Ask HN: Google Play prevents continuous delivery

7 points by quambene 4 years ago | 4 comments

I'm having a Flutter app running both on iOS and Android.

Currently, review time of Apple App Store, Samsung Galaxy Store and Huawei AppGallery is about 1-3 days which is not great but tolerable. However, review time in Google Play is a notable 4-10 days.

Google's review time does make bugfixing quite impossible to deal with.

Especially, GUIs are often impossible to test exhaustively. The obvious solution is continuous delivery which fixes issues identified by users in a timely manner. Unfortunately, app store reviews are leading to the worst deployment experience possible.

How are you dealing with this problem?

IMO, there should be a possibility to submit bugfixes immediately. That is, releases with increased patch number according to SemVer should be approved immediately.

Sure, app store providers won't do this because it will definitely be exploited.

There has to be another way. I find continuous delivery to be one of the most powerful weapons of a developer, and it is just not possible in the app store ecosystem.

treesknees 4 years ago |

I don’t have experience in continuous delivery of apps, but I have experience in embedded systems. In a world where you _cant_ just push updates immediately, you need to increase your test coverage. You should identify what in your stack is causing platform-specific portions of your app to break so often, and fix it.

The problem isn’t the App Store, it’s rushing to market without testing and expecting the user to beta test the app for you. You can have continuous delivery without sacrificing user experience.

quambene 4 years ago | |

It's not breaking often. But even handling rare issues is a pain in the app stores.

throwawayvibes 4 years ago |

>I find continuous delivery to be one of the most powerful weapons of a developer

Write more and better tests so you don't have to continuously take out fires.

quambene 4 years ago | |

UI/UX can't be tested easily. IMO, this is why continuous delivery is especially important in (GUI) apps.