Seven mistakes that restart your 14 days

1. Counting installs instead of opt-ins

The install dashboard is not the closed-test counter. Google counts opted-in testers, not downloads, and you need 12 of them continuously for 14 days — it was 20 until June 2025.

A hundred installs from elsewhere are not worth twelve people who agreed to join your track. The whole rule is in the closed-testing guide.

2. The wrong Google account

Your tester gives you their work address, but their phone is signed in to another one: they will never see your app, and they will tell you the link is broken.

Ask for the address of the Google account used on the phone’s Play Store, not the address where the person reads their email.

3. The opt-in link never opened

Adding an address to a track does nothing until the person has opened the opt-in link and agreed to join the test.

It is the step everybody forgets to explain, and it is the one that leaves counters at zero for a week.

4. The day 11 uninstall

An app that gave nothing to do gets uninstalled. On day 11 there are twelve people on paper and ten on phones.

Give an instruction, publish fixes during the fourteen days, and write to your testers to tell them what changed.

5. Recruiting exactly twelve people

Twelve is the threshold, not the target. One drop-out is enough to fall back under it: the days spent are lost, and everything starts again.

Recruit fifteen: here is where to find them.

6. An app with no way to send a bug

Your testers see bugs, talk about them on WhatsApp, and nothing reaches you. A blurry screen capture and “it doesn’t work” cannot be fixed.

With no tool inside the app, fourteen days produce a number and nothing else, and the production access form will ask you for something else entirely.

7. Applying for production access too early, or answering the form carelessly

The form asks what the test produced: what you tested, what the testers found, what you fixed.

Precise examples of bugs found and fixed beat a general sentence, and an application sent before the fourteen days are over does not pass.

What ekko changes

ekko brings you real testers, follows the first time each tester opens your app and then every session after that, reminds anyone who has not opened it in seven days, and makes every bug arrive with the annotated screen capture, the console, the network requests and the device. Open a campaign, the first one is free.

ekko cannot see the Play Console: it counts what it sees from your app. Google counts from the Play Console: check your track’s dashboard before requesting production access.

Questions and answers