Google Play Review Times Blow Past a Week, Developers Say

Conversations developer Daniel Gultsch says a Sept. 9 submission of his XMPP chat app sat in Google Play review for more than a week, a delay he called unacceptable in a Sept. 16 post on Mastodon.

Gultsch posted a screenshot from the Play Console showing the update logged for review on Sept. 9 and still marked pending a week later. "I understand that the pipeline is clogged with AI slop," he wrote, "but #Google needs to prioritize #Android apps that have been around for 12+ years and push updates only once a month."

The post reached the front page of Hacker News on Sept. 17, where other developers described similar waits. AnkiDroid contributor david_allison wrote that an alpha build submitted Sept. 3 was still pending 14 days later. CoMaps contributor pastk put a recent update's review at about 16 days, clearing only after two support tickets. A developer working on an app with Android Auto integration, posting as mrjeeves, said turnaround had stretched from a typical 48 to 72 hours to two weeks or longer.

What developers reported this month

The waits are not uniform. Four cases from the thread show the spread, from a submission still pending after a week to one that cleared in under an hour.

App	Submitted	Reported review time
Conversations	Sept. 9	Pending 7+ days (Gultsch)
AnkiDroid	Sept. 3	Pending 14 days (david_allison)
CoMaps	not stated	About 16 days (pastk)
Unnamed 16-year-old app	not stated	30 to 60 minutes (ryantgtg)

Not every account is affected the same way. Commenter deminature said reviews on one account run about an hour and read as fully automated, and ryantgtg said a 16-year-old app clears Google review in 30 to 60 minutes, against about 36 hours on Apple's App Store. A third commenter, greysonp, described the split inside a single app's own submissions: "Sometimes it's 4 hours, sometimes it's 5 days, and there's no visibility" into why.

An Android team with a full September

Gultsch's own theory is an app-review pipeline clogged by an AI-generated flood of submissions, a pattern that shows up elsewhere in the Android ecosystem: one analysis of F-Droid's Sept. 12 app batch found 72.5 percent of new listings looked machine-written. The review complaints also follow a busy few weeks for Google's Android security team, which set a three-day patch deadline for an exploited Pixel modem flaw earlier in September.

Google has not addressed the complaints in a developer blog post or its help center, and neither Gultsch's post nor the Hacker News thread includes a response from the company. Neither source gives a count of how many submissions Google Play now processes daily, the figure that would show whether review capacity has fallen behind rising volume or slowed for some other reason inside the pipeline itself.