Per-device visibility loss on Google Play: diagnosing the 8% phone-model threshold.
Your overall crash rate is fine. Installs from one popular phone have quietly collapsed. That is what the per-device threshold looks like, and it hits hardest in markets full of budget phones.
A healthy average can hide a broken phone. If one low-RAM model makes up a large share of your users and your app crashes on it, Play can treat you as a bad app on exactly that model.
The thresholds
| Metric | Overall | Per phone model | Per watch model |
|---|---|---|---|
| User-perceived crash rate | 1.09% | 8% | 4% |
| User-perceived ANR rate | 0.47% | 8% | 5% |
| Excessive battery usage | 1% | – | 1% |
| Excessive partial wake locks | 5% | – | – |
Source: Android Developers. Google's wording: if your app exceeds a bad behaviour threshold, Play may reduce the visibility of your title, and may also show users a warning on your store listing.
We covered the overall 0.47% ANR line in Android vitals and ranking. The per-device threshold is higher but narrower, so it gets missed.
How to spot it
- Open Android vitals and break down by device. Sort crash rate and ANR rate by phone model and look for any model above 8%.
- Cross-check installs by device. In Play Console statistics, compare new installs for that model before and after it crossed the line.
- Look at the RAM tier. Bad models usually share a profile: little RAM, old Android version, a particular chipset.
- Check "emerging issues". Android vitals flags crash and ANR problems affecting devices for more than 7 days, which Google says gives you 21 days to fix them before the 28-day average catches up.
How to fix it
Google's advice: fix the crashes and ANRs affecting the most users first; for specific devices, fix the biggest crash and ANR clusters on those devices. In practice, for low-end phones:
- Shrink the app and its memory footprint. In the Gyan Studios portfolio, about 38% of users had under 1GB of RAM; cutting the build from about 45MB to under 22MB and moving animations from frames to code cut crash reports by 91%.
- Move work off the main thread; most ANRs are a blocked UI thread.
- Test on the actual models from your device report, not just emulators.
- Ship fixes in a staged rollout and watch the device's rate fall before going to 100%.
How long recovery takes
Play checks your metrics daily using a 28-day average. As the average improves, Android vitals warnings disappear, and Google says store listing warnings may be removed faster if its systems detect improvement.
Coming next: Google says apps exceeding thresholds for memory usage, bitmap memory usage or code optimisation may see store visibility impact starting from February 2027. Check those metrics in Android vitals now.
Questions people ask
What is the per-device crash threshold on Google Play?
8% user-perceived crash rate per phone model, and 8% user-perceived ANR rate per phone model. Overall thresholds are 1.09% and 0.47%.
What happens if my app exceeds the per-device threshold?
Google Play may reduce your app's visibility on that device model and may show users a warning on your store listing.
How long until my visibility recovers?
Play uses a 28-day average checked daily. Warnings disappear as the average improves, and store listing warnings can clear sooner if Play detects the improvement.
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