Beyond search and editorial highlights, one way to look for Android apps in the Play Store is via categories. Google Play is now letting developers add tags to their applications to further tune where a listing appears.

Over the past week, Android developers have been prompted in the Play Console to “Add tags” to describe their apps. The tags feature looks to be an extension of categories that will help Google Play refine placement and discovery while being more straightforward for devs than descriptions in app listings.

Add tags to your app to help Google understand its content and functionality. Tags may affect where your app is displayed on Google Play, and the peer groups you’re compared against.

Up to five tags can be applied with devs only able to select from Google’s list of over 150. The new “Tags” section will offer some “Suggested tags” that “may be related to your app” for quick entry. The full collection can otherwise be searched.

The editor is available under your app > Store presence > Store listing > Categorization > Manage tags. Guidance provided by Google advises developers to “choose tags that are most obviously relevant to your app.”

It should be very clear to a user unfamiliar with the app why the tag is relevant based on the store listing or initial in-app experience.

After the initial selection, Google recommends that tags are edited only after “significant changes to the content or functionality of your app, in which case you should re-evaluate your tags to ensure the five most relevant are selected.”

Google Play Store tags are rolling out to developers now, with the feature first appearing last week. It’s unclear when this factor will be applied to improve the user-facing Play Store.

Dylan Roussel contributed to this article

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