This upcoming Google Play Store change could make app reviews actually useful

Reviews have to be one of the most frustrating-to-navigate components of life online — one that we nonetheless find ourselves returning to time and time again. When you don’t know exactly what the best option for you is just yet, a good user review can really be illuminating. But finding that good one can sometimes require trudging through screens of low-quality submissions, AI slop, and even the work of paid shills. If you’re looking for some help finding the one review that really speaks to your needs, the Google Play Store appears to be working on a tool that might be right up your alley.

Let’s say you’ve found an app on the Play Store that sounds promising, but you’re not yet sure it’s able to do exactly what you need it to. Looking at user reviews for someone else writing about the same use case you have in mind could be a prefect way to address that. But right now, Google doesn’t offer an easy way to search through those; you can sort by date or perceived relevancy, or filter reviews by those mentioning specific topics, but there’s no way to arbitrarily search for whatever topic you want.

Looking at version 48.7.17-31 of the Google Play Store for Android, we’ve spotted what feels like early work towards making reviews searchable:

First, there’s this new “Search reviews” string that’s just been added, which certainly seems to communicate its intent rather clearly. And we’ve also spotted an AllReviewsPage__enable_search_bar variable that doesn’t yet appear to do anything, but based on its label alone, sure feels like a setting that will make a search bar appear on the screen that displays reviews.

We suspect the search bar may ultimately appear up top where you can select from those pre-set review topics right now, but for the moment that’s just speculation. Even with the actual interface still unknown, this other evidence at least suggests that this is a Play Store feature that some Google developers are seriously looking into.

Whether or not we see Google actually introduce it anytime soon is another question entirely, but we’ll keep checking for any further signs of progress — and maybe even an early look at this tool in action.