Google is making it easier to find decent apps for Android devices with large screens.
The company says there are currently more than 250 million Android tablets, foldables, and Chrome OS devices in use. These devices can run most Android apps available via Google Play, but finding software that’s been optimized for their larger displays is more of a challenge.
Google recently introduced large screen app quality guidelines to help Android developers take advantage of these devices’ bigger displays, the ability to use alternative input devices such as styluses, and otherwise make their offerings more than just blown-up smartphone apps.
“In the coming months,” Google says, “we’ll be updating our featuring and ranking logic in Play on large screen devices to prioritize high-quality apps and games based on these app quality guidelines. This will affect how apps are surfaced in search results and recommendations on the homepage, with the goal of helping users find the apps that are best optimized for their device.”
Google is also planning to warn users of these large screen displays when they install apps that don’t meet these guidelines. That way people won’t be surprised when the apps they download turn out to be disappointments. (At least where being optimized for larger displays is concerned.)
The company is going to update Google Play to automatically show reviews for specific device types—including “tablets and foldables, Chrome OS, Wear, or Auto”—to help people “make better decisions about the apps that are right for them” based on the product they’re using.
Google says these changes “will roll out gradually over the coming months” and that it “will continue collecting feedback to understand how we can best support large screen optimizations that improve consumer experiences and empower developers to build better apps.”
This isn’t the first time Google has tried to improve the Android experience for tablet users: It actually introduced a dedicated “Designed for tablets” section to Google Play in 2013. Perhaps these new guidelines, warnings, and review pages will have a more pronounced impact.
