Google announced yesterday a new Play Store search and ranking algorithm that takes into account an Android application's performance metrics.
According to Google, the new algorithm will downrank apps that crash or cause any other performance issues like excessive battery usage and slow render times.
Engineers created the new system after they conducted an internal study of all one-star ratings and discovered that half of these negative reviews mentioned app stability as the main factor for the low score.
"Developers who focus on app quality can see improvements in their rating, and ultimately their retention and monetization," Andrew Ahn, Product Manager for Google Play said on the topic.
Google's decision won't affect popular apps like Facebook or Instagram, who even if they're known as some of the biggest battery hogs on the Play Store, are mainly driven by their popularity, rather than search discoverability.
Google's decision will affect makers of smaller apps who heavily rely on the Play Store search for new installs.
Google is also making available a tool called Android Vitals in the Google Play Console to help app makers learn how their app behaves and find the key points they need to address to improve app performance. This is the type of data Android developers can expect to find via Android Vitals:
- ANR (Application Not Responding) rate
- Application crash rate
- Render time: slow rendering (16ms) and frozen UI frames (700ms)
- Battery usage: stuck wake locks and excessive wakeups
Comments
narb - 6 years ago
As a developer of android app, I understand that raising the quality of apps should be a high priority. But this interesting news raises some comments (sorry for the lengthy message):
-not all apps are the same: you have simple app and others very much multi-threaded, heavily network and security oriented which are almost impossible to develop in emulators, etc... Those are more difficult to develop and are more prone to crash and ANR.
-when you launch an app your subscribers are the beta testers. There is the possibility to do beta but real prod release is the real test . My app is out since 5 months and I've experienced 200 crashes. It seems a lot but my app is complex and what is key is how quickly you correct errors. I have now 200+ (1,000 downloads/15 download a day with a much lower uninstall rate) active users with 1 crash a week. I consider that a good achievement.
-last point: it is true that google does a real good job at providing traces but very rarely you have zero info where it crashed in the code. When this happens you have no points of escalation.
I hope that google will take those points under consideration!
Thanks for letting us comment!