Google Play seems to be set up under the assumption that the developer of an app is also the publisher. This is not always the case and, as described below, it causes us (and, I suspect, many others) a lot of time and aggravation. I'm interested in feedback on whether others have encountered these problems and, if so, how they deal with them, and whether an enhancement of some kind to Google Play might help. (I have a suggestion at the end.)
We develop and publish a number of apps and we are also developing apps for a business partner to be published by our partner on Google Play. Our partner, for obvious reasons, does not want to share their logon credentials for Google Play with us, so our work flow as we test the app (licensing, in-app purchases) prior to publication is very inefficient. We have two choices: 1. Publish a copy of the app, under a different package name, in the alpha channel of our own developer console; 2. Ship the app to our partner to publish in their alpha channel, set us up as testers, and then coordinate with them during testing. The problem with the first approach is that our own account will eventually become cluttered with garbage apps that were never intended for publishing. It used to be that we could simply save the app as a draft and when we were finished testing, we could remove all traces of it. No more. There are many difficulties with the second approach. Our partner is not a developer, so all the developer documentation is rather hard for them to navigate and absorb. We need to provide them pointers to specific sections of the documentation. Sometimes we need to interact with them in real time, particularly for setting test responses and canceling test purchases. Such interactions are necessarily inefficient. As it happens, our partner is seven time zones away from us, so real-time interaction is particularly difficult to schedule (and costly, as well). I think Google Play could be enhanced to address these issues. One possibility would be for an account owner to be able to grant to third parties limited access rights to the developer account to perform specific operations for specific apps. For instance, our partner could grant us rights to upload draft APKs for one app, publish them to the app's alpha and beta channels only, and set test responses, but not allow us to set test accounts, publish to the production channel or to see any developer console information about their other apps. Perhaps they could also allow us to manually cancel test purchases (which would require access to a subset of their Google Wallet merchant account). The granularity and scope of the privileges that could be granted in this way would need to be carefully designed. What do others think? -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Android Developers" group. To post to this group, send email to android-developers@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to android-developers+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/android-developers?hl=en --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Android Developers" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to android-developers+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
