What's Google Play
Google Play is a service that helps you find apps, games, movies, books, magazines, or other digital content ("Content"). You may use Google Play to browse, locate, download, use, rent, or purchase Content. When you download, use, rent, or purchase Content on or using Google Play in the European Economic Area (whether you've paid for that Content or not), you'll enter into a separate contract with Google Commerce Limited.
Content on Google Play
Content you find on Google Play comes from Google itself as well as from third-party providers such as app developers, movie studios, and book and news publishers (“Providers”). These Providers may be either professional or non-professional entities. Providers' content may cease to be offered on Google Play at any time in accordance with the Google Play Terms of Service, for example if we learn that it violates our content policies or runs afoul of applicable laws.
Making purchases
You can purchase Content on Google Play using available payment methods that you've added to your Google Account. To learn more, please see our accepted payment methods on Google Play here.
You'll see the purchase or rental price, as applicable, for an item on that item’s details page, as well as in the purchase dialog before you complete the purchase. You’ll also receive an email receipt after the purchase. You can learn more about reviewing your order history and about our policies regarding refunds on Google Play.
Getting support
Without prejudice to the legal guarantee of conformity, Google doesn't offer any commercial guarantee or assurance regarding Content on Google Play. However, whenever you install an app through Google Play, you can reach out to the developer for support. You can learn more about how to contact a developer. When you purchase a book, movie, or app from Google Play, you can also reach out to Google directly for support using the Contact us button, or at play-eu-support@google.com.
To learn about how to withdraw, cancel, or return a Google Play purchase in order to request a refund, please see our refunds policy and Google Play Terms of Service.
Google doesn't intervene in disputes that you may have directly with Providers and doesn't propose solutions for resolving disputes between you and Providers.
Ranking & presentation of content
Our goal on Google Play is to present Content that we think you’ll enjoy consuming or purchasing. To make Google Play as interesting and useful to users as possible, the layout, listing, and ordering of content on Google Play are influenced by the popularity, quality, and relevance of the Content, as well as your prior interactions and purchases with Google Play and other Google services.
Google Play may also organize Content into groups based on factors such as app characteristics (e.g. whether an app is a “multiplayer” game), popularity (e.g. “Top Charts” categories), and purchase volume (e.g. “Top Grossing” and “Top Selling” categories).
When you're using the search functionality, Google Play tries to return relevant Content by establishing what you're looking for (e.g. a specific app or a category of apps) and returning results that best address your search query. The main factors that impact the ranking of search results are each Content’s relevance to your search query, the quality of each Content’s in-app experience (only for apps and games), and how users have engaged with each Content on Google Play or after the Content has been installed. Google Play also considers whether an app would be relevant to and appropriate for a broad audience when ranking search results.
Google Play may also show personalized recommendations using information we've collected (such as previously installed apps) to generate app recommendations in a “For You” cluster.
Google Play also sometimes serves advertisements for content available on Google Play, for which Google is paid by the advertiser. Ads on Google Play will always be clearly marked with a label like "ads" or "sponsored." While advertisers can pay to be displayed more prominently in the advertising area, no one can buy better placement in Play’s search results themselves. Moreover, ads are only displayed if they're relevant to the search terms you entered. That means you only see ads that are actually useful.
Google collects a service fee from Providers based on sales of apps and games on Google Play or within apps and games.
Reviews on Google Play
Google Play includes user reviews of the content available on the platform. Reviews can come directly from Google users or from third-parties that provide user reviews to Google. We don't pay users for reviews, and we prohibit our developers from paying users for reviews as well.
We use a variety of means, from automated tools, to human reviewers and external reports, to detect and remove reviews that may violate our policies. However, it's possible that some of the reviews you find on Google Play don't meet our standards and don't reflect genuine user experiences.
When reviews of games or apps are submitted by Google Play users, we ensure those users have actually installed the games or apps in question. Users must first have installed the apps and games about which they can submit reviews.
However, Google doesn't conduct checks to confirm Google Play users who leave reviews of books, movies, or series have used or purchased the books, movies, or series in question prior to submitting their reviews.
Neither does Google monitor reviews that don't originate from Google Play users, and which are provided to Google by third-party providers. We therefore can't confirm that such reviews come from consumers who have actually purchased or installed the Content to which they refer.
We notify users if we reject a review unless we reasonably believe that doing so would undermine the security of Google Play and compliance with Google Play's policies. User reviews on Google Play are generally accessible until the user who wrote the review deletes the review or their Google Account, or the app, game, book, or other content at issue is no longer available on Google Play.