The glory days of uploading a build of your app to the Google Play store and having it in the hands of your users within hours is well behind us.
The Play Console Help documentation says to expect "review times of up to seven days or longer in exceptional cases." In practice, the exceptional cases are not so exceptional. Take this reddit thread and the stories within it as an example.
In my case, the review process this past month took a whopping 38 days. I waited 24 days for the upload of my app to the Open Testing track to be approved and I then waited 14 more days for the promotion of this build to the Production track to be approved. 38 days waiting for a minor update to make its way into the hands of my users. Take that in. The process is broken.
