YHK - yet another hacker news clone

Same happened for CoMaps (which unfortunately does not have 12+ years of presence going for it)

The google review process is the best advertising for f-droid there could ever be.

Longer than an average App Store review (which is heavily criticized for being too long)? Hilarious

F-Droid's great but their build queue has had multi week waits too, difference is you can see exactly where your build is stuck instead of guessing.

Now, let's compare with "google friendly" apps: https://www.apkmirror.com/uploads/?appcategory=youtube :)

I just updated 2 dormant apps for the first time in 10 years; It took 2 days, and the apps were approved on a sunday.

The Google Play review process has been slower and more painful than the App Store review process for 5+ years at this point. At least you get to communicate with real people at Apple; it’s all bot-driven with Google.

Huh.

On the flip side, googles release infra provides much more functionality for apps that already has scale. I wish apple were more production oriented too.

AnkiDroid (~17 years old) submitted our latest alpha on Sept 03, 2026, 4:40 am. Still pending review.

This isn't my experience. My updates usually get accepted within hours. Apple takes days usually.

For new accounts yes, for older accounts it's much faster in my experience.

Apple has it's own issues, they often just answer with a random question so they can kick the review down the line. "Are you sure this is your pricing?" "Can you confifrm you have not selected that country" and then you have to wait another 2 days.

Some reviews are clearly automated, some get a light human review, and some involve a human really looking hard. In my experience, new apps also tend to get more rigorous human review for their first 2-4 submissions.

The explosion in LLM app development has clearly created a bottleneck at the human review steps.