Google frequently updates its Play Store with user-friendly content and promotions. Most recently, a $1 credit was offered to select users. In June, the summer sale brought with it plenty of discounts and, in March, the "Free App Of The Week" section was reintroduced. Today, the company has reiterated the importance of such updates and how these enhancements have been specifically targeted towards improving app quality over the past few months.
The quality of an app on the Play Store cannot be judged by the ratings it has garnered. According to Andrew Ahn, Product Manager of Google Play, a suitable indicator for the quality of an app is its stability and performance. He went on to say that:
"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)."
Ahn also notes that this change has had a positive impact, leading to people downloading higher quality apps - which are uninstalled on a relatively less regular basis, according to the company.
Similarly, Android vitals in the Google Play Console help in identifying performance issues so that they can be addressed readily. Pre-launch reports are another important feature of the Play Console which show developers what bugs or performance issues are plaguing their app, so that they can be remedied easily. An example of this is the Busuu app, which according to Google, earned an increase from 4.1 to 4.5 stars, simply by turning focus towards improving app performance.
It will be interesting to see how the firm continues to recondition the Play Store in order to emphasize the importance of user experience.