One way of shamelessly making anything you make – especially online – seem like the greatest thing ever is testimonials. Not just in the actual section of a webpage or area dedicated for them, but choosing the best ones to put in the body of text meant to describe your “thing.” Google knows this and seems to think doing so on the Play Store can lead to many of things like unfair advantages, false advertising, etc. So, how do they fix this? By banning the user of testimonials in app descriptions n the Play Store, of course.
“Please do not include user testimonials in your app description. They tend to be dubious and are frequently utilized to include references to popular search terms and competitor apps in violation of the policies outlined here. Let your users speak for themselves via Play’s comment review system,” reads an update to the “Spam, & Placement in the store” section of Google’s developer guidelines.
Basically, Google is preventing app developers from inflating their position on the search results and lists of Google Play as to attain a fair advantage for every developer, in addition to other methods one could use such as repetitive use of keywords in an attempt to boost the presence of the app, using completely unrelated keywords to draw unsuspecting people to your application, and many more.
“To help ensure the best experience for Android users, Google Play policies prohibit the publication of spam. Please do not publish unwanted, deceptive, repetitive, or irrelevant content on Google Play. Not only will it lower your app’s rating and cause negative reviews, it can result in your app being suspended or your developer account being terminated,” reads Google’s guidelines.
Hopefully, this small change to the policy allows more people to get only high quality applications for their device. Believe it or not, there is a lot of scrap-apps (scrapps) on the Google Play store, and most of them are the ones including testimonials in their descriptions.
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