Google is making some big updates to the Play Store and here’s what’s happening.

Support for reacquisition

Google says, that their new features are created to help app developers re-engage with churned users. LiveOps, that has served as a way to engage and re-engage users on the Play Store, will be renamed as “Promotional Content”. In addition, they are also making changes to “guidelines, priority quotas and now enable bulk data downloads.”.

Google states that:

“These changes bring even more opportunities to leverage your events to grow your active audience and revenue. Visibility and promotion across Play are also dependent on the quality of your title and individual content. So make sure you check our updated content guidelines and recommendations.”

To support the developers in reacquisition, Google is also rolling out “Churned-user Custom Store Listings”. With the help of this feature, you will be able to customize your content for those who have installed and uninstalled your app previously.

Added focus on quality

Quality control includes two factors, in-app and technical quality. In-app quality inspects overall design, usability, clarity, ease of onboarding, etc. Technical quality then measures the performance of the app since it also varies a lot across devices. In the future, ANR and crash rate metrics may prompt a warning on the app’s store page if either rate surpasses 8%. Before this warning is visible, however, the app will receive a notification on Android vitals for a chance to fix things.

On the topic of quality, Google also announced an upcoming minimum ratings bar of 3 stars regarding top charts. This will affect both top free and top paid and grossing charts. The effects on the latter charts will start later.

More data points

Google is also making updates on Store Performance reports as well. This will bring more visibility into where your users find your app on the Play Store.

Google says:

“This includes more data from off-Play experiences, differentiating paid-for and direct traffic from users’ organic behavior on Play, and the inclusion of key discovery journeys – for instance, searching for categories like ‘Puzzle Games’ – in Explore traffic.”

You can find the entire statement by Google here to learn more. All in all the updates will be in favor of great apps which in turn will encourage developers to make sure their app performs to the best of their abilities.

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