The two fields that decide whether anyone installs
A Play listing has a lot of fields, and two of them do nearly all the work. The title — 30 characters — is what appears in search results and under your icon. The short description — 80 characters — is the line shown before anyone taps "read more". Most people decide from those two and the icon alone.
The full description gets 4000 characters and is mostly read by the store's own indexing, plus the minority of visitors who scroll.
| Field | Limit | Where it shows |
|---|---|---|
| App title | 30 | Search results, home screen, listing header |
| Short description | 80 | Above the fold on the listing, in some search cards |
| Full description | 4,000 | Listing body, behind "read more" |
| Developer name | 50 | Under the title everywhere |
What Play rejects
Google's metadata policy is stricter than most people expect, and the rejections are avoidable. In your title and short description you may not use:
- Ranking or performance claims — "#1", "best", "top rated".
- Promotional wording — "free", "sale", "discount", "50% off".
- Calls to action — "download now", "install today".
- Emoji or emoticons, anywhere in the title or short description.
- ALL CAPS, unless that is genuinely how your brand is written.
- Keyword stuffing — repeating a term to game search rather than to describe the app.
The checker above flags each of these as you type. None of them is a permanent problem; they just cost you a review cycle and several days if you find out the slow way.
Writing a title that survives 30 characters
The pattern that works is brand, then what it is: "Acme — Shop & Delivery" reads well, fits, and tells someone who has never heard of you what they are looking at. The two failure modes are the opposite extremes — a bare brand name that means nothing to a stranger, and a keyword salad like "Shop Online Store Buy Cheap Fast Delivery App", which Play treats as stuffing.
Bear in mind the title is truncated in more places than the store: the home screen shows roughly 12 characters under your icon, so whatever comes first matters most.
The short description is your only real pitch
Eighty characters, one sentence, and it needs to answer "what do I get?" rather than "what is this?". Compare:
Weak: "The official app for Acme Ltd, a family business founded in 2009."
Better: "Browse the full Acme catalogue, track orders and reorder in two taps."
The second one is about the reader. It also happens to contain the words someone would search for, which the first does not.
The full description
Write for a person and the indexing follows. A structure that consistently works: one paragraph on what the app does, a short bulleted list of what you can do with it, a line about who it is for, then practical notes — offline support, account requirements, supported regions. Aim for 500–1500 characters; the 4000 limit is a ceiling, not a target.
Repeat your key terms naturally two or three times. Repeating them fifteen times is visible to both readers and Google, and the penalty is worse than the benefit ever was.
This is a preview, not a guarantee
The panel here reproduces Play's limits and the wording rules from its metadata policy, which catches the common rejections. It cannot predict a human reviewer's judgement about whether your app matches what your listing claims — and that mismatch, rather than a character count, is what causes most of the harder rejections. Our publishing guide covers the rest of the submission.