A conclusive guide for making your Android Google Play submission successful

13 mins read

The number of available apps in the Google Play Store is placed at more than 3.4 million apps. Google Play is certainly one of the largest platforms for distributing, promoting, and selling Android applications.

Publishing your Android app on Google Play is not only exciting but also a crucial element of your application development process that influences its final success. Will your app be submitted, will it be popular, and will people download and install it? All this and more depends on how fruitful your release will be.

Table of contents


Why is it important to have a good Product Page?

In the Android ecosystem, the Google Play product page is almost the only way to get potential users to install a mobile app or game. In other words, almost all potential users for an app are exposed to the product page, making it one of the most important elements in a mobile growth strategy. The Google Play product page should convey to potential users the most impactful messages around why they should install the app, the unique selling point of the app, and the benefits of using it.

The Google Play Store is a marketplace and in this economy, potential users consider multiple apps and games when they face a certain problem or are looking for their next piece of entertainment. App developers who best understand their users will be able to craft the most effective creatives enjoy higher conversion rates and even lower user acquisition costs. All things equal, the developer with the most understanding of their users will be able to command higher growth rates.

Name

The name of an app in the Google Play Store is an important ASO (App Store Optimization) on-metadata factor to keep in mind. It affects, above all, the search results, but as well the conversion rate to install.

Google allows developers to include 50 characters in the app Title, so use them wisely. Keep your brand name short, easy to spell, and easy to memorize for your users. Include your most relevant keyword(s) alongside your brand name. This can significantly improve your app keywords rankings!

Remember that you can add one title in each language to localize your app. Don’t ignore localizing your app title — the mobile world is global, and the demand for your app can arise from the countries that you have never expected.

Short description

You must provide a short description to publish your store listing. Your short description is a quick synopsis meant to spark user interest by outlining your app or game’s key value. Your short description is the first text users see when looking at your app’s detail page on the Play Store app and can be expanded by users to view your app’s full description. The description can appear in locations beyond your store listing, so any user should be able to use it to quickly understand the core purpose of your app or game.

In Google Play Store, the short description of an app has a strong effect on the ASO in keywords rankings and conversion rate. Google allows developers to include up to 80 characters for the short description, and if the users are interested to know more, they can expand the short description to view the full description of your mobile app or game.

Highly recommended

  • Summarize the core function or purpose of your app or game in simple and concise language, highlighting any aspects that make it unique.
  • Reflect on the latest state of your app or game.
  • Avoid time-sensitive copy that can become outdated quickly to reduce the need to update.
  • Call-to-actions, for example, “download now,” “install now,” “play now,” or “try now.”
  • Localize your description as appropriate for different markets and languages.
  • Avoid slang or jargon, unless it is a language that would come naturally to your target users. Ensure your short description is correctly formatted: Do not include special characters, line breaks, emojis, emoticons, repeated punctuation. Only capitalize your app name if your Google Play listing app name is also capitalized.

Screenshots

Use screenshots to convey capabilities, the look and feel, and the experience of your app to potential users for better app discovery and decision making. You can add up to 8 screenshots for each supported device type: Phone, Tablet (7-inch and 10-inch), Android TV, and Wear OS by Google.

Screenshots may be displayed throughout Google Play, for instance in search or on the homepage, in addition to your store listing on Google Play. When Google Play displays both your preview video and screenshots together, for example on your store listing page, and if your preview video is available then your screenshots will be shown after the preview video, followed left-to-right by the screenshots best suited for the device the user is browsing on.

Requirements To publish your store listing, you must provide a minimum of two screenshots across form factors that meet the following requirements:

  • JPEG or 24-bit PNG (no alpha)
  • For apps, you must provide at least four screenshots with a minimum 1080px resolution. These should be 16:9 for landscape (minimum 1920x1080px) screenshots and 9:16 for portrait screenshots (minimum 1080x1920px).
  • For games you must provide at least three 16:9 landscape screenshots (minimum 1920x1080px) or three 9:16 portrait screenshots (minimum 1080x1920px). Make sure these screenshots depict the in-game experience so users can get a sense of what the gameplay will be like if they download and play.

