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Google's Message To Developers: Fix Your App's Performance Issues Else See Them Demoted On Play Store (techcrunch.com)
Google today announced it's rolling out a change to its Play Store so that better-performing apps -- meaning those that experience fewer crashes and those that don't drain your smartphone battery -- will be ranked higher than apps with bugs and other performance issues. From a report: The goal with this new ranking algorithm is to ensure that the best apps are being promoted, which in turn leads to increased app usage and engagement, the company says. The impetus for this change came after Google realized that around half of the 1-star reviews on the Google Play Store were about app stability problems. Apps that don't work well frustrate users, who often turn to the reviews to leave a complaint. Over time, a number of bad reviews and low star ratings can impact the app's place in the charts and search results. But if an app is popular enough, a large number of installs can still, to some extent, override its negative reviews and push the app back up into a higher position than it rightly deserves.
facebook app
suck my DAMN balls lol, I will keep exploiting the poors with a subsidized carrier OS
stop "other search engines" nonsense automatically adding every website search form I use to your collection of things you try to do on my behalf. Til you stop doing stupid shit in your apps, you have no business telling anyone else what to do.
Geoff "Mandrake" Harrison
Some Random UI Hacker
Why not let the review system speak for itself?
Let people rate the app on a scale of 1-5 or whatever, and just let that rating do its job.
Why fucking manipulate search ranking up or down beyond those ratings?
https://xkcd.com/937/
https://xkcd.com/1098/
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
The Facebook app is an overbloated piece of crap. Will Google+ finally take over?
While I'm all for a system that rewards excellence, I think that unless Google is totally transparent about their methodology, this is going to be really easy for them to become further corrupted as a corporation and uprank loyal advertisers and downrank apps from the unwashed masses.
I would hope they would publish their testing methods and benchmark constraints.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
Google admits that it facilitates the distribution of crash-prone, battery draining apps.
Google Voice for IOS crashes on me daily. Wish you'd take some of your own medicine.
Translation: Apps will now be rated by performance, not fanboi drooling. A hopeful side-effect will be developers fixing bugs instead of adding new (and buggy) features.
Nevertheless, the big 4, (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Uber) have so many users, that their rating won't change.
This is why I don't buy apps on the play store.
Next: Crack down on apps that try to exploit users personal information.
Google just emailed me to inform me of apps that have permissions to contacts and other permissions. Somehow I had a white pages app on a device (must be a seldom used tablet) that I don't remember installing. One click to remove it from the email itself.
So shit useless but nice behaving apps are going to flood out the few useful ones.
Half of the performance issue is 100% your fucking fault for being incompetent at enforcing updates, so you work on that first before you go pointing the blame elsewhere, assholes.
Signed,
Your Customers
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Hey Google, you want Apps running better on Android. Get more devices on the same release of Android. The fragmentation of Android is pathetic, this is why Apple has much less app problems. I've used both Android and IOS and by far IOS is much better, not perfect, but better.
Seeing how all the latest reviews for skype are 1, there was even a news article about it .. can it be buried ?
MS don't listen to its users, but maybe they might if they don't appear in search results anymore.
Wishful thinking, i know
For IOs? Come on, Google has better things to do. Just use Siri and call it a day.
Just a thought. Performance would improve, that's for sure.
pokemon go
The app store shows install count, but an uninstall count should be also be reflected.
Stop ENABLING THEM then.
I want to know if this demotion will apply to Google's own mobile apps (I'd wager not).
Anyone who has used Google Maps for the past several years has seen performance tank, and battery consumption shoot through the roof just so Google can send you a notification that says "take some photos of the restaurant for us while you're there" based on WiFi and GPS. Disabling Google Location services and relying solely on in-device GPS gained me >30% in additional battery at the end of every day.
Or Google Translate. The app takes over 15 seconds to become useful on my phone (Xiaomi Redmi 2: Quad Core w/2GB RAM), and offline translation doesn't work without a network connection (entirely defeating the point of OFFLINE translation).
Or the Play Store, which if I leave running in the background murders performance for some unknown reason.
So, Google, when will you apply the standards for third party apps to your own? With every release your Google Apps add more bloat and take another chunk out of my battery life.
