Like so many of the announcements during this year’s Google I/O, AI has been the star of the show and it’s turning up in almost everything. The Play Store is taking part in the action with its own set of new features, and some of them are going to make a lot of sense. While most of the announcements are directed at developers, users will see benefits from almost everything.

Review summaries

Browsing the Play Store for the perfect app can be daunting, and while you might be able to find some good clues in user reviews, there are too many to read through to find just what you need to know. Google is putting some of its AI tools to good use to add a new review summary section that distills the majority of reviews down to a few key thoughts. With this, Google hopes to help users find out what makes an app special with just a quick glance.

The feature resembles a section found on Amazon’s store listings which likewise condenses customer comments down to a few popular phrases. However, Google’s version is reportedly powered by generative AI rather than a conventional pattern matching algorithm — hopefully making it more accurate. The Play Store section, titled ‘what users are saying,’ also shows a rough count of how many reviewers have given a particular opinion, and it appears that it will also show up alongside the app in search results instead of being just another part of the app listing pages.

The summaries will initially launch with support for English reviews, but other languages are planned for later this year.

Store listings

Developers on the Play Store come in all sizes, ranging anywhere from a solo coder all the way up to giant corporations like Microsoft and Google. Naturally, a small operation generally doesn’t have the resources to hire professional writers or a marketing team to produce app descriptions, and many developers aren’t adept writers, which often results in a tiny paragraph that does nothing for search results or to convince users to install.

Some developers have already turned to chatbots for assistance, but Google is taking some of the legwork out of this process. Starting today, a new experimental AI helper feature will appear in the Developer Console, allowing for an app listing to be written with as little as a couple prompts to detail the target audience and a key theme. From here, a draft is generated and developers may modify it or ignore it as they see fit.

While this will generally save time for developers, it should make good independent apps more accessible to users, as well. At this time, the feature is only designed to generate listings in English, but that may not be a complication thanks to the next feature announcement.

Language translation

Google has been offering language translation on the web for years, but it’s not completely flawless and developers have generally been encouraged to pay to have app listings translated manually. While that’s surely still advisable to get the best and most nuanced results for each language, Google has introduced machine translation models to fill in the gap.

Google Translate in the Play Console is entirely free and supports ten languages as of today. By publishing app listings in more languages, developers can make their apps more discoverable and accessible. Of course, apps should still include a properly translated interface for any language that is shown in their listing to avoid confusion.

More

While AI is the major focus of the show this year, Google Play will be launching quite a few other changes this year. Alongside creating custom store listings, there will soon be options to further customize listings for previously inactive users and new users coming in from AdMob and YouTube ad campaigns.

As previously announced, there are new formats and locations in the Play Store for promoting new content and events in games. To make performance tracking easier, Play is also enhancing the reporting tools with additional data. Likewise, a new feature is coming that will allow for running price experiments for in-app purchases directly from the Developer Console, making it easier to identify if higher or lower prices would be more profitable in select markets. There will also be a new option to sell IAPs directly from the Play Store page without even opening the app.

For more details about each of these announcements, check out Google’s blog post, and follow the rest of our Google I/O coverage.