Google will be showing you ratings of applications and services on the Play Store based on your location and the device being used as announced by Android Developers on their blog.
Reviews help us understand how other people are thinking about a product that we might be using. In the older days, words of mouth acted as reviews which are now replaced by stars and comments.
Developers at Google realized that applications on the Play Store can have better ratings and reviews. There might be various reasons behind bugs in a certain app. Some of these bugs are also in a particular region and global ratings might actually not do justice for them.
Starting November this year, users will see ratings according to the country they live in. Ratings from other regions will not be shown and it will help you make better decisions when installing/buying an app or service.
Different ratings for devices
Google Play Store is also available on a bunch of devices including smartphones, tablets, TVs, and smartwatches. When a user rates an app for a particular device, that rating shows up as part of the global rating for all devices.
Google will be rolling out device-specific ratings and reviews early in 2022. This will help users look for information on the basis of which device they are using. For instance, there might be apps that are not well optimized for a tablet but works flawlessly on a smartphone. If users using the app on a tablet give it a bad rating, it will not reflect on the ratings for smartphones.
You will also be able to see more data on the ratings and sort them as per your needs. If you need to know the performance of an app in the past 30 days, you will have an option to filter that out. So again it helps you make informed decisions better.
Google says that these changes will roll out starting November:
“These changes in Google Play will start to roll out from November with country or region-specific ratings. Look out for messages about your ratings in your Play Console Inbox towards the end of this year, and don’t forget that you can get ahead by checking your ratings by country and device-type today.”
What do you think about the change? Let us know in the comments below.