Time to fix your shit app.
Can they also rank them on the size of the payload because most apps are chronically bloated.
Build a Man a Fire, and He'll Be Warm for a Day. Set a Man on Fire, and He'll Be Warm for the Rest of His Life.
Stop running a beta OS, and it won't crash.
This is actually quite accurate. The Pokemon Go app probably caused a noticeable increase in sales of portable battery packs. You can play with the augmented realty parts off and the app will still heat up your phone to Galaxy Note 7 levels of concern. The nostalgia factor and IP branding are some the main reasons it didn't fail. It could have been so much more.
The Google App force updated itself recently on my Moto G2. A decent phone for it's time, but perhaps ageing. But, the latest version caused my entire phone to slow down so horribly bad that I thought it had bad hardware. My apps were all slow, switching views, going to home screen all delayed by a second or two or more in some instances. Some web pages stopped loading altogether.
Just out of desperation, I clicked un-install upgrades, and any other button I could (starting with Google app, as it was the last to update) to see if per chance it was the culprit, and I finally even was able to disable it! (couldn't before, so not sure what happened). Near instantly my phone returned to normal operation,
Google needs to look in the mirror.
As an Android app developer, 90% of the crashes I see are in areas that happen *completely outside of my control*. That is, the call stack doesn't reference a single line of code that I wrote. To your announcement and on the behalf of all Android app developers everywhere, I say, "Oh, screw you Google." Fix your OS and the Android Support library so that YOUR own stuff stops crashing MY applications. And also recognize that developers use various third-party libraries that might also crash that the developer has zero control over (e.g. might only be available in binary JAR form - e.g. the closed source embedded YouTube player API library that you produce that likes to occasionally crash).
In addition, most app crashes occur because Java is laden with zillions of unnecessary exceptions. An exception is a permanent condition that cannot be recovered from AT ALL. Java and its developers do not understand this concept and so things like, "The file failed to open or the network connection dropped and so your app will now crash" is so common that the only thing to do is to throw a try-catch around every block of code and *ignore all exceptions*. So now, instead of crashing, the app simply doesn't do anything where it used to crash on just three devices but now the app continues along just fine because most UI things are self-healing. Stop using Java already!!!!!!!! Java was well on the way out as a usable language but then Google came along with Android, which had the unfortunate and painful effect of breathing new life into Java.
Finally, if you want to actually help, at least associate what crash and symbol stack is tied to any individual (or multiple) 1-star reviews. Most crashes are just random stack traces that we have to guess at how they are occurring. A public two-way conversation about a specific crash goes a long way to resolving issues and shows other people that the developer cares enough about the app to have the conversation in the first place. Ranking down apps based on reviews is the WRONG solution. Software can be quite difficult to get right, which is especially true when multithreading comes into play and nearly everything has to synchronize across to the UI thread without blocking UI operations. Give us the tools we need that we've been asking for all along. Also, get rid of star ratings as they do nothing but harm the review ecosystem. Users should only get to see the latest reviews for every app (no star ranking system) with reviews for the most recent version showing first and also show the most recent reviews that have a discussion thread with the developer and any associated crash logs. Everything else can be safely buried on other screens.
My 1 star reviews are always due to really crappy permissions. Why does a flashlight app need to read my contact list? Why does the Facebook app need literally every single possible permission? How about Google gives the end user the ability to block any and or all permissions for any app that the user installs on an individual app or system wide basis?
Hey Google, why don't you fix your own shitty web services so they work with proper web standards outside of Chrome first? You have had years to get Hangouts and other apps working well with standards, are still serving inferior versions of your sites to other browsers for no legit reason, are constantly fucking with YouTube and Maps in ways that break things, recently screwed up GMail of all things for a lot of users with HTTP2 issues, you're still trying to forcefully push Web Components on everyone before they're ready for production, and you're trying to brazenly make an inferior mobile web that's under your control with AMP (when people could just make their own simple pages instead and get the same benefits, given a decent CDN). Clean your own house first before you start telling other people to do the same.
Google Play halves my battery life, I assume because I do not run a data or wifi connection. That pile of crap is disabled on my phone.