Google is starting to feature apps that offer satisfactory full-screen support on Android tablets and foldable devices on Google Play, and “shame” those that don’t. The company announced the changes in a blog post yesterday in an attempt to persuade developers to support larger displays for the operating system.
“We’ve made a few ranking changes to improve quality on Play to promote high-quality apps that shine on big screens. Apps and games that meet our big screen app quality guidelines will now rank higher in search and on the Apps & Games Home.”
From late August, Google will increase the visibility of apps that “are well sized, don’t get letterboxed [black margins etc] and support both portrait and landscape orientations.” Whether a phone meets these criteria is now considered part of Google Play’s Editors’ Choice Apps and other Play Store features that highlight certain apps.
Also, Google says it will have new “content delivery formats” that use form factor-specific screenshots, so when you look at an app, you can really see how it will look in portrait mode and landscape mode.
The Store will also start showing alerts when apps are not working properly on big screen phones. At first, these alerts will be about “technical quality,” that is, apps crashing or underperforming, but Google spokesperson Nia Carter says the company is “working on other ways to notify users when apps are not optimized for large screens.”
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