Google breaks developers’ incomes and does little to fix it
Google often proud itself how much effort they put into helping developers to grow their business. They promote success stories from around the world or even invite those people on stage wherever possible. What they don’t share so much are the stories of many developers asking for help via their support channels. You can find many articles and social media posts of people losing their incomes because of (vaguely formulated) rules violations or Play Store bugs affecting their applications. People wanting to work on the problems, cooperating, but only to hit the wall of silence (or ignorance?) from Google. Now I’m one of them as well.
Some time ago I’ve published an app on Google Play Store. From the beginning this was just a small side project I was working on in my free time. The main purpose was to address the problem I wanted to solve for myself but I was happy to publish it for other users looking for same functionality. To get something back for the hours spend developing it I’ve implemented an in-app product, users are able to purchase if they are interested in what the app is offering. I’ve paid the fee to Google to allow me to publish paid apps, then paid cut from every purchase any user did, and was quite content with it since I was basically paying for a service which allowed me to reach users with similar problems worldwide. Hoping this service is here to help me and to assist me if needed.
Ohhhh, how wrong I was! Yes, for some time everything worked well but only until the first hiccup. In late February my sales plummeted. If you are living in Europe or following news, it was around the same time when the Russia invaded Ukraine. My first reaction was to connect those events together even though I don’t live in any of those two specific countries. But in a few days I started to receive emails with complains that the product is impossible to buy because of mysterious DF-DFERH-01 error. So I have tried myself…
My application is designed for Wear OS smartwatches, it can’t be installed on a phone. But some time ago Google changed the purchase flow the way that you can’t complete the process on your watch. You can either use your phone to confirm the purchase or follow a web link and do it in your browser. The first option, which most people will only use, is however broken for me and users of my app. When me (a “beta tester” for my own app) or anybody else opens the notification on their phone to finish payment, they are greeted with this error and unable to continue.
So I finally knew why my app is not making any revenue. It was end of February / beginning of March. In panic, I’ve started looking for channels to contact Google and ask them to look into the problem. I’m a developer using their service which they are making money from, they for sure must help. It is April and the help is still nowhere to be find. My support ticket rots somewhere in the dark corner of Google’s backlog and every answer to my email is the same. Team is looking into it…, we understand that you are “eager to get working”…, you get the image I believe.
Only after some month or so and plethora of emails they asked me to provide steps to reproduce, like really? I have sent them images, video, everything I could and they are supposedly not able to reproduce an issue happening 10 times of 10? Yeah, more like nobody ever tried.
I honestly don’t think this article will help. I don’t think Play teams at Google answer (or listen in that matter) to anybody, God included. Right now my only hope is that some developer will pick the ticket some day and really look into it or more likely they will “fix it” as some side effect when they rollout new version of purchase flow or something similar. I know I’m not alone in this fight with many other developers fighting same or similar battles. If you have similar experience or tips what I can try, let me know in comments. 💭
Thank you and I hope your journey with Google will be hiccup-less as long as possible because afterwards it goes only downhill. 📉
Update - June 2022:
After around 3 months of loosing hope the issue got resolved! 🎆
There wasn’t much communication going on from Google’s side and I don’t really think my queries and complains made much difference but after long months of waiting I have recently received an email stating that the issue should be already fixed. I have immediately tried to make a test purchase and indeed, the test payment went through!
Still, I can’t tell this was very good customer support experience but at this point I’m just really glad the store is back to it’s normal operation. 🙏
