Google's AI will help clean up the Play Store by downranking apps that crash a lot

Over the years, Android has developed a reputation for harbouring buggy, janky, infected and malicious apps. An important argument in the iOS vs Android debate is that on quality of apps. Google has now announced further plans to fix this issue.

Google Play Store. Reuters

Publishing apps on the Google Play Store is supposed to be relatively easy and, unlike Apple, free. While this has helped the Play Store surpass the App Store in app count, the limited quality control mechanisms meant that the apps weren’t always of the best quality.

Apple, on the other hand, charges a yearly fee from developers (It’s a nominal fee, but is enough to ensure that developing an app for iOS is a conscious decision), has tighter restrictions, stricter quality control mechanisms and curates the apps that make it to the front page of the App Store. This focus on users means that Apple’s earnings from its App Store far exceed that of Google’s from the Play Store.

Google has been working on enabling app discovery on the Play Store for a while now. Curated app lists are making their way to the home page, machine learning is attempting to spot malicious apps, etc.

The latest update to Google’s app ranking algorithms, reports The Verge, now examines the quality of the apps as well. In search results, the algorithm will prioritise apps that are stable, have better user ratings, user engagement, etc. The algorithm will rank an app on these and other criteria such to create “quality signals” that will affect an app’s ranking on the Play Store and in search results.

AI is coming to Google’s rescue yet again.