Prisoners of Google Android development
I also got this email, but professionally and personally.<p>Personally, I voluntarily built and run open source apps for 16 different cities for their transit system. This gave me two weeks to update 16 apps, for no benefit of anyone. My app is a PWA, and the Android version just uses cordova + a few plugins to add a few native options. Unfortunately, updating cordova to support the new target android api broke some of the plugins, which haven't been updated yet, so it ended up being a full weekend of work and testing.<p>Truthfully, I'd prefer to get rid of the app and just have users go to the website and install the PWA, but the average user still doesn't know how to do this. And the Play Store is still the first place users go to find apps. If google would just allow submitting a PWA directly to the app store, that'd be nice... I am not looking forward to doing this yearly.<p>Professionally, we are also scrambling. We have a legacy app that some supported customers are still using until the end of the year. The app is a fairly complex application, and basic testing has already shown that just changing the target api version has broken quite a few things. We have gotten the extension, but we know this will take 1-2 weeks of developer time + 1-2 weeks of QA's time, for an update that does nothing but appease Google. All for an app we are going to officially remove from the store at the end of the year, once all customers transition to the new app is complete.