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What's next for Google Play Store AI review summaries (APK teardown)
- The Google Play Store appears to be getting ready to include AI-generated review summaries in app listings.
- These would join the AI summaries in searches and the “App highlights” block we already have.
- Rather than just collating the most popular opinions expressed in reviews, this condenses them down into a single, new voice.
Google is on a bit of an AI kick right now, to put it mildly, finding reason to augment every nook of cranny of its software and services with (admittedly, often impressive) AI-powered functionality. The Play Store has been as much a target as any for these experiments, like with the App highlights feature we saw Google start playing around with several months back. For over a year now, Google’s been talking about using AI to summarize Play Store reviews, and after getting to see how that works in the app’s search mode, we’re now discovering how the next phase of those summaries could arrive.
When delivering Google Play’s most recent quarterly address, VP Sam Bright touched on the company’s progress with AI in the Play store, including the desire to get more of this AI-derived content in detailed app listings themselves. Sure enough, digging through Play Store version 42.1.21 we find new text strings for labeling information as “Summarized by Google AI.” And with the right flags enabled, we can get just such an AI-generated summary to appear at the top of user-written reviews:
This sort of AI-generated written review is a distinct departure from the kind of statistic-based presentation we’ve seen already. There, the Play Store would present users with a ranking of some of the most popular shared opinions expressed in reviews. Functionally, this new approach doesn’t seem that different, and it all comes to down to how you prefer your information presented.
It makes perfect sense for Google to do this here if it’s also doing it from a search, so we really just wonder what’s been taking so long. Actually, maybe we shouldn’t wonder so much, especially considering the sort of performance we’ve been getting from the Play Store’s AI-fueled App highlights. Over on X, AssembleDebug recently shared some of the “misses” he’s noticed, like how there is no good reason the summaries for two different apps like this should be so similar that they only differ by a single letter:
Then again, better to be repeating yourself than to be sharing outright incorrect information — which he also caught popping up in some App highlights summaries.