How Top Developer and Editors' Choice Badges Showcase Google’s Favorite Apps

Note: As of June 13, 2017, Google will no longer display Top Developer badges in the Play Store. This feature has been deprecated in favor of curated Android Excellence collections.

The Google Play editorial team spontaneously honors select apps and developers for outstanding quality and innovation. These awards comes in the form of a badge, which is displayed on app profile pages and anywhere the app name appears.

Though details around selection remain mysterious, Sensor Tower has analyzed the current recipients of each badge. We'll shed some light on what types of apps are earning accolades, and what the results can entail.

Editors' Choice

On their developer site, Google provides some general insights into the criteria they look for when awarding the Editors' Choice badge:

"Editors’ Choice is a curated collection of apps that highlights some of the very best apps available on Android. Editors choose these apps for quality and great user interface, long-term popularity and innovative use of Android features."

In addition to prominent badge placement, an Editors' Choice menu has been added to the store, making favored apps even more discoverable.

Our data shows one point of contention with Google's definition, however. Most apps in this category received the Editors' Choice badge within a few days of release. Because of this, we narrowed our data set to include apps with enough longevity for our team to do "before and after" comparisons, in terms of growth, ratings, etc.

The graph below shows week-over-week growth for selected recipients from our sample set. No doubt, the impact is huge, with changes ranging from a 4x increase to an impressive 24,000x increase.

When considering Editors' Choice apps and their payment models, we found that the vast majority of Editors' Choice apps can be downloaded for free. Apps with in-app purchases have a less significant majority, but this certainly raises the age-old question of "which came first": growth or in-app purchases?

The Sensor Tower data team saw that Editors' Choice apps had earned a median rating of 4.5 in Google Play prior to being notified of the award. Because apps in Google Play, as a whole, have an average rating of 3.8, strong quality indicators from end users are a "must-have" to be considered.

Top Developer

While the Editors' Choice badge is awarded to individual apps, Top Developer is intended to honor a larger body of work. According to Google:

"Top Developer is a badge recognizing established, respected developers for their commitment to launching high-quality and innovative apps on Android. The Google Play editorial staff awards a Top Developer badge from time-to-time based on the cumulative work of the developer."

An important tidbit our data uncovers is that download and revenue numbers do not appear to be the primary factor here. While many apps stamped with the Top Developer badge have high download quantities, there are several instances where developers' apps are collectively seeing downloads in the low thousands.

Data around payment models for Top Developer apps is very consistent with what we saw above. Again, free apps comprise the vast majority of this group.

What other consistent, quality indicators did we find? The majority of Top Developers currently have at least one app in a Top 20 position for their category.

Across all Top Developer apps, the median rating is a 4.2. (Remember, the average across all Google Play apps is a 3.8.) Since Top Developers likely have multiple apps, we also took a look at scores for their best (and worst) rated products.

Median ratings for Top Developers run slightly lower than those for Editors' Choice apps, but as we mentioned, Top Developers can have several apps in the mix, potentially bringing down their overall score.

Installs and Overlap

To gain some perspective on what level of success apps (and developers) with these badges might see, note the following:

• 0.5% of all apps currently in Google Play have a million (or more) installs.

• 1.3% of Google Play developers have an app with a million (or more) installs.

How about our award winners? Knowing the above, I'd say they're doing pretty well for themselves.

Finally, we wanted to see how many "unicorns" existed, or instances where both badges were earned.

The hard numbers tell us that 416 Top Developer badges are in play, along with 107 Editors' Choice apps. 61 of those Top Developers have also received the Editors' Choice badge at least once.

If data on the market's fastest growing apps interests you, you'll definitely want to check back next week to learn about the latest additions to our Store Intelligence product. We guarantee you won't be disappointed.