Tag Archives: User Feedback

I/O 2017: Everything new in the Google Play Console


Posted by Vineet Buch, Director of Product Management, Google Play Apps & Games

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Google Play continues to grow rapidly around the world, thanks to our ecosystem of developers building high quality and engaging app experiences. There are now 2 billion monthly active Android devices. People in 190 countries downloaded 82 billion apps from the Play Store in the last year and the number of developers with more than 1 million monthly installs grew by 35 percent year on year. We've made huge investments to make purchasing quick and easy by offering direct carrier billing with 140 operators that reach 900M devices every month. These, and other efforts, have made the number of buyers on Google Play grow by almost 30 percent in the last year.
Since we launched the Google Play Console in 2012, we've continued to add features to help you do much more than just publish apps. People in a variety of roles at app and game companies, large and small, carry out tasks like running beta tests, analyzing crashes, responding to customer reviews, evaluating A/B experiments on store listings, pulling financial reports, and more.
Today at Google I/O, we're announcing new and improved features to help you improve your app's performance and quality, and grow your business on Google Play.

Statistics

UPDATED The statistics page for your app now gives you quicker, more flexible access to important data about your business. Compare two different metrics and break them down by a dimension. Select any date range you want, view a breakdown of your data, and even access hourly stats.






Android vitals

NEW Understand your app's Android vitals so you can fix bad behaviors, improve your app experience, and increase your star rating. View aggregated, anonymized device data from people who have opted in their devices to understand three crucial aspects of your app's performance: stability (crash rates and App Not Responding [ANR] rates), battery usage (stuck wake locks and excessive wakeups), and render time (slow rendering and frozen UI frames). Learn more about Android vitals.



UPDATED The ANRs & crashes page has also been updated with larger crash coverage and now benefits from a higher volume of data.





Release management

NEW Use the new release dashboard to track a release as it happens. By monitoring how your release is affecting important metrics, you can be confident that everything is going as planned or you can quickly halt your rollout if anything looks out of the ordinary.




NEW Publish Android Instant Apps with the same release management flow you're familiar with from publishing apps on Google Play. Iterate quickly with a development track, gather feedback from trusted testers on a pre-release track, and when you're ready, release to production. Get started with Android Instant Apps.




NEW The new device catalog will help ensure you're offering a great user experience on the widest range of devices. Search and filter across rich device data for thousands of devices certified by Google. The catalog even shows you your installs, rating, and revenue contributed by device type to help you make the right decisions. You can now also set device exclusion rules by performance indicators like RAM and system on chip. With more granular controls you can exclude fewer devices and offer the best experience on all devices your app supports. Learn more about the device catalog.




NEW For something as important as your app signing key, there's no room for error. With app signing in the Play Console, you now have the option to securely transfer your key to Google to manage on your behalf. You'll benefit from Google's industry leading security and be able to opt-in for upcoming assistive services like app optimizations for APK size. Once opted-in to this service, the Play Store will deliver versions of your APK optimized for the screen density and native architecture of each target device type, saving data and device storage for your users. Learn more about app signing.



UPDATED The pre-launch report, powered by Firebase Test Lab, shows you the results of testing your alpha or beta app on real devices in the lab so you can spot and fix issues before you launch, so they won't affect your rating. The report has been updated with more device test coverage including Android O devices, and new controls, like being able to provide credentials so your app can be tested behind a login.





User acquisition

NEW The acquisition report helps you understand where visitors to your store listing are coming from and whether they go on to install and buy things in your app. The report now includes retained installer data. This reveals which channels and geographies drive valuable users who keep your app installed over periods of up-to 30 days, helping you optimize your marketing efforts.







Financial reports

NEW Subscriptions are the fastest growing business on Google Play – the number of active subscribers has doubled in the last year. With the subscriptions dashboard, see how your subscriptions are performing and make better decisions to grow your business. Understand and analyze total subscribers, revenue, retention, and churn across multiple dimensions.






User feedback

UPDATED Reviews are a valuable channel you can use to engage with people who have your app installed directly. Reviews analysis now covers more languages to help you gather insights from reviews to improve your app. Updated ratings summarizes how users have updated their ratings and reviews, including the effect any replies you made had on those updates. Reviews history shows you the history of your conversation with a user. Finally, we are rolling out the ability to report reviews which do not meet the posting policy guidelines.