Screenshots must demonstrate the actual in-app or in-game experience, focusing on the core features and content so users can anticipate what the app or game experience will be like. Stylized screenshots that break UI across multiple uploaded images are allowed, but prioritize UI in the first three screenshots as much as possible; Use high-quality images with the proper aspect ratio and avoid inappropriate or repetitive image elements.

If you’re also interested in iOS App Store submission, we recommend you to check out our article on this topic, A conclusive guide for making your iOS App Store submission successful.

Feature graphic

As the name points, the feature graphic is an image used by Google Play when they recommend your app. Since the majority of apps have a preview video, the feature graphic will usually have a Play button overlaid on top of it and will allow the video to be played instantly, on click. Unlike the iOS App Store where you have to use a frame of the video as a thumbnail to be displayed before the screenshots, in Google Play you have to upload the asset separately.

Requirements

  • JPEG or 24-bit PNG (no alpha)
  • 1024x500px dimensions

Icon

An icon is the first visual impact that your app will have on the user, the essence of your application. Right after making the search request in Google Play, what the users see is a huge list of apps with different names and icons, and at this point, the users will decide which app to check out and install.

You must provide an app icon to publish your store listing. The app icon does not replace your app’s launcher icon but should be a higher-fidelity, higher-resolution version that follows Google Play’s icon design specifications. Your app icon is used in various locations on Google Play, including your store listing, search results, and top charts.

Once you got the requirements right, you should start prioritizing your efforts towards the features that have the most impact and influence on the overall decision of the app user. Hence, growing your app’s chance of getting downloaded.

Requirements

Preview Video

If an image is worth a thousand words, a video is worth a thousand images! A preview video is effective to show the capabilities, look and feel, and experience of your app to potential users for better app discovery and decision making. It is not required, but we highly recommend providing a preview video for games particularly. Your game requires a preview video to be shown in certain parts of Google Play. You can add one preview video to your store listing by entering a YouTube URL in the “preview video” field.

Your preview video is displayed before your screenshots on your app’s store listing on Google Play. Users can watch the video by tapping on the play button that overlays on your feature graphic.

Requirements

  • Disable ads for your video to be shown on Google Play. Turn off monetization in your video, or upload a different video without monetization claims and update the URL in Play Console.
  • Set your video’s privacy setting to public or unlisted, do not set it to private, and do not use an age-restricted video.
  • Make sure your video is embeddable on Google Play.
  • Properly localize the video including the UI, taglines, and audio.

360-degree stereoscopic image

To publish a Daydream-enabled app, you’ll need to add a 360-degree stereoscopic image to your Store Listing page. When you’re creating a 360-degree stereoscopic image, think of it as your app’s background image within the Play Store on a Daydream device.

Requirements

  • JPEG or 24-bit PNG (no alpha)
  • 4096x4096px
  • Stereo 360°
  • 15MB maximum size

Pricing

When it comes to pricing, you can set your app as free or paid, update your app’s pricing universally or per country, and use pricing templates to simplify them for your apps in Play Console. After you publish an app or update, including price changes, adding SKUs, or making changes to your app’s distribution settings, it can take a few hours for your changes to be shown on Google Play.

Make your app free or paid

  • Open Play Console and go to the App pricing page (Products > App pricing).
  • In the “Pricing” section, next to “Your app is,” click Make your app free or Make your app paid.

Changes to your app’s Free or Paid selection

  • You can change your app from Paid to Free.
  • Once your app has been offered for Free, the app can’t be changed to Paid. If you want to charge for the app, you need to create a new app with a new package name and set a price.

Enter a price

When you offer paid apps and in-app products on Google Play, a service fee applies. If you aren’t distributing a paid app or in-app item to a country that you enter a price for, users won’t have access to it.

You can use pricing templates to set up or manage the same set of prices for multiple paid apps and in-app products. If you update a pricing template, all items linked to the template will use the template’s latest prices. You can use up to 100 different pricing templates per developer account, and you can link up to 1,000 items to each pricing template.

There are a few ways you can temporarily offer your apps for free or at a discounted price:

  • Offer your paid apps at a discounted price.
  • Give users a paid app or in-app product for free with a promo code.

