If you have an App on the Android market (
like I do) and are a developer from Europe (like I am), you might have noticed that Google hasn't payed you this month. It appears that Google simply didn't send any money to all European developers selling their apps on Google's store. Which is - quite frankly - for lots of developers quite a disaster.
Ok, this can happen, and usually a company which makes a huge mistake like this instantly tries to resolve this huge problem as fast as possible. Not so google:
No official statement has been done by the company yet. They even didn't reply to any call for help so far, as it seems. Simply silence.
One problem is that as with all services google offers - and I know because I'm a paying google customer - also Android developers have no easy way to contact any human being at google. There is no real contact form, no real bug tracker link, no telephone number, nothing you can use to get some help. Even if you pay a lot of money to google, every month. So it's possible that Google didn't notice this huge problem for quite some time. The desparate Android developers which received no payment from google this month started
a thread in the Google Product Forums, and even that remained unanswered until today, which is already 7 (!) days. A google employee at least posted a small text into there, but it made it even worse. His words were:
Unfortunately the checkout merchant center team is going through a major transition. Many of the past owners of the code base have left, which leaves many of you without proper support :( I'm part of a three person team that's getting transitioned to take ownership of the code base, in fact we have a meeting in 15min to get an overview of the basic architecture and start looking into some of these bugs. I assure you we will work very hard to address your issues as quickly as possible, but please remain patient with us as our team makes this transition.
Big fat WTF. I can hope this is only a joke. WTF is going on inside of Google? There is only 3 people working on a piece of software handling multi-million Euro transactions every month? And none of them have an idea of the code base? WTF?