[throwaway743]

As someone who just started a business and released my first android app a few weeks ago, you couldn't be more right.

Not only is the fate of your app in the hands of the Play Store, but also in the hands of their testers. Just had a critical bug in an update release 5 days ago, affecting fresh installs. I immediately fixed it after a friend notified me, pushed the fixed update, only to wait till yesterday to get rejected due to a super minor ui issue. Then finally got approval this morning. Typically I waited 30 min for approval, 2 hrs the longest.

During that time I reached out to their non-existent customer support, messaged their "help forum", called any number I could find, finally resorted to randomly messaging employees on LinkedIn out of desperation. Nothing. And when you try to get support through their help options, it's a gamble as to whether or not the help option you select is going to give you an error. Not to mention any number you call ends with "please visit support.google.com. thanks for calling".

In the meantime, I had ~300+ uninstalls out of the ~1200 I had, and risked my 4.8 rating tanking and sinking my chances of success before I even really started.

That's just my story. There are people who are facing even worse rn dealing with them and have been waiting for weeks.