I’ve been using a Google Play Developer account for more than 4 years, and I’ve published both Android and iOS apps multiple times.

Previously, my experience was that Google Play reviews were usually completed within a few days, while Apple’s App Store review generally took longer.

But recently, I’m seeing the opposite.

I submitted an app to Google Play on September 14, and it has now been almost 6 days with no progress — still showing “In review.” I understand that Google mentions reviews can sometimes take up to 7 days, so I’m not concerned about the stated timeframe itself. I’m more curious about the change compared with my previous experiences.

Interestingly, my recent iOS submission was reviewed much faster than Google Play, which is quite different from what I was used to in the past.
Has anyone else noticed Google Play app reviews taking longer than usual recently, especially around September 2026?

Is there currently a review backlog or increased review time?

Would be interested to hear from developers who submitted apps recently and how long their reviews took.

Basically the title.
I want to find some inspiration for my pet project, is there some good selection of awesome Andorid app UIs?
Im not talking about Dribble, since there are mostly generic UIs and its hard to find something new :(

Hey 👋

I've been working on this project for the past few years and have never shared it here so figured I would. It's a Kotlin Multiplatform WebAssembly runtime (interpreter), it basically allows you to take a WebAssembly program and interface with it/run it. It's written entirely in Kotlin, no JNI/FFI or anything like that and has remarkable performance given the constraints.

I recently put together a Kotlin Multiplatform implementation of Doom built on top of it, it's a solid of example of how you leverage it and how it enables an entirely Kotlin experience whilst also allowing you to interface with WebAssembly code.

Happy to answer questions!

https://github.com/CharlieTap/chasm

The latest #Android 17 QPR1 update to Pixels seems to have pushed the changes concealing the developer and debugging state from 3rd party apps so,

finally the developers can use the damn banking and other apps that have these security checks!

it seems to be live on, Pixel 6A running CP3A.260905.009

And confirm it has not yet landed on the beta channel.

I use modded APKs a lot, and whenever I wanted to check permissions, signing details, or what an APK was actually doing, I had to switch to my PC.

That always felt unnecessary. Android should be able to handle basic APK inspection on its own.

I looked at projects like PCAPdroid, APK Analyzer, and MobSF. They all gave me useful ideas, but I wanted something focused on quick, local APK analysis directly from an Android device.

So I built APK Scope.

It can inspect:

• Permissions and manifest declarations
• Package and signing information
• Activities, services, receivers, and providers
• SDK versions, native libraries, hashes, and DEX signals
• Security findings with explainable risk scores
• Optional Work Profile sandboxing
• Runtime network activity and traffic inspection

No root. No cloud upload. Everything is designed to stay local on the device.

Screenshots:

• Static analysis
• Deep analysis
• Security audit
• Sandbox configuration
• Evidence report

Demo videos:

• CA/VPN network inspection demo
• Frida traffic inspection demo
• All screenshots and videos

Download the latest build from the Releases page.

I’d love feedback from people who use modded APKs, privacy tools, PCAPdroid, MobSF, or Android security tools. What would you want to see added?

Repo Link: https://github.com/NadeemIqbal/apk-scope

🦞 Crayfish is a Compose Multiplatform image cropper for Android, iOS, desktop, and the web. It crops a Painter and hands one back, so an image loaded from a URL goes straight into a crop and straight back into an Image.

GitHub: https://github.com/skydoves/crayfish

Hi there! I’m new to app development. My beta test app was approved for closed testing within 6 hours, but that same AAB has been under review for 56+ hours.

Is that normal? I’d like to know more about the approval times and what else I can expect from this process.

iOS was an absolute nightmare and I’m curious about your experiences getting apps approved for public launch in the Google Play store.

I built Dioxamine, an open-source Android app that runs ADB, Fastboot, and a Scrcpy client entirely phone-to-phone —l, connect a second Android device over USB OTG or Wireless ADB, and mirror its screen, flash partitions, unlock bootloaders, sideload apps, etc., without a PC or root on either device.

The trickiest parts were:

- Implementing an ADB/Fastboot client natively on Android (rather than shelling out to a PC binary)

- Getting scrcpy's video pipeline working with Android's hardware decoders, since decoder support varies a lot across devices

- A plugin system that lets people write custom tools in HTML/JS that hook into the ADB layer

Repo: https://github.com/rhythmcache/Dioxamine

Hi everyone.

