Google is making it easier to find child-friendly apps in the Play Store

With more than a million apps to choose from, and more each day, it can be difficult to sift through the Google Play Store’s catalog. It’s even harder to find apps that you can be certain are safe for children, which is why Google has launched “Designed for Families,” a new campaign which aims to make it easier for people to fin child-friendly apps in the Google Play Store. 

The Google Play Store’s massive catalog of 1 million apps could use better curation, especially for younger Android users — It’s all too easy for the cutest child-friendly game to become buried in unrelated apps. That’s why Google’s mounting a campaign called “Designed for Families” to make family friendly apps more visible to their intended audiences. It’ll work like this: Developers will submit their app for consideration under specialized guidelines, that are separate from the pre-conditional Google Play Developer Content Policy and Developer Distribution Agreement. In the United States, if the app in question receives a rating of “Everyone” or “Everyone 10+” from the Entertainment Software Rating Board and is found to comply with the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, it’ll be given a “family-friendly” designation and promoted in “new ways” on the Play Store. According to a Google spokesperson who spoke with TechCrunch, reviews originated in other countries will take applicable privacy laws into account.