Review

Google Play has been adjusting its app review process, requiring some apps to take more time for a thorough review before approval. This can impact the timing of an app or update going live, so developers should keep it in mind when pushing out updates for functionality or App Store Optimization.

The important thing for developers to do is to plan their releases accordingly. Since it is possible that apps can take up to a week to be approved, they should plan for an appropriate time frame for the approval process. If a developer is aiming for a specific release date, they should publish to a closed testing track, then use Timed Publishing to go live at the specified time. They should still submit it at least a week or more in advance, in order to provide enough time for the Google Play review process or in case the app gets rejected and requires fixing.

How to prepare your app for review by providing app information

Add a Privacy policy -- Adding a privacy policy to your app’s store listing helps provide transparency about how you treat sensitive user and device data. The privacy policy must, together with any in-app disclosures, comprehensively disclose how your app collects, uses, and shares user data, including the types of parties with whom it’s shared. You should consult your legal representative to advise you of what is required.

Ads -- You must declare whether or not your app contains ads. This includes ads delivered through third-party ad SDKs, display ads, native ads, and/or banner ads). Apps that contain ads will have a “Contains ads” label shown on their store listing. This label will be visible to all Play Store users.

App Access -- If your entire app or parts of your app are restricted based on login credentials, memberships, location, or other forms of authentication, you must provide access details.

Target audience and content -- You must declare your app’s target age group. Any apps that include children in their target audience must comply with Google Play’s Families policy requirements. It’s important to provide accurate information about your app. Depending on the target audience selections that you make, your app may be subject to additional Google Play policies.

Permissions declaration form -- You can communicate familiar and locally relevant content ratings to your users and help improve app engagement by targeting the right audience for your content. To prevent your apps from being listed as “Unrated,” sign in to Play Console and fill out the questionnaire for each of your apps as soon as possible. “Unrated” apps may be removed from Google Play.

Release

Whether you’re publishing an app for the first time or making an update, your app’s publishing status helps you understand its availability on Google Play. You can see your latest publishing status under the title and package name when you select the app in Play Console. For certain developer accounts, Google will take more time to thoroughly review their app to help better protect users. This may result in review times of up to seven days or longer in exceptional cases. You’ll receive a notification on your app’s Dashboard about how long this should take.

There are three types of publishing status:

  • App status -- Helps you understand your app’s availability on Google Play and who it’s available to (such as testers, all Google Play users, etc.).
  • Update status -- Helps you understand the availability of your latest update. An update is a set of one or more changes that you’ve made to your app.
  • Item Status -- Helps you understand the availability of a specific part of an update, such as a particular release, a content rating, or a store listing experiment.

Publish a draft app

When you’re ready to publish a draft app, you’ll need to roll out a release. At the end of the process, clicking Release will also publish your app. If you see the heading “Errors summary” at the top of your app release’s review summary page, click Show more to view the details. When available, you can also view the recommended or required resolution. You can’t publish your app until errors have been resolved. If you only have warnings, minor issues, or a combination of the two, then you can still publish your app, but we recommend addressing them before doing so.

Publish an app update

  • Standard publishing -- Updates to existing apps are processed and published as soon as possible. By default, your app will use standard publishing. Certain apps may be subject to extended reviews, which may result in review times of up to seven days or longer in exceptional cases. Go to Update or unpublish your app for more information.
  • Managed publishing -- Updates to existing apps are processed as usual. After they’ve been approved, you control exactly when the changes are published. Go to Control when app changes are published with managed publishing to learn more.

Once you’re done with submitting your app and finished publishing it, you want to start promoting it since user download action isn’t enough for you to grow, therefore we recommend you to read our article on “How to promote your mobile app for free”.

We hope these instructions will help you get through the submitting process easier, and that soon, the Google Play Store users can download your very special app. But remember, the journey does not stop at publishing. Running a mobile application requires continuous efforts to get it trending, otherwise, competition will overshadow the app, but if this is your first product and you feel overwhelmed, contact us at appssemble, and our experts will help you make it a success for sure!

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