We've been part of this program for a while now. We launched in Early Access mid last year, and it helped more than we could have imagined. We were able to get feedback and work through big bugs all without having to stress about poor ratings. Early Access alone is worth it because it's a constant new stream of users to test your app. You get to basically hit the reset button every new build.
The design feedback was essential in our redesign. Material design for mobile is basically implemented in all popular apps (as it should), but at the same time you want to make it yours, and follow your own design language. While their docs are great, their feedback was so helpful because they understood our goals and what we were trying to do... and it was nice to go back and ask "how can we implement this feature while respecting material design?" We were blown away by how much time they spent on the UI feedback.
One take away from our team at WeDo, is this really made it easy to push Android first. We still have a ton of Early Access users that are now beta testers and because of that we've been able to continue to discover critical bugs and get feedback before it goes live everywhere in hours. The Play team genuinely cares about this ecosystem and about the success of great new products launching on their store. We've been surprised by how much they've walked the walk.
We were pretty new to Android after being iOS only for a few years — the guidance from the SOA team and being part of early access to get feedback from general users really helped us improve the app experience and prepare for the final release.
We used early accessto make final android related refinements for empower for android. Highly recommended.
This program was fantastic for kicking the tires of our app and getting feedback prior to our launch. I'm impressed by how many people are interested in testing Early Access apps, but glad there are so many.
There is a chat feature that allows you to have private discussions as a group for the people who are attending your calendar event on the application. I find this chat feature more fluid than any other chat app I have come across. I come back to this app more knowing I am having secure talks about events and meetings. I can zip through these chats on my way to my meeting or event to quickly brief myself on what has gone on.
