper version of Xcode to the iPadOS, and I'm not particularly hopeful about that either. I've just been using the MacOS runner in Github Actions. Still requires the $99/year fee but not the $2000 laptop. I actually use codemagic.io which is free at my usage level. And amazing. Codemagic has repeatedly provided painless tools to work around Apple's artificial pain points. Do you have an example of this workflow? Are you developing outside of XCode on a non-macOS platform in Swift and then essentially compiling and packaging using GitHub Actions? Is this a new requirement? I launched a flutter app about 8 months ago and didn't need any testers. It's a free app though. Not sure if that makes a difference. I hadn't come across this, but found https://support.google.com/googleplay/android-developer/answ... It seems this only applies to personal accounts that were created recently (which would explain why I've not had any issues with recently created business accounts, nor my own personal account which is probably old enough to be in school) Yes it began afaik for any new developers joining after November 2023 for any type of application. If you have an account registered as a Play Store developer before Nov 2023, it's not required... Ostensibly, the reason why Google did this (according to their blog post) was to increase the quality of Apps in Play, but we all know this is absurd. A real way they could improve app quality is to improve the quality of the documentation, specifically the javadoc / references (guides are OK mostly) but that requires work from developers (since its literally embedded in the code). There are thousands of classes / methods that have no documentation whatsoever other than that they exist in the first place. No description. No tips. No mention of what happens if you pass null, or ... you get the point. Of course, you can look at the implementation ... but that is free to change. The documentation is the contract, and at the moment its a very poor contract. There’s no doubt better docs will help improve the state of Android Apps. But this is about stemming the flow of shovelware into the store, (todolist tutorial no 800000, but I changed the name) where the problem isn’t that devs lack the tools, it’s that they simply have no serious intention of maintaining their product. If you can’t find or don’t have enough belief in your own app to find 20 people to download it for free, is it fair to promote it in a way that my gran might come to rely on it. It’s not nice to be exclusionary, but end users having to pick through that stuff just isn’t great for the platform. There might be a better place for hobby code. > where the problem isn’t that devs lack the tools, it’s that they simply have no serious intention of maintaining their product. Google already has a solution to this: Target API level requirements for Google Play apps https://support.google.com/googleplay/android-developer/answ... If you don't meet the requirements your app becomes unavailable to users. > If you can’t find or don’t have enough belief in your own app to find 20 people to download it for free I can guarantee you, many large companies, some whom I have worked for, and some apps you have likely used, do not have anywhere near 20 human QA / testers vetting their releases. And if you look at the '20 tester' requirement closely, following it does not guarantee any outcome whatsoever. > is it fair to promote it in a way that my gran might come to rely on it. What your gran does is none of my business. If I have an idea which a few people may find useful, what your gran may or may not do with it should not impede my ability to release it. Google already has strict guidelines about malicious apps, etc, which everyone must follow. But I had to pay for access to this marketplace, only to have an arbitrary barrier put in place that can be paid to pass.. Isn't the whole review system supposed to promote good quality content? This change, if genuinely implemented to try and improve app quality, actually only frustrates new developers that are trying to join the ecosystem. 20 people is quite a lot! After getting all my friends and family that use Android testing it, I still needed 10+ more 'testers'. It’s a good point. YouTube for instance doesn’t gatekeep in the same way. And for sure by no means am I suggesting this is the best way to go about it. If you're using Flutter, you can start with just the web app. Flutter for Web is definitely not as good as Flutter for iOS/Android, but it's decent, and the web itself is far easier platform to publish on. Then, if people like the app, you can bother jumping through all those bureaucratic hoops and get it on iOS/Android natively. This is probably the path I will go down, should be easier to get the testers if it's already got some users on the web. Still feels a little unfair that as a new dev, I have to jump through these hoops that existing devs and businesses aren't subjected to. Hasn't flutter been defunded at Google? > I wanted to publish it to the play store, get exposure and share what I have made. It's not clear what you mean exactly with "exposure". But if you only care about sharing your work, it may be better to publish it on f-droid. Play store is the de facto marketplace for Android apps, someone looking for a new game or application will often search the Play store... Publishing on F-Droid is good, but that presumably depends on releasing your app as open source/FOSS, which is not something every app creator will want to do. Pay some amount of money in your country to set up a corporation and make an enterprise account (which does not have the 20 tester requirement, that's only for personal accounts), problem solved. In the US, this only costs 200 dollars as a one-time fee, at least for the initial setup. This stupid policy will backfire spectacularly, it will discourage the good indie developers but the scammers will crowd source the validation, I already get people asking to pay me by email for that. What are the price quotes for getting the required testers part fulfilled? Beware of spammers providing these services, it's an easy way to lose it all. Definitely not worth the risk. I think all this policy is going to do is reinforce the already strong incentive to launch first on iOS and only consider an Android port once you've validated your idea. And the Android ports are going to be outsourced and often not very high quality. I've seen anywhere between $5 - $50 for a <50mb application. What sort of testing will you get for $50 paying 14 people? Seems rather pointless because no one will take that task seriously It's just going to be one person, with 20 cheap devices or maybe even emulators. Even now, I get 20 'testers' but it's just to pass the requirement, pretty much none of them offer useable feedback. It's also a simple little word game, there isn't much to test... They are crowdsourcing the effort of app moderation to save money. I have had many apps in different accounts and they just come up with any excuse pulled from their policies to bring them down and stop providing the service those $25 paid for. So they want to become hostile to developers? Fine, good riddance for the app store. Let's not waste our time and move to the web. As an indie AND dev, with close to 100k downloads on the app, I dread of making any changes to my app. It's like looking for trouble really. Last couple of times I made smallest change, there was always something else I needed to address. As a professional AND dev, this sounds like there might be less devs, which means more work for me. Google is going downhill for a decade already. Don’t expect anything beautiful from a drowning ship. Have you considered trying the EU market first? With the DMA we're starting to have better access to alternative app stores, and it's getting better quickly. Starting ~2021 the most important Android execs got it in their heads that no one in Android was testing software because they were finding and reporting bugs, even late in release cycles. It was like that famous bomber with bullet holes diagram, the part they were missing was the bugs were being reported, it was just only theirs were being taken seriously, and the rest were treated as annoyances* Funnily enough, it actually made the culture exponentially worse because it layered on tons of process and paperwork, which gave more ammo to the actual problem, clique-y and unhealthy coddling of us vs. them behavior within the clique, which also drove a lot of people outside it to stop thinking they could help make things better, and if they did, it didn't/wouldn't matter anyway. I always think of that whenever I shudder about this nonsense. Partly because the same leadership that was too nice & added testing + paperwork eyewash to fix a people problem, added testing + paperwork eyewash here. When you have a hammer... Why are you trying to interface with google products in 2024. App developers are a problem, not a revenue source for google. What do you mean "app developers are a problem". Don't new apps generate revenue for G? HN: NPM is full of trash, anyone can put any garbage package on it, even is-even. Also HN: WTF Google doesn't just allow anyone to put any garbage on the Play store, this is bullshit. Okay.. but I have to pay $25 to have access to Google Play Console and submit ID documents, it's not really the same as NPM. This 20 tester requirement also does very little to actually improve quality or stop 'garbage' from being listed. a) HN is more than 1 person. People will have various opinions b) NPM is a repo for open source. Garbage can be easily inspected. I have no issues with packages I am using. Decompiling APKs is not something I am keen to do c) 20 testers won’t raise Play store quality. Scammers already have click farms or can purchase this for cheap. Better automated review tools and more importantly more humans in loop can help the quality. Maybe submitting code to 3rd party to get some “seal of approval” (not mandatory but boosting score?)