Longer Review Times for Private Apps in Managed Google Play

[petterfoo]

Over the past month, we’ve noticed a significant increase in the review times for our apps that are permanently private under Managed Google Play. Previously, review times for both closed tracks and production were almost instantaneous. However, we’re now seeing delays ranging from 20 minutes to over an hour.

Has anyone else experienced similar issues? Is there any known way to revert to the shorter review times we had before?

It’s possible that this change coincides with our recent verification of developer accounts to meet the new requirements, but we’re unsure if that’s related.

[jasonbayton]

I see them hovering generally around 10 mins, which has been pretty consistent for as long as I can remember. Webapps are a little faster but not by much. 

That said, @Lizzie are you aware of anything internally to cause this?

[petterfoo]

For the permanently private apps we have had no review times at all since permanently private apps was enabled in the play console early 2021.
I have checked with some other app teams in our organisation and the experience the same thing.

We use a developer account per team and publish to our organisation(WS1 EMM), we don't use the iframe for apps.

[jasonbayton]

The thing is they do get reviewed for some very basic security checks, so if checks are generally increasing, which could be architectural as well as process/procedural, it'll affect everyone. @Lizzie ?

[BenMcc]

Review times are generally up around this time of the year as more apps have been updated to comply with the Target API level policy. While this doesn't specifically include managed apps they will still get caught up in the review process. Again this won't apply to everyone - most people will still see a few hours review time but some that caught up in random checks etc may see a lot longer than normal. We have seen some take a month or more (but that is very few and far between)

Ben

[petterfoo]

Reply to BenMcc:
We have not experienced this for permanently private apps at all before since they where added in 2021.
Now it is consistantly longer review times over multiple apps and multiple teams.