Google Play rolls out “designed for phones” tag of shame for apps on tablets
Finding tablet apps on the Play Store has historically been a bit of a trial-and-error process. It usually involves finding an app and hunting through the screenshots for a tablet picture. If there isn't one, you install the app anyway and hope a tablet layout will magically show up.
With Android tablets gaining more and more market share, Google has decided to turn up the heat on app developers that don't build apps with tablets in mind. Apps that don't include certain tablet enhancements will display a "designed for phones" tag on the tablet version of the Play Store, making users with tablets less likely to install them. Google is also upping the ante on the front page and "Top app" lists on the tablet Play Store, which will now hide phone apps by default.
Google has a tablet quality checklist for developers hoping to avoid a public shaming. There's also a tablet compatibility section in the "optimization tips" section of the Android Developer console, which will scan an app and offer tailored recommendations for improvement.
Still, seeing an app without the "designed for phones" tag does not necessarily mean that it will have a tablet-optimized layout. Two of the biggest Android Tablet deniers, Facebook and Twitter, won't get tagged with Google's new scarlet letter.
While Android tablets used to be a distant second to the iPad, most recent market share reports have Android tablets outselling iOS tablets. Tablet app design hasn't really kept up with market share, so Google is presumably hoping that a gentle prodding will get developers to upgrade their apps to take advantage of larger screens.
Sometimes what we hide is more important than what we reveal. Especially, documents with sensitive information, some things are supposed to be ‘for some eyes only’. Such scenarios are quite common, even for the more un-secretive among us. You want to show someone a letter composed in MS Word, but want to keep some of the content private; or it’s an official letter with some part of it having critical data. As important as these two are, the most common use could involve a normal printing job. Many a time we have to print different versions of a document, one copy for one set of eyes and others for other sets. Rather than creating multiple copies and therefore multiple printing jobs, what if we could just do it from the same document? That too, without the hassle of repeated cut and paste. We can, with a simple feature in MS Word – it’s just called Hidden and let me show you how to use it to hide text in Microsoft Word 2007. It’s a simple single click process. Open the document
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