Same happened for CoMaps (which unfortunately does not have 12+ years of presence going for it)

The google review process is the best advertising for f-droid there could ever be.

Longer than an average App Store review (which is heavily criticized for being too long)? Hilarious

F-Droid's great but their build queue has had multi week waits too, difference is you can see exactly where your build is stuck instead of guessing.

Now, let's compare with "google friendly" apps: https://www.apkmirror.com/uploads/?appcategory=youtube :)

I just updated 2 dormant apps for the first time in 10 years; It took 2 days, and the apps were approved on a sunday.

The Google Play review process has been slower and more painful than the App Store review process for 5+ years at this point. At least you get to communicate with real people at Apple; it’s all bot-driven with Google.

Huh.

On the flip side, googles release infra provides much more functionality for apps that already has scale. I wish apple were more production oriented too.

AnkiDroid (~17 years old) submitted our latest alpha on Sept 03, 2026, 4:40 am. Still pending review.

This isn't my experience. My updates usually get accepted within hours. Apple takes days usually.

For new accounts yes, for older accounts it's much faster in my experience.

Apple has it's own issues, they often just answer with a random question so they can kick the review down the line. "Are you sure this is your pricing?" "Can you confifrm you have not selected that country" and then you have to wait another 2 days.

Some reviews are clearly automated, some get a light human review, and some involve a human really looking hard. New apps seem to get a more rigorous human review for their first 2-4 submissions. Or at least humans looking over automated test screenshots etc. One reviewer clearly only looked at screenshots because they missed something that would be blindingly obvious on the prior screen if they did it themselves.

The explosion in LLM app development has clearly created a bottleneck at the human review steps. Not only delays but much more "dump" rejections from likely over-stressed humans.

MAYBE operating systems shouldn't have gatekeepers which can deny access to billions of customers for any and no reason at all. Apple and Google are WELL past due for regulation in this space. The fact that we cannot download and install software from the internet onto our phones JUST like we can do with our computers is a symbol of our inept and ineffective politicians.

And before someone says "well akshully you can technically do it on Android," Google has been working tirelessly to make it as onerous as possible for both developers and customers. For example, users need to separately authorise each app (browser, files manager, alternative store, etc) to install an APK from outside the Play Store. Google also does background scans using "Play Protect" which will periodically delete apps Google doesn't approve of. This happened to me with SmartTubeNext. I have a dozen other ways Google ensures users are discouraged from stepping outside the Play Store.

yeah my 'promptly AI' alarm clock almost always spends 7 days, as soon as the binary changes, even descriptions changes take several days