Hi everyone,
On Wednesday, Katherine, Tomasz and I met with Joe Castorena from Google’s
Android Play Partnerships team. I’ve split up the most relevant information
into a few separate emails, to keep the discussion on each separate point
focussed.
Joe informed us of the process for getting featured in Google Play. The
long and short of it is that once we decide we’ve got a build that’s worth
featuring, we upload it to Google Play and contact Joe. There is a board at
Google that makes the decision about whether or not to feature an app and
that decision is multifactorial, including factors like what other apps are
featured at that time and whether it fits with the current theme of the
store (e.g. “Back to School”, etc.). We made need to make some tweaks to
get it featured (e.g. he said they might say something like “Make the app
more tablet-friendly and we can feature it”), and we’d be informed of what
those were.
We’ve got a choice with how we proceed with this:
1. We submit the current form of the production build to be featured.
2. We wait to finish some of the current threads of work (e.g. wrapping
up page issues and disambiguation), upload and hold that build unpublished,
then submit that to be featured, coordinating the release date with Joe.
I have a mild preference for option 2 as then we can coordinate the release
of the new features with the featuring, and get more bang for our buck.
That said, I am extremely proud of the app that we have out there right
now, so I would be more than happy to submit to be featured if that’s the
consensus.
Thoughts?
Dan
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Dan Garry
Associate Product Manager, Mobile Apps
Wikimedia Foundation
