Chrome extension approved in only 3 days! 🎉
by ArdyOur private launch was scheduled for today.
We knew we were probably going to be a few days late because we're behind on a few bug fixes and features, but I didn't think we'd be blocked by something completely out of our control...
That was until last weekend when I submitted our Chrome extension to Chrome Web Store to be used by Testers and I found out even if you're only launching privately to a few specific accounts, your extension has to go through a manual review process by Chrome Web Store team. 😮 And guess what...they're currently going through the backlog of extensions submitted 3 weeks ago! 😱
I was so pissed at myself for not submitting the extension sooner. 🤦♂️ Because the extension is pretty much done and the changes we're making are mostly on the dashboard and the backend services. I was thinking we may have to postpone the private launch until a month from now...which is super disappointing when you've been working 70 hours/week for many weeks to get your product launched in time.
An hour ago I refreshed my pinned Chrome Web Store developer dashboard tab and saw this 😍
SUCH A HUGE RELIEF!
I guess we're going live now! 😍 Just need to wrap up a few things and start sending the invites to the 60 signed up early users plus friends and ex-coworkers! Exciting times!
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Hey Ardy, we are also developing a Chrome extension and had the same problem. If you are testing internally with whitelisted users, I really do not know what is the rationale of having the extension manually reviewed. It is devastating to wait, if you have just been building it for so long. Took us 3 weeks+ to get the first version on Chrome Web Store, but after that (if you do not change permissions) the review is quite fast - in 1-2 days. Good luck with your product, looks superb!
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Thanks for sharing your experience!
The whole review process is a pretty big hassle. For example, we want to send invitations for our "Testers-only" extension and at the same time submit it for a review to be published on the webstore (Unlisted) so that even people who don't have a Google account can download it through a link. But...if we submit it and it takes weeks to review, during those weeks, we wouldn't be able to publish bug fixes for our testers... so we submitted the extension separately instead of changing the publish settings on the Testers-only one. Now waiting for it to be reviewed.-
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Congratulations on the launch Ardy! Browse AI fell on my radar a while ago on twitter by someone from the no code crowd. It's a fascinating tool and I'm waiting for a good opportunity to use it.
As @lowraw mentioned, we went through the exact same story with publishing Tablerone on CWS. Their dashboard is a disaster and their review staff is not much better. It took them a month to confirm some of our assets.
The worst thing is that they disabled reviews for everybody. I think after the Tik Tok Play Store fiasco to avoid similar incidents in the future.
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Thanks Natan! Our extension was just approved! We're going to (soft) launch this week.
I hadn't heard of the Tik Tok Play Store incident. But I've heard there are a lot of extensions posting fake reviews and even fake downloads. Given that most apps businesses use have become web-based, I think it's crazy that Google is not investing 100x more in their extension store. There's such an enormous untapped potential there.
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