WTF Google, you stole my $5 - Update

A couple of weeks ago I posted about this issue I had with my Google Chrome Developers account. After a minor public outrage (#1 on Hacker News for an hour or two) I thought: this can go two ways, either they fix the problem perfectly right now and send me apologies and a free phone or something, or they keep ignoring it. Either way: I should tell the world how it went.

Well, the actual outcome was somewhere in the middle. After three days of silence I got a reply on the Chromium Apps discussion board from Google's Developer Advocate Joe Marini. He apologized, said that the issue had been fixed and so it had. No big deal and certainly no free phone ;) (Bummer, my old HTC Vision just broke down)

I published my extension straight away. The status turned to published but it did not show up in search and neither was I able to install it. I waited, after two days hit published again. Now the status turned to pending review. I waited two weeks. I posted this new issue on the Chromium Apps board. After half a day Joe replied once more and what do you know, after a couple of hours the issue got fixed.

This morning my extension finally got published! Not exactly a smooth process though.

Two things struck me:
A) this Joe guy responds to almost all the questions on the Chromium forums. Apart from his replies Google is dead silent.

B) Google handled this in a rather off-hand manner. Does that mean that they're not really working on improving this process? Would it have been an indicator of improvement if they would have made a bigger deal out of it? There is so much silence from their side that it is really hard to make out what is actually happening.

Well, at any rate, you now know that my app finally got published after 2.5 months. And you've learned that complaining works every now and then, however much it goes against your personality. It certainly does not come natural to me.

You can discuss this on HN

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The unreasonable effectiveness of i3, or: ten years of a boring desktop environment

Idea time: RFID+E-Ink, electronic price tags without batteries

Parsing 10TB of Metadata, 26M Domain Names and 1.4M SSL Certs for $10 on AWS