Google has made some changes to the Play Store. The company has announced that it recently started incorporating app quality signals in its ranking algorithms. What this means is that higher quality apps, those that don’t have any stability issues and crash on a regular basis, rank higher in search results on the Play Store than similar apps of lower quality.

Google said that this change has had a positive impact on engagement, as users who are installing higher quality apps on their devices use them more and don’t uninstall them quite as often.

Users aren't uninstalling apps quite as often

The company is committed to delivering the best Play Store experience possible to users, which is the main reason for this change. The online search giant claims that an internal analysis of app reviews showed that 50 percent of 1-star reviews mentioned stability as the main issue. The key to seeing improvements in their ratings, retention and monetization for developers is, therefore, to focus on performance. Let’s face it, no one wants to deal with excessive battery usage, slow render times, and crashes, no matter how good an app or a game is.

To focus more on performance, developers can use the Play Console to find a number of quality issues, which they can then fix. Android Vitals, for example, can identify key performance issues reported by devices an app is being used on. Then there’s also the pre-launch report, which shows you the result of testing an alpha or beta app. That way, you can know exactly which problems to fix before launching updates.