Most Google Play listing advice is iOS advice with the nouns swapped. It tells you to pick a hundred characters of keywords, which Play does not have; it tells you to test your screenshots, without mentioning that Play ships a testing tool with rules that determine whether your test will ever return an answer; and it says nothing about the two listing structures that only exist on Play.

This is a checklist built the other way round: from what Google states in Play Console Help, with the Play-specific mechanics that most cross-platform checklists skip.

The fields, and the limits Google actually states

Play gives you three text fields on the default store listing, with limits stated in Play Console Help (Create and set up your app):

| Field | Limit | What it does | |---|---|---| | App name | 30 characters | Your app's name on Google Play; one localized name per language | | Short description | 80 characters | "The first text users see when looking at your app's detail page on the Play Store app" | | Full description | 4,000 characters | Expandable; the body of the listing |

There is no keyword field. The description is the text surface, and Google's guidance about it is a warning rather than a technique: "Repetitive or irrelevant use of keywords in the app name, description, or promotional description can create an unpleasant user experience and result in an app being suspended on Google Play" (Create and set up your app).

Google's best-practices page adds specific prohibitions that quietly disqualify a lot of common listing copy (Best practices for your store listing):

  • No unattributed or anonymous user testimonials.
  • No text indicating store performance or ranking. Google's own examples are "App of the year," "#1," "Best of Play 20XX," "Popular," and award icons.
  • No price or promotional language in app titles or developer names, such as "Free" or "No Ads."
  • No CAPS "unless your brand is capitalized," and avoid "emojis, emoticons, and special character sequences that are irrelevant to your app."
  • The description must accurately describe the app's functionality and content.

Treat that list as a pre-submission read-through rather than as style advice. Google states the suspension consequence narrowly, for "repetitive or irrelevant use of keywords" (Create and set up your app); the best-practices items above are the house rules your listing gets read against, and there is no upside in breaking them.

The assets are a specification, not a taste question

Play states exact requirements for preview assets (Add preview assets to showcase your app):

  • **App icon** — 512 × 512 px PNG.
  • **Feature graphic** — 1024 × 500 px.
  • **Screenshots** — up to 8 per device type, with stated aspect ratio requirements.
  • **Preview video** — supplied as a YouTube URL, with monetisation disabled.
  • **TV banner** — 1280 × 720 px, for Android TV.

Two things follow. First, "up to 8 per device type" means a tablet or TV listing is a separate asset job rather than a resize, and one you have to plan for deliberately. Second, because assets can be localised, they are a per-market decision, not a global one.

Three Play-only levers most checklists skip

1. Custom store listings target segments, not languages

You can create **up to 50 custom store listing pages**, and each can change "your app's name, icon, descriptions, and graphic assets" (Create custom store listings to target specific user segments). Targeting is not limited to geography: Google names install-state segments including **churned users** (those who uninstalled), **lapsed users** (those who have not opened your app in the last 28 days), and buyer categories, as well as users eligible to pre-register.

One constraint governs how you plan them: "You can target multiple countries with a custom store listing, but you can only target a country with one custom store listing at a time." So a country cannot be split across two listing strategies simultaneously — a country is a slot, and you have to choose what occupies it.

2. Language localisation and country targeting are different tools

This is the distinction that causes the most wasted work. Google says it directly: "Store listing localization is one of two ways that Play Console can help you deliver differentiated experiences to users in different locations. To deliver different store listings by country/region (versus language), we recommend creating custom store listings" (Translate and localize your app).

The same page notes that where you have not supplied a translation, **automated translations are displayed with a notification** — with the exception of Armenian, Raeto-romance, Tagalog and Zulu, where automated translations are not available. That has a measurement consequence people rarely account for: in markets where you have shipped nothing, users may still be seeing *some* version of your listing, and its performance is not a clean read on your copy.

3. The A/B testing tool has rules that decide whether you get an answer

Play's store listing experiments let you "run experiments to find the most effective graphics and text for your app" (Run A/B tests on your store listing). The operating constraints matter more than the feature description:

  • **Two experiment types.** Default graphics experiments cover the icon, feature graphic and screenshots in your default listing language. Localized experiments additionally cover descriptions, in up to five languages.
  • **Concurrency:** "For each app, you can run one default graphics experiment or up to five localized experiments at the same time."
  • **Up to 2 variants** tested against the current listing.
  • **Audience percentage** sets the share of visitors who see a variant, and those visitors "will be split equally across your experimental variants."
  • **Metrics** are unique user install clicks, open clicks and pre-registration clicks — click-level outcomes, not retention or revenue.
  • **Experiments stop automatically after 6 months.**
  • A **"More data needed"** result is a real outcome, and Google notes that adjusting confidence level and minimum detectable effect "can make your experiment run for longer before providing useful results."

The practical reading: a low-traffic listing testing two variants at a small audience percentage will often produce nothing conclusive, and the honest response is to test a bigger visual difference rather than to squint at an inconclusive result.

Ordering the work

Given all of the above, the sequence that wastes least effort is:

  1. **Clear the policy gate first.** Run the title and description against Google's prohibitions list. A suspension resets everything else to zero.
  2. **Complete the asset set** for every device type you actually ship to, at spec. This is the cheapest fix with the clearest failure condition.
  3. **Write the short description as the only text most people read.** Eighty characters, describing the functionality, in plain language.
  4. **Rewrite the full description for a reader, not a parser.** Google's discoverability guidance tells you to "use SEO best practices in your 'Description,' but be mindful of the Google Play Content Policies regarding spam and IP Infringement (for example, keyword spamming, impersonation, etc.)" (Get discovered on Google Play search).
  5. **Then, and only then, structure by segment** — decide which countries deserve a custom store listing, and which languages deserve a real translation rather than the automated fallback.
  6. **Test one big change at a time**, sized so the experiment can actually resolve.

What Google will not tell you, and what to do instead

Google names ratings, reviews and downloads as ranking inputs and then explicitly withholds the weights. No amount of reading will close that gap, so the only honest source of truth about your listing is your listing. That means keeping a change log: what changed, on what date, in which country, alongside the ranks and conversion figures you observed before and after. Without the dates, a listing's history becomes folklore within a quarter.

ASOClimb covers this ground through the Keywords Tracker, the Keywords Inspector and Competitors Analysis. Wherever the record lives, keep what you observed separate from what you concluded — the same discipline that makes [rank comparisons across countries](/blog/app-keyword-rankings-by-country) meaningful.

A Play listing is not an iOS listing with fewer fields. It is a different structure with its own segmentation model, its own asset spec, and its own testing tool — and the checklist is worth rebuilding around that.