Play Store Pre-registration gotchas

Hello dear devs,

I recently opened pre-registration for my app on Android, thinking it’d be a straightforward way to build some early hype before diving into testing and the beta phase. Well, turns out I underestimated a few things because pre-registration on Android comes with some unexpected quirks. Here is what I got wrong:

Pre-registration takes over all testing phases

My plan was simple: get a pre-registration page up, then roll out open testing to gather feedback. Oopsie! Once you enable pre-registration, it takes priority over any open or closed testing. That means instead of people downloading the app for testing, the Play Store only shows the pre-registration page. If you want users to test your app, they have to manually register as testers on the web – no easy Play Store installs. Not exactly ideal though.

This was a big blow because open testing is super helpful for catching bugs and getting feedback before an official launch. Plus, it helps avoid bad reviews from first-time users who may not be as forgiving or you just have some stupid bugs or crashes at launch. But once pre-registration is live, that option is kinda useless unless you want to make your potential users jump through hoops on the browser.

Pre-registration is listed last under the testing section in Play Console – you’d think open testing would take priority. It’d be nice to have the option to choose, but no such luck.

The Subscription Setup

No more rewards: if you don’t set up subscriptions (or in-app purchases) before enabling pre-registration, you can’t offer rewards later. So, if you're like me and planning to offer a premium tier (in my case, more resources in the app), you need to have everything set up before you enable pre-registration. Otherwise, no perks for your early adopters.

What I Wanted

Ideally, my flow would have been something like this:

• Create a pre-registration page
• Launch open testing for real feedback
• Finally launch with full/premium features and reward all pre-registered users with something nice

This would’ve been perfect since the Premium plan in my case doesn’t unlock any extra features, you just get more resources. Everything would’ve been ready for testing, but now I’ve messed it up since I didn’t read documentation fully before proceeding.

Conclusion

Pre-registration on Android is actually pretty cool but if you're planning to go down this path, make sure you’re fully prepped ahead of time. Have your subscriptions, IAPs, and everything else set up before you open pre-registration and find another way to easily test your app.

Biggest lesson here actually, just read documentation fully before enabling anything 😅.

You can check how pre-registration page for my app (Paralino) looks like directly on the Play Store.

Cheers!