Google Play review now takes over a week, developer says
The Google Play app review process now regularly takes longer than a week
Daniel Gultsch, developer of the 12-year-old Conversations app, reports that Google Play app review now regularly exceeds a week, calling the delay unacceptable. He blames AI slop clogging the pipeline and argues Google should prioritize long-standing Android apps that update only monthly. A screenshot shows his September 9 submission still pending.
This is unacceptable. The Google Play app review process now regularly takes longer than a week. I understand that the pipeline is clogged with AI slop, but Google needs to prioritize Android apps that have been around for 12+ years and push updates only once a month.
- greysonp
With Signal, the biggest issue we have is that review times are extremely inconsistent. Sometimes it's 4 hours, sometimes it's 5 days, and there's no visibility as to why. Our working theory is that there's automated and manual queues, and occasionally, for whatever reason, we fall into the manual queue. But when you work on an app that has weekly updates, randomly getting hit with a review time of several days really throws off your groove. And it can obviously be terrible for moments where you're fixing a critical issue.
- davidmurdoch
I'm partly to blame. I accidentally ran an illegal unregulated money transference service over Google Play.
It let users cash out their Google Play Credits for real cash, which I automatically wired them.
Someone then hacked in to a major bookstore chain, stole piles of Google Play Gift cards, activated them using their access, and used my app to get cash for them.
Luckily, the whole thing blew up on me before I got in serious trouble, rightfully so, and the app was removed by Google, then an investigation followed. A ton of copycat apps popped up immediately after, then a few months months later Google announced their app review process.
- abricq
By the way, the same is happening for the Apple Store.
Their review process is advocated as usually within 24 hours (and heavily advertised by Apple as such, see https://developer.apple.com/distribute/app-review/) and it is taking now much longer.
In the last month, I had to go through the review process twice, and twice I needed to contact them personally after waiting for 1 week of waiting. It did however helped, after every human contact I was reviewed within a few hours.
I got this explanation from them...
> We are currently experiencing a higher-than-normal amount of inquiries and have been unable to respond in the time frame that we would prefer. During these periods of high volume, the app review time will take longer than average, and we cannot currently provide a concrete timeline for when your specific app(s) will be finished with the process
I'm guessing, AI slots invading the store.
- IvanK_net
My tool is used by 1 million people a day https://www.photopea.com
This is the reason I never made a mobile version and all mobile users use it in a browser.
The biggest problem (bug) with this approach is that iOS limits the RAM usage to 2 GB per website. I have to tell many of my users to ditch their $1000 iPads and get a used $150 Macbook for better experience.
I think Apple does it on purpose https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=268816
- david_allison
AnkiDroid (~17 years old) submitted our latest alpha on Sept 03, 2026, 4:40 am. Still pending review.
- bbx
I just released a game [1] on both iOS and Android.
The Google Play process is more thorough. There are a lot of steps and you need to clear them one by one. This means waiting several days between each step. The Play Console dashboard is quite well documented to be honest but can be overwhelming. The main obstacle is that you need to find at least 12 testers to play your game for 2 weeks straight. I ended up paying a service to test my app.
On iOS, the process is a bit more obscure. It's fairly easy to submit an app, but then you don't really know what's happening. You can only see a status like "Pending review". And then one day, you are approved.
Overall, the iOS process felt easier for me. As long as your build succeeds and you provide the correct information, your game can be live within a week. The Android process took more than a month in total.
- victords
I started coding around 2013, picked up a book, learned Java and started building Android apps. It was fun at the time, and pretty painless to get your app in the store.
Fast forward to last year, with all the rage about coding tools, I got into building small projects again, and built a simple app. After a decade from posting my last app on Google Play I resurrected my account, and started going through the process of publishing an app today... And how awful things got!
Back then it was essentially, title, description, upload your Apk and some screenshots and you're done! Now there are reviews, privacy policy, endless amount of forms and information you need to fill out. I get why (some) things are the way they are today, but when you just want to make an app for fun, getting it out there just feels like work. I gave up on the app, made it into a website, and in the end it actually felt better (and so much easier).
- fhub
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.
- pastk
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)...
- mrjeeves
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.