Google Play Store: display of app ratings by device class and country

Google wants to personalize the display of ratings in its own Play Store more in the future. App ratings will only be displayed according to the country or region of the respective user and the device class used.

Changed display from November

Beginning in November 2021, Google will start with the new display of app ratings in the Play Store, as the search engine specialist announces in its own developer blog. According to this, only ratings of apps from one’s own country are to be displayed. From 2022, only those that come from a matching device class (i.e. smartphone, tablet, foldable, Chrome OS or Wear OS device).

This makes sense in many respects, because before downloading an app, many users read the reviews of the respective program – reviews in other languages are rarely consulted, as are reviews that talk about device-specific problems of other users.

While this hardly results in any significant restrictions in this country, the change of the Google Play Store hits countries with only a few users quite hard. The breakdown by region and device class could mean that very few reviews are available in smaller markets in the future.

The benefits for developers

App developers, however, should also benefit from the change. Negative ratings that relate primarily to conditions in a particular country or region will thus no longer have a negative impact on the overall rating in the future. Changes to the tablet version of an app, for example, should also be better recognizable compared to its smartphone counterpart.

The corresponding developer console is also undergoing an update that will provide even more detailed information about the ratings submitted by users in the future. This includes various filter options and an improved segmentation option, which now allows better selection of time periods for displaying and collecting data. The CSV export of average data and the distributions of ratings is also possible with this.