Chrome extension approval process/SLA

[Covenant Eyes]

I've posted this before, I realize, but haven't received any response. I don't want to be annoying or rude, I just know that there are many in the same boat as me, and as far as I know, cannot find any answers:

1) What causes an extension to be flagged for review, other than NPAPI? Is there anything we can do to mitigate the delay for review each time we submit an update?

2) What is the SLA for extension review?  Our first extension review took 5 business days, and our update was submitted 7 business days ago and is still pending (unfortunately our first submission was incomplete & nonfunctional, so we're still unable to release to customers).

3) Is there any plan to allow a developer to cancel their submission while it is Pending Review? For example, they may have found a critical defect that needs to be released ASAP, and yet would still need to wait 5-? business days for the previous update to be reviewed, and then another 5-? business days for their critical update to be reviewed.  If nothing else, a warning when submitting an extension that will be flagged for review would have been very helpful: I would not have submitted our first extension for review until I was more sure, if I had known this was subject to a long review process (since my extension does not use NPAPI, I was surprised to find it flagged for review).

Sorry again if this comes across as nagging - I just feel like I'm in the dark, and I think alot of developers feel similarly.

Thanks,

-Tyler

[Joe Marini]

Sorry for the delay in responding, I'll try to answer your questions as best I can.

1) There's no purely deterministic way to know if your extension will be flagged for review. Some things are known to trigger it with good reason, like NPAPI usage or certain words that appear in the description. Beyond that, some extensions are randomly flagged for quality purposes, etc. We're trying to make the process smoother among other improvements to the store.

2) There's currently no solid SLA. We try to get to everything a quickly as possible, but we've had an influx of extensions lately (a good problem to have, I guess) and that's caused some delays (a bad problem to have). Again, we're trying to get caught up.

3) That's good feedback, I will raise that with the engineering team. Being able to cancel a submission in review would probably help us a lot, too.

Joe

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Joe Marini

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[Covenant Eyes]

Thanks! That's helpful information.  I guess it mostly comes down to bad timing: it seem everyone and their mother all of a sudden discovered that Chrome 21 now basically requires use of the Chrome web store, and are submitting their extensions now.  And now just happens to be the time when my company is trying to release our Chrome extension...I'm hopeful that in the coming months, the extension review backlog will be more manageable.

Thanks again,

-Tyler

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[Peter Hultqvist]

My extension was blocked for review some months ago and after about 2 weeks I sent an email to this list and had the block removed.
Here are my comments to Joes reply.

1) I can obviously see why you don't want the bad guys to know what your filters are triggering on. Also allowing one to cancel and resubmit(3) would also give the bad guy a chance to poke the filter determine what it triggers on.

But the last part in that reply keeps me puzzled, "randomly flagged for quality purposes", are you here referring to the chaos monkey applied to the flagging system so you can handle random false positives?

If not I suggest that you do send random extensions for review, but please don't block their update.
It also suggest that if your review team get too busy you dial down the random flagging. That way you can keep the response time for randomly flagged extensions down to a guaranteed response time.

On 2012-08-23 18:57, Joe Marini wrote:

[Covenant Eyes]

It's now approaching 12 business days since our update was submitted, and it's still 'Pending Review' - this is quite concerning to us, as we assess the feasibility of continued browser extension development (we enjoy extension development for Chrome, much more than for Firefox or IE, but this deploy/review process for Chrome is quite burdensome: with Safari and Firefox, no review is required :-/ ).

If there are questions or concerns related to our extension, please contact us...due to the nature of our service, our software is often initially miscategorized as spyware: if this is a concern, we can more fully explain the nature of our software/service to address & discuss any potential concerns you may have.

Thanks,

-Tyler

On Thursday, August 23, 2012 12:57:23 PM UTC-4, Joe Marini wrote:

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[Covenant Eyes]

This extension has since been approved! Not sure if that's a coincidence or not - regardless, it's now approved - yay!

I am still concerned about the potential review delay for future updates - some sort of SLA would be helpful, especially if we ever need to push through an important bug fix. Though hopefully the backlog of new extension submissions will drop off soon, once most developers have submitted the extension they'd previously hosted in-house!

-Tyler