Google Play debuts Android Excellence curated collections that showcase top apps and games
At WWDC this month, Apple introduced an entirely revamped App Storethat puts a much greater focus on editorial, with plans for stories about the apps, how to's, interviews, and more …
Context & Ripple Effects
Google is answering Apple's storefront playbook within a week of WWDC. Apple had already moved this direction twice before — its 2015 editorial overhaul of the App Store Games section and last week's redesigned App Store with Today, Games, and Apps tabs built around daily picks — making editorial curation the visible front line of the two stores' rivalry.
Until now, Google's curation was episodic: the Best of Play Store year-end lists bundled apps, games, movies, and music into annual roundups. Android Excellence turns that into an always-on collection format, giving Play a standing editorial surface rather than a December-only one.
First-order effects
- Developers selected for Android Excellence get a persistent visibility slot on Play, a discovery channel that previously existed mainly through algorithmic charts or the annual Best of lists.
- Google now fields a direct counterpart to Apple's App of the Day / Game of the Day picks, putting the two stores' merchandising formats head-to-head.
Second-order effects
- Featuring becomes a bargaining chip in developer relations: with Apple and Google both running curated slots, studios have two storefronts competing to showcase the same titles, raising the value of placement on each.
- Apple's push toward more editorial surfaces pressures Google to keep expanding beyond collections — the later Play updates adding curated pages and widget highlights show exactly that escalation continuing.
Third-order effects
- If both stores keep investing in human curation over pure algorithmic ranking, editorial teams become a structural cost of operating an app store, and featuring decisions become a de facto gatekeeper layer alongside search rankings.
- A recurring curated slot like Android Excellence points toward app distribution consolidating around a small set of high-visibility placements, where being unfeatured increasingly means being undiscoverable.
The trend: App store competition is shifting from catalog size and search algorithms to always-on editorial curation, with Apple setting the format and Google matching it store-for-store.