Extension review time. How to improve it?

[William A.]

What are the factors that affect the extension review time? We see that some of the extension approval happens immediately while others can take days or week to get approval. 

Is there anything we as extension developers can do to improve the time? What are the factors that affect this. 

The reason I ask is that sometimes when there is a bug it takes us only a couple of hours to have a fix for it, but it takes days to get it approved for teh chrome store. 

Regards

William A. 

[Deco]

There are certain extension updates criteria which judge how long a change can take, for example, requesting a new permission will go through a more thorough review than one that doesn't. 

The following are examples from the CWS documentation: 

Notable factors that increase review time

Reviews may take longer for extensions that request broad host permissions or sensitive execution permissions, or which include a lot of code or hard-to-review code.

Broad host permissions

Host permissions patterns like *://*/*, https://*/*, and <all_urls> give extensions extensive access to the user's web activity, especially when combined with other permissions. Extensions with this kind of access can collect a user's browsing history, hijack web search behavior, scrape data from banking websites, harvest credentials, or exploit users in other ways.

Sensitive execution permissions

Permissions grant extensions special data access and manipulation rights. Some permissions do this directly (for example, tabs and downloads) while others must be combined with host permissions grants (for example, cookies and webRequest). Review must verify that each requested permission is actually necessary and is used appropriately. Requesting powerful and potentially dangerous capabilities takes more time to review.

Amount and formatting of code

The more code an extension contains, the more work it takes to verify that code is safe. Obfuscation is disallowed as it increases the complexity of the validation process. Minification is allowed, but it can also make reviewing extension code more difficult. Where possible, consider submitting your code as authored. You may also want to consider structuring your code in a way that is easy for others to understand.

There isn't you as a developer can do to shorten the review time, everyone goes through the same process. Mainly, be vigilant of what you are changing, try and if possible factor this into how long a review will take.

Thanks,

Deco

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[Deco]

Typo error: "There isn't you as a developer" to "There isn't anything you as a developer" 

[Oliver Dunk]

Plus one to Deco's excellent answer!

Some variance is expected, but we do try to keep the times down as much as possible.

Deferred publishing can help in some situations if you're planning for a launch, for example: https://developer.chrome.com/docs/webstore/publish/#deferred-publishing

Oliver Dunk | DevRel, Chrome Extensions | https://developer.chrome.com/ | London, GB

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[William A.]

Thank you for the great answers. This is very helpful.