Today we're announcing some improvements to the review process for smart home Actions, aimed at making the experience more transparent in the Actions console and reducing the time it takes for your Actions to get approved.

The smart home review process is slightly different from other Actions on Google projects because it has two separate phases: a policy review and a certification review. All Actions undergo a policy review, which verifies that your Action follows the policy guidelines for Actions on Google. Smart home Actions go through certification review for additional quality assurance validation. Certification reviewers verify the content you provide through the certification request form, including your test suite for smart home results.

Until now, developers did not have visibility into both phases of the review process. This was a common source of confusion as developers would receive notifications that their Action was approved during policy review, without realizing that certification was incomplete or still in process.

To address this concern, we've introduced a new view in the Release section of the Actions console to display detailed status for both policy and certification review. This provides a more complete picture of your submission and when it's ready to go live in production. When your Action encounters an issue during review that requires your attention, you are now able to see that status directly in the console user interface for your project.

Action submission requiring developer attention

These console updates reflect additional internal changes we've made to better synchronize the policy and certification review teams, enabling reviewers advance submissions through the process more quickly and reducing delays between Actions being approved and ready for production.

We're excited to bring these improvements to the Actions on Google developer community! Share your thoughts or questions with us on Reddit at r/GoogleAssistantDev.

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