If your personal Google Play developer account was created after 13 November 2023, you cannot ship to production until you have run a closed test with at least 12 testers opted in for 14 continuous days.
The number that breaks people is not 12. It is 14.
Why the 14 days is the hard part
The days only count while at least 12 testers are opted in. One person uninstalling on day 11 can put you back near the start, and the Play Console does not exactly shout about it. People recruit exactly 12 testers, lose two in the second week, and find out days later that they are counting from zero again.
The fix is not clever, it is just unpopular: recruit 15 to 20, not 12. Assume some will ghost.
The tracker
I got tired of counting days in a notes app, so I built one: https://devconnectplatform.com/tools/closed-test-tracker?ref=devto
You put in the first day your test had 12 testers and how many are opted in right now. It tells you which day you are on, what date you can apply for production access, and what happens if someone drops.
Three things about it:
- No account. Nothing is stored on a server. Your progress lives in the page address itself, so you can bookmark the link or send it to the people testing for you.
- It does not read your Play Console. It is a calculator, not an integration. The Play Console is the authority, and its own counter can lag a day. Use the tracker to plan, then confirm there.
- It warns instead of flattering. If you sit exactly on 12, it says so, because that is the situation that costs people two weeks.
The part a tracker cannot fix
Counting is the easy half. Keeping 12 real people opted in for two straight weeks is the half that fails, and no tool solves that for you.
What does work is reciprocity: you test someone else's app, they test yours. Everybody in that trade needs the same thing, so nobody has to be talked into it. That is the idea behind the tester exchange I run at https://devconnectplatform.com/app-testing,?ref=devto which is free and has no ads.
If you are in the middle of a closed test right now, the tracker is the useful half of this post. Take it, it costs nothing.
