Hello!
We are still working on our cloud app, and wanted to know is the Cloud App incentive increase deadline of March 31, 2022 when the app needs to be approved and listed on the marketplace by, or submitted for approval? I ask as it appears that cloud approvals are taking a while so we want to make sure the timeline lines up.
I strongly recommend that you just submit a placeholder. You wouldn’t be the first: Atlassian Marketplace
With a screenshot for prosperity
Wow didn’t know this was possible. What do you say the Marketplace App Review team when submitting a placeholder app?
Don’t say anything. This is not allowed. You release a boilerplate app that’s basically just very simple (I can recommend a branded iframe, there are hundreds of those on the Marketplace already) and once it passed the review and get’s published, you change the marketplace assets and description to “Coming soon” and you deploy a completely different app. Once the app is approved, there is no additional review anymore, so you can just do whatever you want (until someone complains)
Hey @GavinBunney - the app will need to be approved first as this action is what creates the license models for the app which the system will use to apply incentive figures. For the approval timelines, we have an SLO of 10 business days which we’ve been adhering to for months now, if you had a different experience than this you can message me directly and we can see where we’ve gone wrong.
@remie - just to comment on the idea of a placeholder app, doing this won’t actually speed up the rate of approval (at least not by any advantage giving timeframe). As I mentioned to Gavin, app submissions are picked up within the 10 business day SLO, submitting a simpler placeholder app won’t have any effect on when one of our engineers actually assigns the ticket. It certainly may reduce the time taken to approve the app, but even then on average we see Cloud app reviews taking roughly an hour (providing there’s no complicated setup required). As it stands, once an app is approved partners are free to; release new versions (some situations require version approval), change media assets, alter text descriptions etc, this enables partners to grow their apps in line with the increasing maturity of their business and customer base, we see this as a really good thing and don’t want to throttle it.
That being said, publicly encouraging flagrant abuse of the review process isn’t cool. We don’t want to have huge barriers to entry for apps onboarding to the Marketplace, but there has to be a quality check in-line with the type of app that is submitted. I.e. apps advertised as enterprise-grade (DC) are obviously going to be more stringently checked. This is why we currently have an annual review process in place for Data Center apps, but we will be exploring the idea of doing the same for Cloud as well. But in general, when an open system is abused then more stringent measures are put in place to prevent this, and all that happens is the experience becomes more authoritarian than it ever needed to be. In this specific use case, the impact isn’t so high, but if similar gaps are uncovered in the future we’d love to hear about them directly first, so we can work with the partners to plug/improve them.
@chparker it’s not about the speed of approval: it’s about the speed of submission. You can make a placeholder app in 2-3 hours today. That means it will be approved in 10 days. If you need to finish your complex app first and get it in an approvable state, that might take you 20 more days. With 10 days of approval, that means it won’t be live until 30 days from now, instead of 10 days from now.
If this is a paid app and you need to have it on the marketplace by 1st of April to still benefit from the 95% revenue for Connect apps, the first option will allow you to make that deadline (10 days from now is before 1st of April, 30 days from now isn’t).
This is a lazy take. The terms & conditions are already strict enough. Atlassian has the tools to correct Marketplace Partners if they try to game the system.
You’re just not using those tools because of lack of resources, indifference(?) or some other lack of incentive. Review abuse is rampant. The marketplace is flooded with bullshit apps. There is absolutely no cleanup process whatsoever. Multiple marketplace partners need to sound the alarm before abuse is being investigated, and even if it happens you often get away with a slap on the wrist. In 10 years of MPAC, I can’t remember any Marketplace Partner that was removed from the Marketplace.
The problem does not lie with the actors or the lack of clear rules, the problem lies with the arbitration. You need to step up to the plate before you put it the full burden on the vendors.
