In reviews we trust — Making Google Play ratings and reviews more trustworthy

Posted by Fei Ye, Software Engineer and Kazushi Nagayama, Ninja Spamologist

Google Play ratings and reviews are extremely important in helping users decide which apps to install. Unfortunately, fake and misleading reviews can undermine users' trust in those ratings. User trust is a top priority for us at Google Play, and we are continuously working to make sure that the ratings and reviews shown in our store are not being manipulated.

There are various ways in which ratings and reviews may violate our developer guidelines:

• Bad content: Reviews that are profane, hateful, or off-topic.
  
• Fake ratings: Ratings and reviews meant to manipulate an app's average rating or top reviews. We've seen different approaches to manipulate the average rating; from 5-star attacks to positively boost an app's average rating, to 1-star attacks to influence it negatively.
  
• Incentivized ratings: Ratings and reviews given by real humans in exchange for money or valuable items.

When we see these, we take action on the app itself, as well as the review or rating in question.

In 2018, the Google Play Trust & Safety teams deployed a system that combines human intelligence with machine learning to detect and enforce policy violations in ratings and reviews. A team of engineers and analysts closely monitor and study suspicious activities in Play's ratings and reviews, and improve the model's precision and recall on a regular basis. We also regularly ask skilled reviewers to check the decisions made by our models for quality assurance.

It's a big job. To give you a sense of the volume we manage, here are some numbers from a recent week:

• Millions of reviews and ratings detected and removed from the Play Store.
  
• Thousands of bad apps identified due to suspicious reviews and rating activities on them.

Our team can do a lot, but we need your help to keep Google Play a safe and trusted place for apps and games.

If you're a developer, you can help us by doing the following:

• Don't buy fake or incentivized ratings.
  
• Don't run campaigns, in-app or otherwise, like "Give us 5 stars and we'll give you this in-app item!" That counts as incentivized ratings, and it's prohibited by policy.
  
• Do read the Google Play Developer Policy to make sure you are not inadvertently making violations.

Example of a violation: incentivized ratings is not allowed

If you're a user, you can follow these simple guidelines as well:

• Don't accept or receive money or goods (even virtual ones) in exchange for reviews and ratings.
  
• Don't use profanity to criticize an app or game; keep your feedback constructive.
  
• Don't post gibberish, hateful, sexual, profane or off-topic reviews; they simply aren't allowed.
  
• Do read the comment posting policy. It's pretty concise and talks about all the things you should consider when posting a review to the public.

Finally, if you find bad ratings and reviews on Google Play, help us improve by sending your feedback! Users can mark the review as "Spam" and developers can submit feedback through the Play Console.

Tooltip to flag the review as Spam.

Thanks for helping us keep Google Play a safe and trusted place to discover some of the world's best apps and games.

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Automating your app releases with Google Play

Posted by Nicholas Lativy, Software Engineer

At Google I/O we shared how Google's own apps make use of Google Play for successful launches and updates and introduced the new Google Play Developer Publishing API Version 3.

The Publishing API enables you to integrate publishing operations into your existing release process or automated workflows by providing the ability to upload APKs and roll out releases. Here's an overview of some of the improvements you can now take advantage of in Version 3 of the API.

Releases in the API

The Publishing API now uses the release model you are familiar with from the Play Console.

{
  "track": "production",
  "releases": [
    {
      "name": "Release One", 
      "versionCodes": ["100"],
      "status": "completed"
    }
  ]
}

This gives you full control over releases via the API allowing a number of operations which were previously available only in the Play Console. For example, you can now control the name of releases created via the API, and we have now relaxed the constraints on what can be rolled out via the API to match the Play Console.

Additional testing tracks

The API now supports releasing to any of the testing tracks you have configured for your application as well as the production track. This makes it possible to configure your continuous integration system to push a new build to your internal test track as soon as it's ready for QA.

Staged rollout

Staged rollouts are the recommended way to deploy new versions of your app. They allow you to make your new release available to a small percentage of users and gradually increase this percentage as your confidence in the release grows.

Staged rollouts are now represented directly in the API as inProgress releases.

{
  "track": "production",
  "releases": [
    {
      "versionCodes": ["100"],
      "status": "completed"
    },
    {
      "versionCodes": ["200"],
      "status": "inProgress",
      "userFraction": 0.1
    }
  ]
}

You can now halt a staged rollout via the API by changing its status to halted. This makes it possible to automatically respond to any problems you detect while performing a rollout. If it turns out to be a false alarm, the API now also allows you to resume a halted release by changing its status back to inProgress.

Release notes

Release notes are a useful way to communicate to users new features you have added in a release. In V3 we have simplified how these are specified via the API by adding the releaseNotes field to release.

{
  "track": "production",
  "releases": [
    {
      "versionCodes": ["100"],
      "status": "completed",
      "releaseNotes": [
        {
          "language": "en-US",
          "text": "Now it's easier to specify release notes."
        },
        {
           "language": "it-IT",
           "text": "Ora è più semplice specificare le note sulla versione."
        }
    }
  ]
}

Draft releases

We know that while many developers are comfortable deploying test builds automatically, they like using the Play Console when rolling out to production.

So, in the V3 API we have added the ability to create and manage Draft Releases.

{
  "track": "production",
  "releases": [
    {
      "name": "Big Launch",
      "versionCodes": ["200"],
      "status": "draft"
    }
  ]
}

This allows you to upload APKs or App Bundles and create a draft release from your continuous integration system, and then have your product manager log in, check that everything looks good, and hit "Confirm and Rollout".

We hope you find these features useful and take advantage of them for successful launches and updates with Google Play. If you're interested in some of the other great tools for distributing your apps, check out the I/O sessions which have now been posted to the Android Developers YouTube Channel.

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