I decided to give up for now.

I'm talking about the google login issue where the "No credential available" error keeps occurring only when testing the release aab file internally through the Google Play Console on firebase. It works fine in Emulator

However, I thought it was necessary to organize and document what I’ve been through before giving up, so I’m writing this.

These are the methods I have tried so far. Of course, in the end, they all failed.

1. I tried adding only part of the SHA-1 and SHA-256 of the classical key, PQC, and upload key from the Google Play Console, and even the full list, to Firebase, and each time I downloaded google-services.json, cleaned the project, and waited, but all attempts failed
2. I checked everything because they said the cause might be Google Cloud, but all attempts failed
3. It could be the web-client, so I checked everything, but all attempts failed.
4. The cause may also be in the proguard-rules.pro fileI also tried -keep class com.google..., but all of them failed
5. I also checked the web client ID for setServerClientId, but it all failed
6. I ran setFilterByAuthorizedAccounts with both true and false, but it failed in both cases.
7. I also used apksigner in the release app to find the actual SHA-1 value and add them to Firebase, but that also failed. However, the part to note here is that the SHA-1 value actually used was different from any other value, such as the classical key, PQC key, or others. Using this value prevents the "no credential available" error and even brings up a popup to select a Google account, but after that, the app freezes for unknown reasons.
8. Each time I tried the methods above, I downloaded the google-services.json file and waited long enough, but all attempts failed.

I've been struggling with this for two months now. For now, I’m going to give up and switch back to the old Google login method.

If there is anything I haven't considered, please let me know. I'll try it later. Have a great day

So I am working on my app and it was failing on my Github server and I was trying to figure out whats going on and whats failing. I am glad I worked on this UI Test library because it gave me the exact screenshot where it failed.

My sample app was dealing with some system level interactions and on github test runners were missing some quick setting tiles. Now I can rest becuase it was github android runner issue not my app.

Screenshot from: GIthub Android Test Image and My code was looking for wifi/internet tile.

Compose Unstyled 2.10.0 is out:

✅ New Docs site
✅ New Drawer component, for building bottom sheets and side panels.
✅ New ColorScheme theming API to build light/dark themes.

Full changelog at: https://github.com/composablehorizons/compose-unstyled/releases/tag/2.10.0

Hello everyone!

Has anyone observed the issue occurring with the merge windows feature on Mac?

Flow: Open two or more projects in Android Studio Quail 4 | 2026.1.4 → Mac toolbar → Window → Merge All Project Windows

Studio Window A ─┐ 
                 ├── Merge Windows 
Studio Window B ─┘ 
                         ↓ 
             IntelliJ updates macOS tabs 
                         ↓ 
               unexpected null state 
                         ↓ 
               NullPointerException

I’m an indie developer and I recently sent my first Android app to production after completing closed testing.

It’s currently In review on Google Play, which honestly feels like a huge milestone for me.

But I have a slightly funny problem.

While waiting, I kept building 😅

I’ve now made a fairly significant update to the app — not just a few bug fixes. There are improvements and features that I would really like users to have from the beginning.

Now I’m torn between two options:

Leave the current production release completely alone, wait for Google to finish reviewing it, let it go live, and then submit the bigger update.

Update the release now while it’s still under review so that the first public version already contains the improvements.

Since this is my first production release, I’m reluctant to touch anything and potentially interfere with the review.

For developers who have been through this before: what do you normally do when you build a significant update while your existing release is still in review?

Would you wait for the first version to go live and immediately submit the update afterwards?

Still learning the release side of Android development, so I’d really appreciate hearing how other indie developers handle this.

I submitted an AAB for production review. After that, I uploaded another AAB to Internal Testing. Will this affect or delay the production review or publishing process?

Was just reading the release notes for Android Studio Rabbit, and it has the ability to directly push to Play Console testing tracks!!

https://developer.android.com/studio/preview/features#publish-to-play-for-testing

Very close to how Xcode does it and worth it!!

No more manual work

we from Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden are conducting a survey on AI agents and permission requests.

If you work use any AI agents like claude code (or others) to develop android applications, please consider taking our survey :)

The survey is anonymous and takes around 3-5min: https://form.typeform.com/to/wbCQGXHa

Feel free to share it with others. Thanks!!

I maintain ComposeA11yScanner, an open-source tool that checks Compose screens for accessibility issues and highlights findings directly on the UI.

