A Team of 20 to Publish an App?! - THIS New Google Play Policy Change is CRAZY

In this video I'll share what the new Google Play policy is about and what my view about it is.

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[yavvivvay]

Non-issue for scammers, issue for solo devs. Awsome rule.

[ayushmanbt]

Google has attacked the weakness of developers.... 20 friends 🙂

[vighnesh]

I work at Google and I build a lot of tiny android apps in my free time. I am equally furious at this policy as the rest of the people in the comment section.

[steve]

Google hates indie devs since they don't bring in much money. They needed us to build up the Play Store and now they're trying to get rid of us like yesterday's jam.

[sevarbg]

I've never been in a project with more than 2 testers working simultaneously. And I speak banking apps, payment processing. The guy who took this crazy decision needs his pills.

[Stabby]

Google’s “Don’t be evil” mantra has become an insider joke.

[jakosss]

I think we can all agree that google just wanted to overtake apple in being hostile to developers :D

[anmolsharma]

Instead of banning sus apps like banking apps asking for storage info, they decide to make life harder of indie devs

[bitwisedevs]

I saw the verification last week and was surprised what more data they wanted from us. But WTF?! I just woke up literally and now I need to look for 20 people to test my app that I worked so hard? Also some developers publish their personal app as a portfolio so someone can easily check their work. This year was crazy everyone want to screw indie dev and follow Unity’s bad decisions I guess.

[TiboBelleile]

That's ridiculous, I don't like where Google is headed. But one comment that made me laugh among the dev community is "This assumes I know 20 people" 😅

[pauligrossinoz]

When I worked for IBM as a Technical Lead, a small App we were developing for American Express was tested by only 5 beta testers, all provided by American Express.

If we were to add in the developers on my team as "beta testers", we still wouldn't get nearly 20 testers in total. IBM would have had to incur extra costs to meet that arbitrary number of 20.

Google's policy is dumb. 🙄

[themaskedcrusader]

I work at a company with +50K employees, and my project has one tester and one developer. It's not an android app, but our development team is still only one dev, one sme, one tester and one project manager. The client does provide testing and guidence too, but I think our whole team is under 10 people.

[laujimmy]

That is just absurd. They are basically kicking out all the solo or indie developers.

[michaeleber]

Over the past decades I have written many corporate applications and I can say without a doubt that not a SINGLE application had 20 testers. In fact, we typically had two or three testers in addition to the developer testing his own code.

[KristjanB]

This is obviously intentional. They have actively been trying to remove solo and indie developers from the platform for years. I actually was thinking at one point of going full time developing apps and games for phones, so I tested the waters by writing a small app that provided realtime information about the bus system in my town and published it free with ads. At first it looked promising and people where happy using it and I even made some small amount of ad revenue at first but then Google suddenly banned my ad account because they said my app was fake, which it obvously wasn't, and even though I contacted them and explained in detail why my app wasn't fake, they never replied or reverted their decision. So in a split second all my ad revenue was taken and it was impossible for me to use Google ads ever again. They also regularly deprecate older versions of the API and require you to rewrite and update your app. This means that it's basically a full time job just maintaining an app even thought there are no actual changes required for the app.

[AaronStorey]

This is nonsensical, even for Google's standards! If this policy isn't adjusted to be more reasonable, it might be about time to look at moving to Web development, where at least you have control over your own development & deployment lifecycle... Very disappointing

[systemchris]

The best fix for this would be to add a checkmark to apps that have had 20 testers so it's optional

[ayushmanbt]

I bet google doesn't even use 20 tester for their apps.... They just want to stop solo projects 🙂 totally a good way to stop good upcoming developers... With recent decisions google making, I think an AI is running google rn

[LabGecko]

5:21 Google should realize this is an easier thing for scammers to finish than it is for honest developers to do, especially those of us with a condition like PTSD that limits how easy it is to talk to other people.

[diegoberaldin]

This introduces a big disparity between people who already have existing personal accounts (who just need to verify their identity once and can publish as many apps as they want without restrictions) and people with new accounts who, besides identify verification, will need to find 20 testers for each and every single app they publish now and forever. Like people before 13 November 2023 could be trusted and people coming after can't. Interesting...