Watch us introduce the new Play Console features live at I/O 2017

Tune in live to watch the 'What's new in Google Play at I/O 2017' session, which starts at 12:30pm PT on Thursday, May 18. The team is excited to share all the features we've been working on.
We're also presenting deeper dives into all of our new features and sharing best practices to help you succeed on Google Play. Watch all the Google Play I/O sessions live or afterwards on YouTube:

Day 1, May 17

Day 2, May 18

Day 3, May 19

And be sure to watch the Google Play Awards on day two, which will once again recognize outstanding developers that continue to set the bar for quality apps and games.



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Our latest quality improvements for Search

[Cross posted from the Official Google Blog]

Search can always be improved. We knew it when I started working on Search in 1999, and it’s still true today. Back then, the Internet was expanding at an incredible rate. We had to make sense of this explosion of information, organize it, and present it in a way so that people could find what they were looking for, right on the Google results page. The work then was around PageRank, the core algorithm used to measure the importance of webpages so they could be ranked in results. In addition to trying to organize information, our algorithms have always had to grapple with individuals or systems seeking to “game” our systems in order to appear higher in search results—using low-quality “content farms,” hidden text and other deceptive practices. We've tackled these problems, and others over the years, by making regular updates to our algorithms and introducing other features that prevent people from gaming the system. Today, in a world where tens of thousands of pages are coming online every minute of every day, there are new ways that people try to game the system. The most high profile of these issues is the phenomenon of “fake news,” where content on the web has contributed to the spread of blatantly misleading, low quality, offensive or downright false information. While this problem is different from issues in the past, our goal remains the same—to provide people with access to relevant information from the most reliable sources available. And while we may not always get it right, we’re making good progress in tackling the problem. But in order to have long-term and impactful changes, more structural changes in Search are needed. With that longer-term effort in mind, today we’re taking the next step toward continuing to surface more high-quality content from the web. This includes improvements in Search ranking, easier ways for people to provide direct feedback, and greater transparency around how Search works. Search rankingOur algorithms help identify reliable sources from the hundreds of billions of pages in our index. However, it’s become very apparent that a small set of queries in our daily traffic (around 0.25 percent), have been returning offensive or clearly misleading content, which is not what people are looking for. To help prevent the spread of such content for this subset of queries, we’ve improved our evaluation methods and made algorithmic updates to surface more authoritative content.
  • New Search Quality Rater guidelines: Developing changes to Search involves a process of experimentation. As part of that process, we have evaluators—real people who assess the quality of Google’s search results—give us feedback on our experiments. These ratings don’t determine individual page rankings, but are used to help us gather data on the quality of our results and identify areas where we need to improve. Last month, we updated our Search Quality Rater Guidelines to provide more detailed examples of low-quality webpages for raters to appropriately flag, which can include misleading information, unexpected offensive results, hoaxes and unsupported conspiracy theories. These guidelines will begin to help our algorithms in demoting such low-quality content and help us to make additional improvements over time.

  • Ranking changes: We combine hundreds of signals to determine which results we show for a given query—from the freshness of the content, to the number of times your search queries appear on the page. We’ve adjusted our signals to help surface more authoritative pages and demote low-quality content, so that issues similar to the Holocaust denial results that we saw back in December are less likely to appear.

Direct feedback toolsWhen you visit Google, we aim to speed up your experience with features like Autocomplete, which helps predict the searches you might be typing to quickly get to the info you need, and Featured Snippets, which shows a highlight of the information relevant to what you’re looking for at the top of your search results. The content that appears in these features is generated algorithmically and is a reflection of what people are searching for and what’s available on the web. This can sometimes lead to results that are unexpected, inaccurate or offensive. Starting today, we’re making it much easier for people to directly flag content that appears in both Autocomplete predictions and Featured Snippets. These new feedback mechanisms include clearly labeled categories so you can inform us directly if you find sensitive or unhelpful content. We plan to use this feedback to help improve our algorithms.
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New feedback link for Autocomplete
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Updated feedback link for Featured Snippets
Greater transparency about our productsOver the last few months, we’ve been asked tough questions about why shocking or offensive predictions were appearing in Autocomplete. Based on this, we evaluated where we can improve our content policies and updated them appropriately. Now we’re publishing this policy to the Help Center so anyone can learn more about Autocomplete and our approach to removals.   For those looking to delve a little deeper, we recently updated our How Search Works site to provide more information to users and website owners about the technology behind Search. The site includes a description of how Google ranking systems sort through hundreds of billions of pages to return your results, as well as an overview of our user testing process.   There are trillions of searches on Google every year. In fact, 15 percent of searches we see every day are new—which means there’s always more work for us to do to present people with the best answers to their queries from a wide variety of legitimate sources. While our search results will never be perfect, we’re as committed as always to preserving your trust and to ensuring our products continue to be useful for everyone. Posted by Ben Gomes, VP, Engineering