It sucks, but it's more of a time gate and an inconvenience than an actual barrier. There are communities/apps where people do this for each other in an organized way, so you're pretty much guaranteed to pass after 14 days.

I published my first app a few months ago, and I hated 14 days part more than 12 people part.

> so you're pretty much guaranteed to pass after 14 days

Then why have it in the first place?

I don't complain about the money because my time to organize and go through this is worth more than the price difference. I'd rather pay 100€/year, same as on the Apple Appstore. Now I have to coordinate some fake weird closed-testing groups and hope I don't get banned for using unauthentic testers.

>Then why have it in the first place?

The inconvenience/effort is probably the point, likely to discourage people who aren't willing to put at least that much effort.

>and hope I don't get banned for using unauthentic testers.

I doubt Google cares about this, since they let apps for these testing groups into play store. Those apps organize people into groups, provide play store links, and buttons to open other people's apps, so all you do is just open and close each app once a day.

Since this takes like 30 minutes total over 14 days, I'd rather do that than pay $100 forever since I'm not made of money and it's less time than it would take me to earn $100 at my job even once.

What you doubt doesn't matter, google clearly even requires you to fill out details about the testing process, how you recreuited your testers, etc. [0]. This is mandatory. Good luck trying to fill in "I used Fiverr to recruit some chinese clickworkers". Any if you are lying about the process - well If Google doesn't like your App or anything about you in the future, they can just delete whatever your App is citing false claims on your side.

[0]: https://support.google.com/googleplay/android-developer/answ...

>Any if you are lying about the process - well If Google doesn't like your App or anything about you in the future, they can just delete whatever your App is citing false claims on your side.

They could do that for any reason or no reason at all anyway even without the testing requirement.