Delay with Publishing

This is not advertisement related but thought I would ask here as this has the most traffic.

Has anybody noticed a huge delay in publishing the last week?
A friend and I put some apps up over the last few days that took days to show up in the listings as apposed to the usual 3-4 hours.
And since release have been getting 1 download or less a day?
The app should easily be getting 300+ a day due to the nature of the app, I have tried a quick unpublish - republish and it does not seem to have fixed it.

Anybody else getting this?

Have also noticed this pattern lately. The apps do show up, but they’re like #200 in the search results or some such, even when the app name exactly matches the searched term.

And when you start looking at what other apps are in the search results, pretty much anything after #50 isn’t even related to the search in any way.

Yeah if I search for my developer account I can see it so it is obviously released… It’s really odd, to the point where an app I have not released and I am testing today has shown more impressions than the released app!
No idea what has caused it… going to need to take it down completely and upload it as a new app I think. Will I need to change the package name?

what country are you in? I know what app you are referring to, it’s ranked #42, used to be much higher, g-play search algorithms have changed again, some for the better some for the worse over the last couple days, it’s the breaks of the game

UK, It’s ridiculous search for the exact app name and it comes up as the 126th result on the search, with apps that have literally nothing in relation to the search before it! I’m searching for cheats for a game and I’m getting piano apps come up before me. Yet similar apps I have done that are for the same thing are ranking quite high up in there search.

I’m in the US and your app is ranked 42 for that specific search, rank is everything, everyone knows it and is fighting for that top spot

It appears there is an Algorithm change which doesn’t seem to give weight to absolute names. The changes seems to be only related to new Apps. Apps which have been around for while (or may be with X number of isntalls - not sure) doesn’t seem to be impacted.

Yes, I saw that too! I also saw that Google is checking some new apps before publishing. One time my app got banned even before it was available on the market…

I see a mix of both, increase in association apps with strong downloads and absolute names with fewer installs. Google has definitely been messing with the app association algorithm, for example, type in any popular photo app and Instagram will be #2 without any particular reference to the actual app. Give it a rest g-play, we know instagram kicks ass but everyone already has it on their phone. I believe it reflects what a user has on their phone, for example Cymera users also have instagram on their phone driving instagram to the top of the search results assuming new cymera users will also like to install instagram. Google does like to think it has a direct line into your psyche.

well yes that can and will happen if you upload multiple apps within a short timeframe aka spam detection

So after everything that is happening, Google decides to make life even harder on small developers? I mean i really don´t understand it, why shouldn´t an app with the exact title/description show on the top searches? Why if you search for a particular term, most results are nothing related with what you searched for? Is google trying to force developers into invest in advertising? Small developers can´t afford to spend thousands of dollars in advertising, which rises the question if Google only wants the big and established developers to develop apps?

This has been the reason for significant number of low quality apps. Many developers are simply using popular names and are simply spamming. Google caught on naming spam.

How does it fix spamming, though? Now even the new high-quality apps get no visibility because of this change.

It’s funny that it’s now Google spamming users with apps that are not relevant to their searches. :wink:

Can you message me which app you think it is.

hey guys, check this page :Google Help

We’re currently aware of an issue causing some developers to not appear correctly in Google Play search. This is also effecting the Developers Apps page, which shows all apps by a specific developer. We appreciate your patience while we work on a fix for these issues.
so, this is not algorithm change it is a bug and also my apps also got affected badly because of this.

Who are you speaking on behalf of when you say “we”? Oar are you quoting a source?
That page just takes me to what looks like a new google support page no specific topic.

I could not find your quote in the given link, can you tell us what section it’s in?

recent fixes , 5th issue . although it is in recent fixes it is not fixed yet

it is a quote taken straight from known issues page

+1 …are you guys still experiencing this? i am…no apps showing after published