The Home screen of the Google Play Store is now showing Android app sizes to more users, with some reports from India suggesting that the change was introduced early on Saturday. The sizes themselves appear to be accurate up to one decimal place, as evidenced by the screenshot below which labels some apps as being e.g. 3.3MB and 9.6MB in size. The storage weight of the app is placed in the bottom left corner of its Home screen listing, taking the place usually occupied by the average user rating label, with the latter seemingly being removed from the same interface.
The feature itself isn’t entirely new and Google has been experimenting with it for over a month, though it appears to be limited to India for the time being. Both the latest sighting of the functionality and previous reports about it rolling out have been exclusive to the South Asian country, with the Alphabet-owned company presumably targeting developing territories where wireless internet speeds still aren’t particularly high or mobile data is expensive. While the latter isn’t the case with India whose residents can usually purchase prepaid mobile data at relatively affordable prices, the former certainly is, as OpenSignal’s recent survey suggested that India has the world’s worst 4G speeds on average, at least in terms of downloads. The Mountain View, California-based tech giant hasn’t announced the feature in an official capacity as of this writing, though many of its previous Android efforts have been aimed at making the mobile ecosystem more accessible to people in developing countries and this feature seemingly falls in line with such a strategy.
The app size labels reportedly don’t only appear on mobile connections but are also present when users whose devices were encompassed by Google’s rollout of the feature are connected to a Wi-Fi network. A way to disable the functionality doesn’t seem to be part of the new Play Store package, so users who prefer to see app ratings instead of sizes on their starting screen appear to be without an option for the time being. Recent developments suggest that Google may be preparing to distribute Android app size indicators to the Play Store Home sections of all consumers in India, though it remains to be seen whether the feature eventually makes its way to more (developing) countries.