Report: Google will let devs A/B test Play Store listings, I/O announcement likely

Google is reportedly working on improving the Play Store experience, for users and developers alike.

An A/B testing feature for Play Store listings could be announced at Google I/O, according to The Information, citing developers who were briefed about the new feature. Developers will be able to create different versions of screenshots, videos, icons, and app description copy and run them in parallel to see which variant yields the best results. This isn’t a user-facing change, but it may ultimately improve the user experience by giving developers better insight into user preferences and habits.

Google is expected to showcase this feature at the I/O developer conference at the end of this month, according to The Information.

The report also hints to potential announcements related to app indexing, which is the ability to search through and go to specific “location” inside an app, as well as a way for users to try out certain features of an app without  actually installing the full application. Unfortunately, there’s no hard info on these developments.

Android design guru Matias Duarte has hinted in the past that Google is thinking about unbundling apps into their basic features and making them available to users on demand. It remains to be seen if Google has anything to announce on this front at its developer conference. Google I/O is set to take place in San Francisco on May 28-29.