Pain and humiliation from Google, or why I don't want to publish Android apps anymore
Claude wrote the app in two hours. Publishing it on Google Play took a month: 12 testers, 14 days in a row, and 40 other people's apps on my phone.
💡 It all started with an idea from a friend: a simple instrument tuner app for musicians. Yes, there are a million of those, but the problem with them is that they are either overloaded with features or stuffed with ads that stop you from doing the one thing you opened the app for. So the idea was an app with no ads and no nonsense. My friend had already shipped the iOS version, and I sat down with everyone’s favourite Claude and happily watched the lines of code appear while all I had to do was keep an eye on things. A couple of hours later the app was ready.
📝 While Claude was doing its job, I went off to register a developer account. The process is fairly strange, but not that hard. You fill in the forms, pass verification by uploading your passport and proof of address, and pay $25. And yes — everyone who hates on free apps in the store, remember that the developer pays to publish that free app (Google $25 once, Apple $100 every year).
😱 And here’s where it gets interesting: it turns out that before you can publish an app, you first have to run a closed test where 12 people must test your app every day for 14 days. And I sat there thinking: where the hell do I find those 12 people, and what kind of fool is going to poke at my app for two weeks?
🔍 I remembered that I used to help people test their apps for free, and there was a group on Telegram full of the same enthusiasts. I find the group and add my app: guys, please help. I didn’t get much response — everyone who installed it dropped my app after a day (and what Google cares about is that your app was opened every single day, it tracks the number of testers closely). So that idea failed, I never reached the required number, and all I got was a phone cluttered with other people’s apps from trying to help them in return.
🤦 I say “cluttered” because some of those apps really did look like garbage, forgive me, authors. Some of them genuinely made me angry. A person builds a calculator app and there’s more advertising in it than on a porn site. I don’t know, I don’t understand what people are expecting. Or the app simply doesn’t launch, or the layout is so broken that I think: dude, did you even open your own app before handing it to people for testing? I won’t even start on the design of some of them. Again, that’s my opinion and I’m no expert, but there should be at least a shred of taste involved.
📚 Then I went digging around the internet and found a good article on Habr about the testing process, and through it another resource — Testers Community. They have a website and an app where you also submit your creation for testing and can install other people’s. That was a failure too, the same story repeated: over 40 third-party apps on my phone, and nobody testing mine.
😩 I was already losing hope and starting to think through options like registering 12 accounts and testing it myself, or finding someone who would do it for money (Testers Community has that option too, by the way). And then an email arrives telling me about a great testing service called App Hive. Another piece of junk, I thought, and ignored it.
⏳ Time passed and the app was still sitting there waiting for testing, so I finally decided to look at what they had sent me — maybe there was something useful in it. And to skip ahead: that’s exactly what worked. This service solved the problem of everyone abandoning your app. It also solves a pile of problems caused by people not playing fair.
🐝 The idea is simple: a Hive is assembled — a testing group of 17 people in the same situation as you. Once the group is formed, a 12-day countdown starts. Every day each member opens all 16 apps in the group and attaches a daily screenshot proving they did. That report lands with you for review, and you can approve or reject it. If you reject it, a judge is assigned to decide how justified the rejection was. If a member keeps breaking the rules (not sending reports, or sending the same one over and over), they get removed from the group.
🎉 And there you go: 12 days later I get the happy news from Google that the app passed testing and I can submit it for publication. The funniest part is that in this submission Google helpfully asks where I found my testers, how I know they actually tested my app, and how thoroughly they tested it (it read like mockery on their part).
📱 And so, after almost a month, the app is in the store. The total: 2 hours of Claude’s work, several weeks of hunting for testers, and 14 days of daily testing of 16 other people’s apps — and I published mine. Do I want to go through this path again? Probably not.
⭐ After publishing you also get user reviews: “Hey dude, great app, I use it, but I’d like a different font, here’s a 1-star rating for you.” What Google was going for with this kind of testing is unclear. The way I see it, it spawned companies that offer paid testing (and now I understand it’s easier to just pay), it lets people spread all kinds of scam apps (you have no idea what you’re installing when you test), and there is no improvement in app quality to speak of. People shipped outright garbage on Android before, and they still do.
🍏 Apple, by the way, is stricter with moderation, there’s none of this hassle, and they make sure apps more or less follow the style of their iOS.
That’s the experience. Sorry for the longread, it had been building up. 😮💨