Google’s new ‘Android Excellence’ program highlights best Android apps

By Christian de Looper June 13, 2017

Google play — Ymgerman/123RF

Google is looking for new ways to promote and show off apps and games that deliver a top-quality Android experience, and to that end the company has taken the wraps off of Android Excellence, a new program aimed at showcasing those great apps.

The apps on show have to meet a number of important criteria. Not only do they have to be generally good apps, but they also have to follow Google’s Android best practices, have a great design, perform technically well under the hood, and optimize well for whatever device they’re on.

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“Every day developers around the world are hard at work creating high quality apps and games on Android,” Google developer marketing head said Kacey Fahey in a blog post. “Striving to deliver amazing experiences for an ever growing diverse user base, we’ve seen a significant increase in the level of polish and quality of apps and games on Google Play.”

Initially, there’s quite a list of apps and games that make the Android Excellence cut, including the likes of Evernote, HotelTonight, Runtastic, and Riptide GO: Renegade. You can check out the full list for yourself here. Not only that, but the list will be refreshed quarterly — so you can check in every few months to see what Google considers the latest and greatest Android apps. The apps can be found on the revamped Editor’s Choice section of the Google Play Store.

It’s nice to see Google highlighting apps that perform well on Android. It’s all too easy to look for an app, only to download it and find that it’s either badly designed, or buggy and doesn’t work well on your device. Hopefully, if you download from Google’s Android Excellence list, that issue should be a thing of the past. Even if you’re not looking for a particular app, the new list should be a great way to discover something new.

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Christian de Looper

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Christian de Looper is a long-time freelance writer who has covered every facet of the consumer tech and electric vehicle…

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