Android Devs 650+ impacted by Google Play indexing bug

10 points

7 years ago

Our Pomodoro Focus Timer, DayNinja https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.envisageapps.dayninja has been published for over 7 days now and still does not appear in search results. If you search “DayNinja” or the package name in Google Play “com.envisageapps.dayninja” it won’t appear. We publish many apps and this has never happened in all the years of our business. I tired support chats over the last week which just were a waste of hours debating and me insisting that this is a fault. They won’t listen and there is no path to escalate.

In frustration started digging around the web this morning and found this: https://support.google.com/googleplay/thread/15162444?msgid=15162444

Many other developers are impacted dating back to September!

I just finished another support chat bringing the thread to their attention, and support would not acknowledge it as a known issue or offer any idea of if/when they will resolve it. Their only suggestion was to get reviews and downloads?!? But this is not an ASO issue, no other app that appears in the results is on competing terms with our apps' name, we have always been able to search on the package name or exact name of the app and have it appear as the first result. In this case we do not appear at all.. (Sorry I am venting here! just really frustrated)

...Same app in Apple App Store https://apps.apple.com/us/app/dayninja-focus-timer-to-do-task-list-mindful/id1163539295 appeared in <24hrs using just the app name and is now ranking on other terms.

In my experience, Google Play is going down hill. A client app a couple of months ago took over a week to approve. Apple takes 24hrs pretty consistently now, to at least get a reply. With google nothing, and now this.

Please download DayNinja by the direct link and rate it. I'd like to test if votes and downloads do make an impact, as the way things are right now I don't know what to tell clients about when their app will appear.

If this is the new status for app publishing then there is no hope of having an app even appear without massive budgets for Ads.

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