In conversation with Google Play Store developer support today, they confirmed to me that all new Android apps now require at least three days for approval.

When releasing today’s newest game, Psy High 2: High Summer, our app was greeted with a warning banner, saying, “To help better protect our users, we’ll take more time to thoroughly review your app. Learn More”

In a chat with Google support, they confirmed:

All new apps are getting the “we’ll take more time” banner . “We’re taking more time to thoroughly review every app.” Plan for at least three days between submitting your app and going live. We’re professional developers, and we can definitely plan a few days in advance, but that then raises another, bigger problem. There is now no way to schedule the release of a new app. When you submit an app for review, it will automatically go live whenever it’s approved, even if the app is approved days before the planned release date. Google offers a “timed publishing” feature, but it only works for app updates. (We discussed using the “closed alpha” process, which also undergoes Google review, but closed alphas go through a separate review process; you still have to plan for three days buffer when promoting a release from closed alpha to production.) Google offers no way to expedite review. “Unfortunately, there is no escalation path, and there is nothing that can be done to expedite the review process. I completely understand your frustration, and I would love to be able to help you get your app approved immediately, but there is nothing I or my team can do.” Developers were not notified of this change ahead of time.



Google’s Warning Appears Too Late, After Submission

The “we’ll take more time” banner appears only after you submit your app to go live in production. There’s no way to know that you have to submit three days in advance until it’s already too late.

Google’s failure to communicate this change is extremely disappointing. Back in April, Google announced on their Android Developer Blog that they were planning to take more time to review certain apps.

Separately, we will soon be taking more time (days, not weeks) to review apps by developers that don’t yet have a track record with us. This will allow us to do more thorough checks before approving apps to go live in the store and will help us make even fewer inaccurate decisions on developer accounts.

We’ve been a developer on the Google Play Store since 2010, so we didn’t think this would impact us. We were wrong.

If you click “Learn More” on the banner, Google doesn’t provide much additional detail; it’s the all-purpose documentation for publishing apps in general. But it does include this note near the top:

Note: For certain developer accounts, we’ll take more time to thoroughly review your app(s) to help better protect users. You’ll receive a notification on your app’s Dashboard about how long this should take. We recommend that you adjust your planning to include a buffer period of at least three days between submitting your app and going live.

“Certain developer accounts?” That didn’t sound like us. We have dozens of games published on the Google Play Store; we’re a developer in good standing.

It turns out that instead of just “developers that don’t yet have a track record,” all new apps are undergoing additional review. App updates may go through quickly if the app itself has earned Google’s trust, but each new app starts with an empty track record.

Luckily, we did submit Psy High 2: High Summer in time to get it approved today. Next time, we’ll have to submit to Google a few days in advance and “soft launch” our app, not announcing the release until the official release day.

Here’s the transcript with Google Play Store developer support.