The Google Play app store has recently added tiny icons to apps on their top trending, indicating whether they're showing growth or decline on the platform.
The icons, appearing under an app's numerical ranking, are denoted by the familiar trending, spiking graph image capped off by an arrow. The arrow head going up indicates healthy growth, while it's going down indicates deceleration in the marketplace. This goes a long way in both providing users a reason to exhibit trust in products, as well as letting them gauge what is currently trending and popular in the general populace.
This update, quietly slipped onto the platform unbeknownst to Google's sizeable community, seems to revolve around giving users more insight into what they're downloading from the store. While Google itself takes care of its userbase via rules and regulations keeping malware away from purchase and downloads. However, choosing to attach the trending graph icons allows users to make a more informed decision when downloading an app, choosing to judge whether or not people are sticking to the app as a sign of trust, or if they're jumping ship.
This is, of course, not entirely infallible as a yardstick to measure reliability and success, since Google Play gives no indication as to what factors determine measuring an app's rise or fall, or even the timeframe in which a sudden change in equilibrium is observed. For example, the social media app Telegram is currently facing a downward trend on the Play store, presumably since people have successfully settled into whatever domains they chose after the WhatsApp policy fiasco. However, since that very down slope was only achieved after a markedly rapid upscale and no timeframe is provided to measure the downfall with, it's hard to determine whether this decline is due to lackluster user satisfaction or simply the app returning to normalcy.
At any rate, this design change doesn't seem like it was made to establish a nuanced breakdown of success and failure on the Google Play market, as it's seemingly only a minuscule change to the app store's interface along the lines of window dressing. Seemingly put, while it can certainly be used as a metric for reliability and success, perhaps other factors such as the rankings these new icons accompany are best considered as well.
Read next: Law enforcement agencies are looking for dents to invade user privacy through the loopholes in Android and iOS ecosystems
The icons, appearing under an app's numerical ranking, are denoted by the familiar trending, spiking graph image capped off by an arrow. The arrow head going up indicates healthy growth, while it's going down indicates deceleration in the marketplace. This goes a long way in both providing users a reason to exhibit trust in products, as well as letting them gauge what is currently trending and popular in the general populace.
This update, quietly slipped onto the platform unbeknownst to Google's sizeable community, seems to revolve around giving users more insight into what they're downloading from the store. While Google itself takes care of its userbase via rules and regulations keeping malware away from purchase and downloads. However, choosing to attach the trending graph icons allows users to make a more informed decision when downloading an app, choosing to judge whether or not people are sticking to the app as a sign of trust, or if they're jumping ship.
This is, of course, not entirely infallible as a yardstick to measure reliability and success, since Google Play gives no indication as to what factors determine measuring an app's rise or fall, or even the timeframe in which a sudden change in equilibrium is observed. For example, the social media app Telegram is currently facing a downward trend on the Play store, presumably since people have successfully settled into whatever domains they chose after the WhatsApp policy fiasco. However, since that very down slope was only achieved after a markedly rapid upscale and no timeframe is provided to measure the downfall with, it's hard to determine whether this decline is due to lackluster user satisfaction or simply the app returning to normalcy.
At any rate, this design change doesn't seem like it was made to establish a nuanced breakdown of success and failure on the Google Play market, as it's seemingly only a minuscule change to the app store's interface along the lines of window dressing. Seemingly put, while it can certainly be used as a metric for reliability and success, perhaps other factors such as the rankings these new icons accompany are best considered as well.
Read next: Law enforcement agencies are looking for dents to invade user privacy through the loopholes in Android and iOS ecosystems
