Google Play App Ratings Will Soon Be Weighted Towards Recent Reviews

Google is taking an altogether new approach to how the app rating system works on the Google Play store. The company announced at its I/O 2019 developer conference that it would be making changes to Play Store average app ratings to better reflect an app's recent revisions. And unlike Apple, which made a change two years ago by allowing developers to decide whether or not their app ratings would reset with the latest update, Google, on the other hand, will begin to weight app ratings to favour those from recent releases.

Milena Nikolic, an Engineering Director leading Google Play Console, detailed the changes on Day 2 of I/O 2019, She said, “You told us you wanted a rating based on what your app is today, not what it was years ago, and we agree.” According to her, the current Google Play rating system shows a lifetime cumulative value of an app's ratings. That will change later this year, she said, and more emphasis will be given to the ratings from the most recent reviews by the users.

The update to the Google Play ratings system promises that users will be able to better see the current state of an app, which in other words means fixes and changes that have been made to an app to deliver a better experience over time will now be taken into account, thanks to ratings of recent versions by users. A negative to the situation can be if an app that was once very high quality and has failed to deliver updates and bug fixes in recent times will have its ratings indicate its current state.

Lastly, end users won't be seeing the changes in the Google Play rating system until August. But the developer, on the other hand, can test out their new rating system by logging in to their Play Store Console.