Same happened for CoMaps (which unfortunately does not have 12+ years of presence going for it)

The google review process is the best advertising for f-droid there could ever be.

I believe the App Store has switched to automated reviews, at least for updates. I've had my app updates approved in <1h on a regular basis starting this summer.

Hopefully the process is straight forward so others can easily pick it up.

Part of the value of F-Droid is the curated distribution model that hopefully catches the worst behaving developers that think they have a god given right to your data though.

It took the whole year before v21 was finally approved, so seems only fair they publish minor v21 revisions multiple times a day!

I just updated 2 dormant apps for the first time in 10 years; It took 2 days, and the apps were approved on a sunday.

The Google Play review process has been slower and more painful than the App Store review process for 5+ years at this point. At least you get to communicate with real people at Apple; it’s all bot-driven with Google.

Huh.

On the flip side, googles release infra provides much more functionality for apps that already has scale. I wish apple were more production oriented too.

If you can get your agent of choice to run up the app in an emulator and navigate the whole thing taking screenshots then tasks like edge-to-edge can be pretty hands off.

The way I did it was to firstly get accessibility identifiers on everything. Then have it record everything I do on an emulator to navigate the entire app. Then left it for a while to work out how to actually use the app via the emulator. Once you have this sort of baseline. A lot of changes are really quite pleasant. I often ask for an HTML gallery of screenshots covering a few device sizes as the step before I bother running it on a device myself.

This isn't my experience. My updates usually get accepted within hours. Apple takes days usually.

TFA is a post from an established developer and showing a screenshot for the submission of an update to a longstanding app (Conversations XMPP chat client).

Some reviews are clearly automated, some get a light human review, and some involve a human really looking hard. New apps seem to get a more rigorous human review for their first 2-4 submissions. Or at least humans looking over automated test screenshots etc. One reviewer apparently only looked at screenshots because they missed something that would be blindingly obvious on the prior screen if they did it themselves.

The explosion in LLM app development has clearly created a bottleneck at the human review steps. Not only delays but much more “dumb” rejections from likely over-stressed humans.

MAYBE operating systems shouldn't have gatekeepers which can deny access to billions of customers for any and no reason at all. Apple and Google are WELL past due for regulation in this space. The fact that we cannot download and install software from the internet onto our phones JUST like we can do with our computers is a symbol of our inept and ineffective politicians.

And before someone says "well akshully you can technically do it on Android," Google has been working tirelessly to make it as onerous as possible for both developers and customers. For example, users need to separately authorise each app (browser, files manager, alternative store, etc) to install an APK from outside the Play Store. Google also does background scans using "Play Protect" which will periodically delete apps Google doesn't approve of. This happened to me with SmartTubeNext. I have a dozen other ways Google ensures users are discouraged from stepping outside the Play Store.

yeah my 'promptly AI' alarm clock almost always spends 7 days, as soon as the binary changes, even descriptions changes take several days

Sounds like a clear "find another store" message to me.

I've noticed this

Google Play is regularly slower now than App Store Connect, which never used to be the case

Not sure how it works behind the scene, but our app (present on the store since 2018) is taking a couple hours at best with Google, and usually less than 24h with Apple.

Very much likely an automated triage based on code change or complexity.

A public FTP server is next app store.

For a critical bug fix, a week can be a very long time.

For all the complaining about Apple's store, the Play Store has always been worse imo. You can't even release an app without first doing a beta test with at least a dozen people.

Our app includes Android Auto, which I think is what causes it for us. Submitted 4 Sept, still in review.

Was only 48-72 hours until this year, where it randomly jumped to 2 weeks or longer like it still is.

It's really frustrating, and makes it very difficult to develop with, let alone reliably release features across platforms.

Yeap latest CoMaps update took ~16 days to review (the longest wait for us so far) and two support tickets (submitted first after ~9 days and got "we have expedited it", 5 days later still in review, so submitted one more ticket).

Before that we had a hotfix update (a very small change) and still it took longer than a week and a support ticket (after which it had been approved in a day)...