Tell HN: You can't add “no ads” in your Play Store app's title

It's hard to interpret this because in the presence of better searching tools for ads, and better surfacing of metadata fields about ads, this would be a clearly pro-consumer move. It wouldn't even be remotely controversial. And my instinct is to interpret it through that lens, it is a policy that in many ways just makes sense. But I don't think there is a way to exclude apps with ads from search results or to search for add-free apps specifically? Google isn't taking advantage of any of the upsides of having "ad-supported" as a separate category of information. This is a general problem, search in the Play Store is kind of frustrating; it doesn't feel designed to help really filter information.

I constantly wonder if I'm being far too charitable with Google or not charitable enough. It's a hard balance to strike, and I always feel like I'm slightly getting the balance wrong. Maybe the correct thing in this case is not to question the policy itself at all but to redirect all of that energy towards the more pressing question, "why can't I filter based on this category?"

Because we can have a somewhat endless debate over whether this policy is good or bad based almost purely on Google's motivations and what they plan to do next. But most of that is just interpreting Google's intent; in the abstract forcing apps to move information out of titles into easily accessed categories/fields is a good thing. And in contrast to a debate about intentions, the lack of filtering tools around ads, and the lack of any ability for developers to highlight being ad-free as a selling point -- those are pretty unambiguous weaknesses of the Play store that make the store worse regardless of Google's motivations. The search page doesn't even show whether or not an app contains ads (or in-app purchases while we're on the subject), you have to go into the app screen to see that, Google really isn't putting a ton of effort that I can see into surfacing this information.

That kind of stuff is negative, that stuff should be fixed. The search page does show the price of the app directly in the result list. It should also show an icon indicating if the app has ads or not, that's information that is just as relevant as the price. In a lot of cases ads are the price of an app, and so for UX purposes they should often be treated like they're the same category of information.

> the distributor has been in the role of adding

That would cause (relative) avoidance of the distributors - and in the case of APK, any site could be a distributor.

Can we just all agree on an alternative language that means "no ads"?

How about "coool" spelled with 3 o's? As long as you use that everyone will know it means "no ads" if we can get some media to write about it.

I mean, this is exactly what happens on the internet in China when words are banned. No media writes about it but it spreads through social media fast enough such that it's not really possible to ban words. We can do the same for censorship in the US by Google.

Sounds totally believable.

The app stores are scams. Look at Apple's deliberately defective search functionality.

Both these companies think nothing of stabbing developers and partners in the back.

its trivial to add, yet hasn't been added in almost 15 years, it is very much a title text search and nothing about this move indicates otherwise.

there is no economic interest from google to make ad free apps actually findable, and no chance somebody making a better play store is going to usurp their position.