You may recall that two years ago, Apple changed the way in which app store ratings were working. Apple started to allow developers to decide whether or not their ratings would be reset with their latest app update.
Apple was suggesting back then that this feature should be used only sparingly.
Google changes the app rating policy as well
Now, Google revealed that it decided to make its very own change to how the Play Store app ratings are working as well.
But Google is not giving developers the option to choose when ratings reset. On the other hand, the tech giant will begin to weight app ratings in order to favor those which are from more recent releases, Tech Crunch reveals.
“You told us you wanted a rating based on what your app is today, not what it was years ago, and we agree,” said Milena Nikolic, an engineering director leading Google Play Console, who detailed the changes at the Google I/O Developer conference just the other day.
She continued and explained that the average rating calculation for apps will be updated for all Android apps on Google Play.
Instead of a lifetime cumulative value, the application’s average rating will be recalculated in order to give “more weight” to the most recent users’ ratings.
Seeing the current state of the app
With this update, users will now have the ability to see the current state of a particular app. This means that fixes and all the changes that made the experience better over the years will finally be taken into consideration when determining the rating.
“It will better reflect all your hard work and improvements,” said Nikolic about the updated ratings.
What’s the downside of this update?
Tech Crunch notes that there’s also a downside to all of this.
The change also means that once high-quality apps that have failed to release new updates and bug fixes, they’ll be plagued by a rating that reflects their “current state of decline,” as the online publication puts it.
After finishing Theatrical Journalism at the Faculty of Theatre and Television in Cluj-Napoca, Rada reviewed movies, books, theatre pieces and she also wrote articles from the IT niche as a content editor for software producers. At the moment, she is working with various online advertising firms.