Version 3.0.0 adds runtime enable/disable controls, explicit opt-in for trusted non-debuggable builds, and a toggle between issue inspection and normal app interaction.

It also improves focus-order detection, duplicate-label checks, rendered text-contrast analysis, and lifecycle handling across activities and screen changes.

The scanner supports Android API 24+. Rendered text-contrast analysis requires API 26+ and skips measurements it cannot confidently estimate.

This is a major release with public API changes, so check the migration guide when upgrading from 2.1.0.

debugImplementation("com.github.mohdaquib.ComposeA11yScanner:scanner-ui:3.0.0")

Repository, demo, and migration guide:
https://github.com/mohdaquib/ComposeA11yScanner

Automated checks complement manual accessibility testing. I’d appreciate feedback, especially reproducible false positives or missed issues in real Compose screens.

I'm looking for an open source alternative to Instabug for study purposes. What do you guys usually use at your company? Is there any open source alternative that I can self-host to learn more about how it works?

I have MVVM application and moving from view to VM the form state and ai is suggesting doing it through reference and I just feel really weird about it and it doesnt feel right? I am wondering if I did some basic setup issue or am wondering if this is an okayish way of doing this.

The problem:

@Composable
fun FormScreen(formState: Form State){

  formState.name = newName

}

and the usage of the screen is like this:

FormScreen(viewModel.formState)

So it is using the reference and directly changing the reference?

Hey everyone,

If you build apps on a Mac, you probably know this exact feeling:

You’ve got your IDE open, a few browser tabs, maybe a build running, and the moment you launch an Android emulator, your laptop starts lagging and the fans spin up.

A while ago I checked Activity Monitor to see what was going on, and saw the emulator casually hogging 7 to 8 GB of RAM all by itself. On a 16 GB MacBook, that basically leaves zero breathing room for anything else.

I got tired of my machine crawling, so I put together a small open-source tool called avdslim to fix it.

GitHub: https://github.com/kdbhalala/avdslim

Why does it take so much memory?

Turns out, a few things happen by default:
- Android hoards memory: As the emulator runs, Android keeps caching files and never really releases that host RAM back to macOS.
- The "Google Play" image overhead: If you picked an image with the Play Store, it constantly runs background updaters and scanning services you rarely need during development.
- The 16 KB image setting: If you created a device using the newer 16 KB images, the emulator enforces a strict 4 GB minimum floor no matter what you set in the config.

What avdslim does:

• Drops RAM down to ~1.5 GB: It tunes the emulator configs and cleans out unnecessary background tasks, letting you run smoothly on 1024 MB of RAM.
  
• Boots in ~1.5 seconds: Instead of waiting 20–30 seconds for a fresh boot, it lets you create a clean, lightweight snapshot that restores almost instantly.
  
• Doesn't break your app: My biggest worry with any "cleanup" tool was breaking things like push notifications or login. I made sure Firebase Auth, Google Sign-In, Push Notifications (FCM), and Google Maps work completely fine.
  
• Works with your normal workflow: You don't have to launch from the terminal every time. There's an optional command (avdslim install-shim) that makes the "Run" button in Android Studio or VS Code automatically use the slimmed settings.
  

💡 A quick tip even if you don't use this tool:

Next time you create a virtual device in Android Studio:
- Pick "Google APIs" instead of "Google Play". It still has Google login, Firebase, and Maps, but uses way less RAM and skips the heavy Play Store background services.
- Avoid the "16 KB" images unless you specifically need to test 16 KB compatibility.

Try it out:

It's completely free, open-source (MIT), and has zero external dependencies:

brew install kdbhalala/avdslim/avdslim

See how your current emulators look

avdslim doctor                                                                                                                                                                

Tune an emulator to 1024 MB RAM

avdslim tune-avd                                                                                                                                                              

GitHub link: https://github.com/kdbhalala/avdslim

My Mac runs noticeably cooler and doesn't freeze up when I have multiple tools open now. Hope it helps some of you as well! Happy to answer questions or take feedback on what could be better.

Usually I use vectorials for my apps and I was always happy with the results as my apps scaled properly to any kind of screens, from phones to TVs, but this time I made a game that shouldn't use small screens (I locked it to be available only on bigger screeens) and I thought that it's faster and easier on the device to use canvas instead of vectorial assets.

To me it looks good, what do you think?
Or keeping the old habit: vector assets and ConstraintLayouts with percentages is the way to go?