If you’re a long-time Android user, then you know that downloading apps from the Google Play Store, especially those not from established developers (and actuallly even those from popular ones), is a trial and error thing. You’re lucky if you get stable apps but oftentimes, you also get those that have lots of bugs and will crash a lot. Now Google is looking to punish those apps by making them less visible in search results, which will hurt their chances of being discovered and downloaded.
Google announced that they will be looking not just at the users ratings and engagement, but also at the performance data. Through AI technology, they will look at the stability and reliability of the apps. It will be a combination of human assessors and machine intelligence and if an app passes both, then their visibility will be good and maybe even near the top of the list. But if your app keeps on crashing and users keep complaining, then you will be downranked and chances of users seeing you among the gazillion apps in the Play Store are minimal.
But this is just a stop gap in the aforementioned millions of apps available as Google’s main problem is that they only take action when there are complaints about the app. Unlike Apple which carefully vets apps before publishing them on their App Store, Google doesn’t have such a strict process. Thus, users can sometimes end up with duds, or even worse, sometimes the apps they download are spam or phishing apps.
This new Google Play ranking algorithms will be tested out on selected users but will eventually expand across all Android devices eventually. Hopefully, this will help users get the best app that they’re looking for and weed out the bad apps out there.
VIA: SlashGear
I don’t know what year it is for you, but I more often find stable apps than non stable ones