“App quality is the foundation of everything we do at Google Play. Android users expect a great experience from the apps and games they download. Some apps and games that don’t meet our quality bar will be excluded from prominent discovery surfaces such as recommendations, while others may display a warning on their store listing to set appropriate user expectations,” Lauren Mytton, Group Product Manager, Google Play, said in a blog post.
Google Play to highlight higher-quality apps
Google is introducing new Android vitals to help monitor and act on technical issues of the apps. It will set a certain threshold in all vitals and the apps who fail to stay below the threshold will be removed from prominent places. The apps may be removed “from some discovery surfaces”, and Google may also show a warning indicating users that a certain app may not work properly on their phones.
The Play Store will start applying store listing warnings on November 30.
Improving technical quality: Google says that it is replacing the existing core vitals metrics – the one-stop destination for monitoring technical quality on Google Play, including stability and performance metrics from the field – with new, more user-focused metrics. The company says it is “aligning [its] definition of technical quality with user experience.” Core vitals metrics affect the visibility of an app on Google Play.
The new core vitals include two matrices: user-perceived crash rate and user-perceived “app not responsive” (ANR). As the names suggest, the user-perceived crash rate is the percentage of daily active users who experienced at least one crash that is likely to have been noticeable. The user-perceived ANR is that percentage of daily active users who experienced at least one ANR that is likely to have been noticeable.
Overall bad behaviour threshold: The overall threshold will use the new metrics to improve app quality. The threshold will remain unchanged at 1.09% for user-perceived crash rate, and 0.47% for user-perceived ANR rate. Developers are advised to keep their apps below these thresholds in order to increase their apps visibility on Google Play store.
Quality bar per phone model: Google seems to understand that apps behave differently on different smartphones. It can be stable and smooth on one phone model but not another. In order to take this behaviour into account, Google says it is also introducing a new bad behaviour threshold that is evaluated per phone model. Initially, this threshold will be set to 8% for both user-perceived crash rate and user-perceived ANR rate. Crossing this threshold will lead to reduction of app’s visibility on that phone model.
