Recent Chrome Extension Issues Due to Delayed Review by Google

Most likely you run into a problem that Everhour integrations partially stopped working and reinstalling the extension does not help. Below, we explain the details and what to do. Please accept our deep apologies.

Problem

As you know, Everhour embeds time tracking controls directly into the interface of third-party project management tools such as Asana, Trello, Basecamp, ClickUp, GitHub etc. This is done by means of our browser extension which works for Chrome, Firefox, Edge, and Opera.

Recently, we encountered a problem that we cannot quickly roll out a new version of our Chrome time tracking extension to all our customers.

Without going into much detail, Asana or Trello can apparently change something in their interface (say remove the block where Everhour is supposed to be) that will affect our work. This wasn’t critical before, as most often, it took us no longer than a few hours to fix everything while the client’s work won’t be completely paralyzed during this period. Remember, this is always possible to log time through our website or the browser extension pop-up window by searching any task by name.

But, Google has changed its policies (or something), and now every time we submit our newer version of the browser extension to the market, they manually review it and this process could take up to 7 business days (instead of a few hours).

Moreover, as soon as we upload the new version, we can’t do anything until the review finishes. So even if suddenly we need to update the extension again, we have to first wait until the current verification is completed.

Unfortunately, Google neither provides technical support on the issue nor an explanation why it needs to make a manual review and what we can change to improve. Trying to guess. And we are not alone with the issue (link, link, link).

Solution

Because we cannot somehow speed up the review process (although we keep looking for options), we have come up with a temporary solution – you should install the developer version of our browser extension. I.e. not via the Chrome Market but via our website.

We described all the steps in detail by the link below:

How to install Everhour browser extension bypassing Chrome Web Store

• Go to “Chrome Extensions” settings
• Enable “Developer mode”
• Download the most recent version to a local folder
• Click “Load unpacked”

The good news is that even though this is a local version, as soon as there will be a newer version available in the official marketplace, Chrome should automatically replace it.

Our plans

Of course, we consider the above solution as a temporary workaround. Because still, it’s not very convenient.

Firstly, we will keep trying to understand what triggers the manual review process and how to avoid it. This is certainly not fast, because we don’t know the exact reason and each iteration of the check will take time, but we will work on it.

Trello users: We are going to develop Everhour Power-Up as an option to increase our stability and less dependence on the browser extension. The ability to use Everhour in the Trello desktop app or inside the browser on the mobile device will be a nice bonus, as it’s supported by the platform itself. Working on it right now!

Jira users: We’ve just released our new Everhour native Jira plugin. The link says what’s already done, plus we have many ideas on how to further improve it.