Today, Google says it will now require new Android developers with personal accounts to test their app with a minimum of 20 people for at least 2 weeks prior to publication. I have my mum, my dad and my two brothers but Google wants at least 20 testers. Yo!

About time.

See if I care. Lesser the excuses not to try PWA, F-Droid, Obtainium, and IzzyOnDroid.

It needs 20 email n devices

I'll buy testers the same way youtubers were buying likes back then.

I'm offering Android app testing services for $5/week

Included:
- Google account under my legal name
- 1 download with your choice of proof
- a statement that I found no issues

Not included:
- testing
- more than 15 minutes of my attention or your app's runtime
- a statement that there are no issues

@lorentz https://youtu.be/3uPIFItnrcg

Ok, I agree with the comments but I'm still sorry about this change.

@vintprox Classic

Funny to see we think alike: this will be a service just like buying likes.
Third is just for the initial publication right?

It's not personal. They just found a way to slow down the app store without publicly stating "we suck at business and need to stop bleeding money".
So they are shedding their least lucrative users - teeny tiny app devs.

I mean, for every super-indie viral game out there are literally tens of thousands of little-to-no-download apps, and CDNs aren't free.

@ostream the company as a whole, yes.
But almost the entirety of that money was from Google search. Pretty much every other line of business is soooo red right now.
That's why they've had so many of our kind lay'd off those last couple of years.

Another example from history that might be easier to analyze: Microsoft had profits during the short years while they had the "Zune", an early-2000s competitor to an ancestor of the iPhone called "iPod".
But even during green quarters Zune was soon out-competed, and then extinguished by Microsoft.

Google has the same problem, but much worse - much of their market relevance is due to being "the non-apple platform for everything". So they can't just drop the google play app store. But they need to make it less of a loss leader.