Google is rolling out an update to the Play Store that will penalize poorly performing apps, making them less discoverable .

Announcing the move, which will tend to promote apps of higher quality, on the Android Developer blog, Andrew Ahn, Product Manager, Google Play writes: 

As part of our continued effort to deliver the best possible Google Play experience, we recently enhanced our search and discovery algorithms to reflect app quality. This results in higher quality apps being surfaced in the Play Store more than similar apps of lower quality (eg: apps that exhibit more frequent crashes). The change has had a positive impact on engagement -- we've seen that people go on to use higher quality apps more and uninstall them less.

Explaining the rationale for this change Ahn notes that in an internal analysis of app reviews on Google Play, it was noticed that half of 1-star reviews mentioned app stability. He also points to how developers can use Android Vitals to help find and fix such issues

Announced at Google I/O 2107 and made available last month, Android Vitals is a  dashboard in the Google Play Console intended:

"to help you understand and analyze bad app behaviors, so you can improve your app's performance and reap the benefits of better performance".

This video gives an overview of how it helps identify opportunities to improve your app's performance:

:

The Android vitals dashboards are intended to be useful for both developers and business owners alike by offering quick reference performance metrics to monitor an app. They provided the following data collected from Android devices whose users have opted in to automatically share usage and diagnostics data:

• Stability: ANR rate & crash rate
  
  
• Render time: slow rendering (16ms) and frozen UI frames (700ms)
  
  
• Battery usage: stuck wake locks and excessive wakeups.

Given this information you can work out how best to use resources to make improvements, which will in turn lead to higher ratings and better ranking by the search algorithm.

More Information

How we’re helping people find quality apps and games on Google Play

Android vitals: Increase engagement and installs through improved app performance

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