The tech giant Google, the company which has given us Android Operating Systems and its new editions year after year now has almost three million apps in its Play Store. A number which as it claims now would reduce greatly given it has come up with an algorithm to bury junky apps. These junky apps are mainly poor quality Android apps which have received extremely bad reviews on the Play Store.
The company has supposedly updated its search and discovery algorithms which would now also reflect the quality of an app, a step which is going to help the company to weed out all the junky apps. Such a change in its search algorithm would make sure that apps with higher quality and functioning are more often thrown up in searches as compared to apps which have comparatively lower quality and poorer functioning (for example apps that crash more often would be featured in searches lesser than apps that don’t).
It basically means that now the higher rating apps would feature more and more as the top links on searches and lower rating apps would disappear from the top which was not the case before. You may note that the war continuing now for years between Apple and Android users always has debated the Play Store and the number of low performing apps that Play Store allowed without any filters. Well, now all of that is going to change if we are to believe the official blog posted by Google.
This step is not only going to make Play Store a safer place, it will also ensure that users are now able to search for the apps they want and need easily and quickly – and the options they are offered are better in functioning. The apps that crash more often usually lead the customers to review them bad on the rating system of Google Play Store, which works on a five star system, where a user can mark their app out of five based on its performance. This struggle that many users have faced in the past would now be taken care of by the algorithms offered by Google making sure that such low performing apps are buried down and do not get another customer to first install and later uninstall them. The company has stated that this step surely would lead to decreased uninstallation of the apps from smartphones in future.
On the other hand, people and companies who develop apps are also going to benefit by this step. Having a better filtration process in place for different apps would not only ensure enhanced user experience but also a more positive one, which would thus benefit the app developers who are coming up with better apps. Google Play Console can also be helped in locating and fixing the quality issues it has been facing for years now by the developers who are more focussed on performance as well.
This move is a surprise as Google has been attacked for years now given the Play Store’s less than in place process of screening apps. Such apps which do not even get to feature on Apple’s App Store usually get all dumped at the Play Store duping one customer after the another. As we discussed already that the Apple vs. Android debate has also been revolving around the issues Play Store faces in screening apps, which actually was being made up by the number of apps that Play Store had to offer.
These free applications that Android could offer were a great USP for Android smart phones. However the sad state and quality of such free applications was harming the Android case more than doing it any good. In fact given the fact that Play Store is plagued by a number of low quality poor performing apps was the reason that in app revenues were so low for Android apps as compared to their Apple counterparts. Now that Google Play Store is finally going to get its priorities in place, one can expect that this would benefit everyone – the app developers, app users and obviously Google itself.
Google has thus also asked the developers to analyse pre launch reports as well as vitals page before upgrading apps. The company has for past some time now trying to improve the user experience and this step comes right after the effort to locate more and more rogue apps which install malware on user’s phones. Let us know in comments below if your Play Store experience has improved now that Google has taken out the junky apps plaguing our phones before.
