The Google Play Developer Policy now allows for a 50-character title limit as opposed to the previous 30 characters that were allowed before. This will give developers even more space to work with when coming up with a title for their applications before publishing them to the Play Store. While this might seem like a good thing in theory, it appears that a fairly large number of developers have already started taking advantage of the new character amount and judging from some of the names and the response to those name changes, the new policy could end up making things worse.
Presumably Google made this change so that developers would be able to more accurately name their app and game titles, or so that developers in some regions who need more characters to correctly title their app or game would be able to do so, thus perhaps helping apps get discovered more easily by users. It seems though that many developers are simply using the extra space to jam in additional words to describe features of their apps . This isn’t really a big issue exactly, as it doesn’t make anything less functional, but there are bound to be users who find the longer (and some more redundant) titles annoying if anything.
According to the report by Android Police, at least Waze has taken advantage of the 50-character limit since the middle of June, so it’s not entirely clear when exactly the policy change was put into place, but it didn’t just happen overnight, that much is a given. Now that the change seems to be getting a little more coverage though, any developers who may have been unaware of it may now start taking the measure to update their Play Store app titles to include whatever extra content they can fit within the new limit. That being said, users should expect more apps and games in the Play Store to start showing up with longer titles that include extra descriptions of the app, something which, quite frankly, would be probably be better suited for the actual description section of the app listings where Google intended for app features to be listed.