Finally applied for production access. Yay!
I built a whole app. The Google Play questionnaire nearly broke me.
Quick context: I'm building Kept, a shared disposable-camera app for events, mostly aimed at Indian weddings. Guests get photo tasks, upload pics, everyone gets a shared "reveal" gallery afterward. No more "hey can you AirDrop me that photo" 47 times.
I built the whole thing solo. Firebase backend, Flutter app, camera capture, upload, gallery, the works. Ran closed testing with 12 friends and family for 14 days like Google requires for new personal developer accounts.
And I thought that was the hard part.
Then I hit the production access questionnaire.
The bug list was humbling
During testing, my testers found things I genuinely didn't see coming:
Photos uploaded by one guest for this particular event weren't visible to everyone else in the event (turns out one corrupt picture can ruin stuff)
Swiping left on some screens would just... exit the app. Not navigate back. Just gone.
My "custom template" flow wasn't really working!
None of these were things I'd have caught testing solo on my own phone. This is the actual point of closed testing and I get why Google forces it now.
Then the questionnaire made me second-guess every sentence I wrote
Ten-ish questions. Recruitment method. How hard was it to recruit. Tester engagement. Feedback summary. Changes made. Why you think you're production-ready. Audience. Value prop. Install projections.
Each answer capped at 300 characters, which sounds easy until you're trying to compress a critical issue into a sentence that doesn't sound like a red flag.
I kept flip-flopping: do I describe fixes as "shipped" when they're actually still "prioritized and in progress"? Do I mention the one gnarly bug that's technically still open, or does that read as inconsistent with everything else I wrote about "no crashes or breaking issues"?
Ended up landing here: be honest, don't overclaim fixes I haven't pushed, but don't volunteer every known issue either. The form isn't asking for a full bug tracker, it's asking whether real testing happened and whether I learned from it. Both true. Just took me way longer to write four short paragraphs than it would to fix half these bugs.
The real lesson
Building the app was, weirdly, the more predictable part. I knew what "done" looked like. The questionnaire is this weird meta-layer where you have to describe your own testing process convincingly, honestly, and concisely all at once and there's no compiler error telling you when you've gotten the tone wrong.
Still pre-launch. Critical bugs are next on the list before I actually hit submit. Wish me luck. Here's hoping my production access gets approved.
