Have you ever downloaded an app only to find it drains your battery, takes forever to load, and crashes all the time? Google wants to help you avoid these types of apps in the future.
The Web giant on Thursday announced a tweak to its Google Play ranking algorithm that aims to help you find the best-performing apps, and avoid the crappy ones.
"We've recently started incorporating app quality signals in our ranking algorithms," Google Play Product Manager Andrew Ahn wrote in a blog post. "Higher quality apps are being surfaced in the Play Store more than the similar apps that are lower quality (e.g. if they exhibit more frequent crashes)."
Ahn said this change has positively impacted engagement.
"We've seen that people installing higher quality apps go on to use the apps more and uninstall them less," he wrote.
Ahn added that an internal Google analysis has revealed that half of 1-star reviews mention app stability as an issue.
"People enjoy using apps and games which meet their quality and performance expectations," he wrote. "Excessive battery usage, slow render times, and crashes, on the other hand, can be a source of frustration. Developers who focus on performance can see improvements in their rating, and ultimately their retention and monetization."
Developers looking to improve the performance of their apps can start by checking out the new Android vitals dashboard in the Google Play Console. This tool is designed to "help you understand and analyze bad app behaviors, so you can improve your app's performance," Google said.
Meanwhile, Facebook this week announced a similar change. The social network said it plans to update its News Feed ranking algorithm to "show people more stories that will load quickly on mobile and fewer stories that might take longer to load." Facebook will begin taking into account factors like "the estimated load time of a webpage" linked in News Feed, as well as the speed of the page overall.
"If signals indicate the webpage will load quickly, the link to that webpage might appear higher in your feed," Facebook Engineers Jiayi Wen and Shengbo Guo wrote in a blog post. Links to snail-like sites, meanwhile, will be demoted.