On March 17, 2015 Eunice Kim – Product Manager of Google Play announced on Android Developers Blog about manual app review process and a global content rating system. Prior to this Google was relying on automated review process to verify.

Although google claims that there won’t be any noticeable difference to the developers but there will be expert team of developers who will review the app for content guidelines defined by Google. However due to this process app with poor content, design or app which simply duplicates other apps features/functionality will be controlled from publishing on app store. Moreover developers will get very clear guidance from app review team about the reason for their app rejection and possible ways to correct it.

Overall this seems to be a good move by Google in making Google Play Store a reliable & secure place for app users. This will also benefit serious app developers as they will be ensured that their work is being submitted through a legitimate process and other apps on the store will also follow similar process.

Along with manual review process, Google is also introducing age-based rating system in order to easily identify content suitable to appropriate audience. App developers will have to login to their google developer accounts to complete the self rating process for their existing apps as well. Apps without completed rating process will be marked as “unrated” and may be restricted from display in certain countries depending for specific users.

It seems that internet giant is on the way to provide a secure and robust experience to their app users through above steps.