New Google Playstore’s 20 testers policy for production release. Where are they going with it?

Google Playstore has so far been known for leniently reviewed releases that allowed developers of all kinds to swiftly publish and make updates to their android apps. This however now is changing.

While the quick-glance type reviews helped us developers, they were sometimes unjust to users who frequently ran into bugs while using our apps and hence hesitated from installing newly launched unrated apps.

Google Playstore, starting from November 2023, is attempting to correct this by adopting many measures the most notable one being:

To avoid panic, an important disclaimer to note here is that it only applies to new personal accounts created after November 13, 2023.

So existing or organization accounts have nothing to worry about yet. Relived right? Now let’s read about the policy changes.

Mandatory 20 Tester Check Before Releasing to Playstore

For new personal developers accounts, to publish any new app to production, they are now required to:

• Run it in closed testing
• With minimum 20 testers
• All of testers being actively enrolled for last 14 days

Only after successfully meeting these criteria, one will be eligible to make the release to production.

Now what does this indicate?

Unlike before where only large organisations teams were expected maintain high quality apps, today one-person dev teams and indie developers are now being put under the same lens of scrutiny.

This indicates two things:

1. Google is serious about the usefulness of apps on their store.

They could have kept the tester requirement to a minimum 5 or 10 which would have been easy for developers to pull by reaching to their directly disposable friends, family and colleague.

The 20 number is really going to push developers to reach out to real potential users from the community and asking them to fairly test and provide feedback on their apps. Hence pushing only better quality and more useful apps to reach it’s store.

2. Quality is going to become the default and not a nice-to-have.

These measures are most likely is just the first step of the direction we are all heading in to. We can expect further quality checks not just for new and personal developers but for long run organisation accounts as well.

We can expect to see criteria like:

1. Through review process with checks on usability, performance and security.
2. Deeper exploratory tests by human reviewers at google.
3. Minimum automation test coverage requirement for organisation accounts.

What steps should we take about it?

1. Focus on testing right from the start

Don’t wait until the last moment to test everything and then stuck in approval process for months as bugs keep coming.

While coding any feature, always cover the important testcases with unit and integration tests. This helps you ensure the behaviour of every individual module and hence prevent any surprises later when the whole app comes together.

You may use tools like welltested for this to minimize time spent in writing tests while letting AI do most of the work.

2. Consistently looping in user-feedback

Even during the building stages, it is critical to factor in real user feedback so that you can build much useful.

This helps you create a more useful app altogether and also assemble a testing group that can be used for closed testing to be eligible for releasing to production.

Overall, with the hardships the new policies bring in, it is ultimately going to improve the experience for end users and rewards the businesses positively that meet these policy criteria.

Good things are coming and it’s time for us to buckle up and focus on building truly useful and well-tested apps for our users! Cheers.

App testing requirements for new personal developer accounts