We’ve noticed a pattern in which URLs work
Two million apps sit on the Google Play Store at any given time. Most of the downloads go to names we’ve all heard of, making it all the more vital for the smaller publishers to get known. One handy way fans could get to know all the apps a developer has made was to either visit their website… or GitHub… or LinkedIn… or their non-existent web presence… or to take a look at their developer listing page on the Play Store. Except those listing pages are kind of messed up right now.
To be clear, we’re not talking about the mobile view where tapping the publisher name on an app listing sends you to a tagged search. The issue lies on desktop where doing the same thing takes you to a dedicated webpage.
Android Police founder Artem Russakovskii says he’s not been able to access some key publisher listing pages including ones for Apple, Netflix, and Spotify.
One other user said he’s been dealing with this problem for the past couple of days.
We did some further digging and found that publisher tag hyperlinks with URLs that refer to the human-readable name of the publisher like https://play.google.com/store/apps/developer?id=Righteous+Hammer+Games don’t work, but ones that refer to the Play Store’s internal identifying code for the publisher e.g., https://play.google.com/store/apps/dev?id=6079376672689401879, do work. Google LLC’s developer page can be reached with the URL https://play.google.com/store/apps/dev?id=5700313618786177705, but not https://play.google.com/store/apps/dev?id=Google+LLC. It’s hard to tell whether this is a causal factor or just something correlative.
We’ve reached out to Google for comment.
