[scottfr]

It's a similar situation with Chrome extensions. Extension reviews are generally pretty quick (an hour or so), but every once in a while you get hit with a longer one (days+).

In this type of environment, you need to ensure every release is as rock-solid as possible. For our extension, we have beta extension with a sub-group of opted-in users that we test on for a week or so before doing a production release. Then we roll out the extension to production incrementally starting with 1% of users and slowly ramping that up to 100% (it seems Android has a similar staged rollout feature).

[jarm0]

Good point, but as I also wrote in the article then one and only reason for doing anything was an API level deprecation e-mail from Google less than 3 weeks from its deadline and it states that review could take a week (never happened before with me though). If I would have noticed the "extend to November" immediately then it would have left more time. But yeah, I'm not saying that this situation could not have handled better, I'm saying that as soon as you make a mistake then there's nothing you can do. And mistakes will happen, even when testing thoroughly with every Android version.