You may or may not have noticed but the Google is now recommending best apps for certain things via Play Store notifications in the notification panel that you can slide down from the top of the display. These aren’t entirely new as they’ve shown up more than a few times over the past month, but it would appear that they may be starting to surface more frequently and across more devices.
One to thing to notice is that these best apps recommendations will be for various types of apps. As depicted in the image they can be for the best apps for note-taking, but the Play Store will likely be recommending other types of apps as well from time to time.
If you tap on the notification instead of dismissing it you’ll be transported to the notification section of the Play Store, which you can also freely access by sliding the menu in from the left. If you tap on this notification message from this section of the Play Store you’re then taken to a round-up of different apps based on the recommendation. In this particular example, note-taking applications.
These recommendations appear to be showing up regardless of whether they’re apps you’ve either recently installed or searched for in the recent past, so this could mean that Google is simply trying to advertise these apps, and perhaps unsurprising the apps that are recommended will be fairly popular ones. In the case of note-taking apps you’ll probably see options like Evernote, Google Keep, Dropbox Paper and more.
It’s unclear if Google is sending these out to all users globally or how long they have been surfacing for the users that have been getting them. Also unclear is whether Google intends to keep sending out these notifications. Since this is sort of like an advertisement it shouldn’t surprise anyone that they’re popping up. This is Google after all.
There doesn’t appear to be any direct way to disable these, though, if you go into the settings section of the Play Store and then tap on the notification settings, there is a toggle option all the way at the bottom labeled as Deals and Promotions. This may be the option that handles these recommended topical apps. Google states that enabling this notification feature means you’re allowing them to send you notifications on offers that it thinks you’ll like.
That being said if you disable this toggle then you may stop getting these notifications for recommended apps. Since there is no rhyme or reason as to how often these pop up however, you may need to wait a bit after disabling this toggle to see if things change. Or you could just leave things alone as you can simply dismiss the notification when it shows up. It’s also worth mentioning that it doesn’t utilize the heads up feature so if you’re watching a video or playing a game or doing anything that makes use of the full screen, you shouldn’t be interrupted by this type of notification.