Android Vitals: What’s New
Google has introduced a smarter stability-focused update feature that enables developers to roll out their apps at a faster rate and strengthen performance signals tied to Core Web Vitals. This capability is available on devices running Android 7.0 and above. Ever since its introduction 6 years ago, Android vitals have continued to gain importance and are now a major driver of your Play Store organic visibility. In 2022, Google announced that it would consider device-level crash patterns and may restrict visibility based on them from November 2022.
How does this work?
The Play Store will prompt users to update the app when:
- The app crashes in the foreground
- A more stable version of the app is available
This helps improve perceived in-app performance and encourages users to move to the version with fewer stability issues.
Do you need to enable anything for this to work?
This feature is managed automatically by Google and requires no configuration from developers or users. When the app crashes, Google will suggest the version with the lowest crash rate. Since the prompt is triggered by Google and not by BioLab, this alert also appears even when the app crashes on launch.
How does Google decide which version to recommend?
Google’s machine learning system evaluates multiple factors:
The crash rate of the current version compared to a newer, more stable release.
How frequently update prompts are shown and whether users follow them.
User activity levels, ensuring the data is statistically meaningful for Android vitals.
