The Pending Review process is broken: can we please get an update

[Ken]

Here are a collection of recent topics: 

"Paid extension is broken and a fix is "pending review" for 5 days. Please help or give some way to communicate."

"My chrome extension in pending review long time"

"How long is it taking everyone to publish an update?"

"Our latest Chrome Extension is on the CWS marketplace but our dashboard says it's pending review for 7 days now."

"My extension got pending review for a very long time, is there any channel to communicate?"

"Extension "Pending Review" since December 13"

"Stuck in Pending Review"

"Extension in "Pending Review" for updating FAQ & Support Link"

There's clearly something wrong here. A process has been changed, a team is understaffed, who knows. But something's not right and nobody is communicating to developers. 

It's the holidays, teams likely have changes they want to get in for the New Year and their development cycle is frozen because what typically took less than 24 hours is now taking a week and beyond, and there's no clarity on whether this is the new normal or a temporary delay. Additionally there's no promise that the next change won't also take an unknowable amount of time. Sane software development - and the businesses that depend on it - cannot work like this.

There needs to be a system where:

- description or FAQ updates are not pending review for as long as code changes

- the developer can see the average review response time for the last X days

- developers can communicate and receive a response. The submit button on https://support.google.com/chrome_webstore/contact/developer_support is a placebo and not reliable

- developers can pay to get some kind of support, if that's what's necessary

- developers receive detailed reasons for rejection if a review is not successful

The review process is a black box and perhaps that won't change. But at the very least please communicate with the people who invested in building Chrome extensions and who are currently stuck in limbo because the platform they relied on appears to have frozen in time.

[Phil Starkovich]

YES, YES, YES. Exactly what Ken has outlined is what we need (at the very least)

[Wezelkrozum]

Agreed, it's a mess. Can please someone at Google look at it and let us know what the plans for 2020 are? 

Even a response like "We won't be investing any more time in it" is fine by me at this point. Then we know we can stop complaining.

[Simeon Vincent]

Can please someone at Google look at it and let us know what the plans for 2020 are? - Wezelkrozum

The short version is that we're working to make the review process less painful. While I expect that longer reviews are here to stay, we are looking at other ways to improve the publishing experience for developers.

- description or FAQ updates are not pending review for as long as code changes - Ken

For the purposes of review extensions aren't just code, they're the combination of the zip file you upload and all the values and assets you specify in the Web Store listing. That said, we're considering a few different ways to improve the process. Unfortunately, I can't go into much detail both because we don't publicly discuss the internals of the review process and because talking about work in progress without promising anything is fraught with peril.

- the developer can see the average review response time for the last X days - Ken

I'd like to see this as well. More broadly, I'd love to have a CWS status page akin to other service providers. 

- developers can communicate and receive a response. The submit button on https://support.google.com/chrome_webstore/contact/developer_support is a placebo and not reliable - Ken

I'm planning to work more closely with the developer support team in the coming months. I'm sorry your experience has been poor. Can you clarify what you mean by "is a placebo and not reliable"? Those two ideas suggest very different experiences to me and I'd like to better understand how we're falling short. 

- developers can pay to get some kind of support, if that's what's necessary - Ken

I feel like it makes sense to have an enterprise support offering for businesses that are built on extensions or where extensions are a critical component of their operations. 

- developers receive detailed reasons for rejection if a review is not successful - Ken

This is an area I'm very interested in and am hopeful that we can make progress on in the coming months. Even if we can't include details about the reasons for the rejections in the email, I'm bullish on the idea that we can make the process of requesting and receiving a clarification much better. 

Cheers,

Simeon - @dotproto

Extensions Developer Advocate

On Tue, Jan 14, 2020 at 12:21 PM Wezelkrozum <wezel...@gmail.com> wrote:

Agreed, it's a mess. Can please someone at Google look at it and let us know what the plans for 2020 are? 

Even a response like "We won't be investing any more time in it" is fine by me at this point. Then we know we can stop complaining.

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[joette cordsen]

If longer reviews are here to stay, would it be possible to offer the option to drop back to a prior version quickly? The scenario in which this would be helpful is, if I upload a version with new features or bug fixes, and it introduces more/worse problems, 

if I could allow my users to drop back to a more stable release, that would at least address one scenario where long delays cause users to be adversely  affected. 

Jill 

[NERBlock Developer]

I have the same problem.

I uploaded a version of my extension that contains a bug on January 17th. The review process took ~30minutes. I noticed the bug immediately, fixed it, and uploaded the new package with minimal code changes an hour later. Today is 19th and it's still pending review.

So right now a bugged version is live in the webstore, hindering my users' experience, that I can't fix or roll back. I wonder if this had happened in the Play Store what would be the response time from Google. 🙄

[MG]

Totally agree. Rollback would definitely help in this case and it's not very uncommon. Rolling back should be immediate as the previous version has already passed the review.

[Jumpcut Dev]

Over a month later and the process is still incredibly slow and broken. No responses from the team. Very unprofessional from Google - this would make a lot of developers think hard before developing extensions for Chrome.
I've been thinking, and that might be just what they want... If they know they can't scale their support/review process they might as well have very few developers to deal with.