I've recently finished an app and wanted to release it in the play store, but developer accounts created after Nov 13th need to have the app tested by 20 different users before it can be released.
That's quite a lot and despite asking friends, family and all of my facebook, I only got 8 accounts from people who'd test my app. It was also a quite awkward experience to have to ask friends for their google account email, only close friends are willing to share that information and I'm not quite sure yet what google counts as "testing". They say that the testers need to "opt-in" for 14 continuous days. I hope they don't mean that the testers need to use the app daily.
How do you deal with that? As excited as I was to get going with MIT AI, this is a serious blow to my enthusiam. Sure it's nice that I can make apps now for personal use but I made this app primarily for my kids, their friends and other kids (it's a school/math app) and the only way to distribute it is to put the APK as a direct download on my site, bypassing google play, which is something I'd never encourage.
Any chance we can form a circle here where we test each others apps or does something like that already exist? There are sites which test an app for money but I don't want to pay for an app for which I don't earn a single dime, my app is completely free without adds.
Yes definitely. Now they're really going crazy. The patronizing and harassment just won't stop and, as usual, everyone simply accepts it. But don't worry, Google (like all big techs) won't continue to exist in this form anyway.
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But nevermind, the approval times are so long, it took them 2 weeks to just point a mistake in my app's description. I resubmitted last Wednesday and haven't received a response yet...
..do I sense that in the near future "AI" will be utilized to achieve this in behalf of Google Play at an additional charge to developers? The writing's on the wall.
I have made a Rubik's Cube game
So would you please help me by testing my game and opted in for 14 days?
To test this game you have to do following things-
First - Join this google group https://groups.google.com/g/20-testers-group
It is not clear from the google documentation on this whether the "testers" actually have to install the app, or just be "opted in" ? (My guess is that Google will be looking at installs in the closed testing phase)
It looks like a Google Group could be used (accessing the signed up users with google accounts) to access testers.
We need to work together if we win at Google Play to reach more people. I made this Google group: everyone as indie (or tiny teams) can join to get free testers:
No-one said you had to use that method. I only suggested that a google group appears to be a way of gathering interested parties in one place. Why would this be neither safe nor legit, if google suggest it as a method ?
