The app review experience from hell
Misadventures in working with Chrome extensions and Google OAuth
Programmer’s log. Epoch time 1682911318. The seasons feel off-kilter this year in the Bay Area. First, we had an endless deluge of rain and storms. Now the weather has jumped straight to hot without any real feeling of spring in between. I can’t say that I dislike it, though. It reminds me of the strange seasons of my childhood in Florida where we would go from warm winters straight into blistering summers…
Happy Sunday!
Here are the cool articles and content I’ve enjoyed recently:
Why We Speak More Weirdly At Home (The Atlantic)
Is There Life After Influencing? (NYT, no paywall version here)
Everything you don’t actually need to know about the economics of Succession (The Financial Times)
The ‘Quiet Catastrophe’ Brewing in Our Social Lives (The Ezra Klein Show)
Why California Has So Many Problems (YouTube)
If you live in the Bay Area, you should check out Darrell Owens’ The Discourse Lounge. His recent three-part series about the Builder’s Remedy and the status of housing elements in various Silicon Valley cities was incredibly informative. Read the first part here: Bay Area Cities To Lose ALL Housing Zoning Powers in 2 Days
From the blog…
The latest post is actually a follow-up from the previous one where I talk about Recite, the little Chrome extension I made. While the first article was about all the fun I had building the extension and how delightful it is to use, this next part is about the absolutely horrible time I had dealing with the approval process to make the extension available to the public.
I honestly am not sure if anyone will find the write-up of the experience useful. I do try to provide some suggestions about how the process could be better and also highlight how the overall situation would be so much worse if I was actually trying to build a business with this extension. But mostly, it’s just 3.3k words of me ranting about what I’ve been calling the “app review experience from hell.”
So if you want to understand how platforms can deeply suck at making good app submission processes or just enjoy some plain schadenfreude at my expense, check it out below!
And as a teaser to encourage you to read—the extension took me 2 days to build and 78 days to finally get the final working version published. 😩
The app review experience from hell
Misadventures in working with Chrome extensions and Google OAuth
I’ve written previously about my strong opinions about the App Store and Google Play stores. These platforms and the massive tech companies that operate them make misguided policy decisions that disadvantage small indie developers while also decreasing the creativity and richness of their mobile app ecosystems, motivated by corporate profits or just plain indifference.
But at this point, after years as a professional mobile developer as well as building multiple side projects, I thought I had seen it all—the good, the bad, and the ugly of getting my apps approved. I believed I had a good understanding of the bargain that companies and developers make when engaging with app ecosystems.
That is, until I decided to make a Chrome extension with Google login.
My Chrome extension Recite is about as basic as you can get. It’s only 1,744 lines of code and uses bare HTML/CSS/JS, one simple third-party utility library (lodash), and makes GET requests to two Google spreadsheets API endpoints. I quickly built it as a fun weekend project in less than 8 hours. The final step was just to wrap it up by publishing through official channels so anyone could install the extension.
The Pareto principle (or 80/20 rule) is often applied to productivity and time management to explain that 20% of your time spent will account for 80% of the results. However, people often forget the implied corollary, which is that the last 20% of a project will consume 80% of your time. For the Recite project, the time spent between building a complete, production-ready extension and making the app available to users was even more extreme than 80/20. I spent less than one working day making the software functional and more than 11 weeks stuck in review processes.
Come along with me as we descend into an app approval hellscape, one stage at a time:
Part 1: Dreadfully long review times.
Part 2: Want to charge for your Chrome extension? Too bad.
Part 3: Surprise! An extra submission process!
Part 4: How do I get approved? Nyah nyah, I won’t tell you.
…
(Click here to read more)
That’s all for now. See you later alligator 🐊