Reference

Google Play metadata, field by field

Play indexes all three fields, including the long one. That changes what to write.

Google Play indexes all three of your text fields, including the 4000-character description. That one difference is why an App Store listing copied to Play is wrong, and why Play rewards a different kind of writing.

The fields

There is no hidden keyword field. Everything that ranks you is also read by a person, which is the constraint that shapes every decision below.

How Play differs from Apple, concretely

• Repetition counts, up to a point. Apple counts a word once. Play notices how often a term appears in the body — but a phrase repeated past the point of reading naturally is discounted, and it costs you installs from the people reading it. A handful of mentions for the terms you are really going after, one or two for the rest, is where the evidence sits.
• The body is a ranking surface. On Apple the description is for humans only. On Play it is both, which means a description that never names what the app does is leaving the largest field you have unindexed.
• The title carries more weight than on Apple. Thirty characters, and Play leans on them harder than any other field. A generic word in the title costs more here.
• Localisation is per language, not per country. Play indexes each translated listing separately, so a language you have not localised is one you do not rank in.

What to write in each

Title — 30 characters

Your name and your strongest term, in that order if the name means anything to anyone. This is the highest-leverage text in a Play listing and the one most often spent on a tagline. "Bitcoin Hero: Trading Game" earns its characters; "Bitcoin Hero — Learn, Play, Win" does not.

Short description — 80 characters

Shown under your title in search results, above the fold on your page, and indexed. It has to do two jobs at once: say what the app is to a person deciding in two seconds, and carry a term you want. Write it as one sentence a human would read. If it reads as a keyword list it will convert worse, and conversion is a ranking input.

Full description — 4000 characters

Structure that works, in the order Play and readers both reward:

1. Two sentences saying what the app is and who it is for. Only the first few lines are shown before "read more", so they carry the most weight with people and are the most likely to be read at all.
2. Short paragraphs or bullet groups by feature or use case. Each one is a natural place for a different keyword, because each one is about a different thing somebody searches for.
3. A closing line. Plain text. No markdown, no symbol headings, no emoji walls.

Work your terms into sentences that were going to exist anyway. If a phrase cannot be said three times without sounding like stuffing, say it twice — the discount for stuffing and the cost in installs are both real, and neither is worth one more mention.

What not to do

• A keyword list at the end of the description. It is the oldest trick on Play, it reads as spam to a person, and it is exactly the pattern that gets discounted.
• Repeating a sentence pattern to hit a count. "Best sleep sounds. Free sleep sounds. Relaxing sleep sounds." A reader stops there.
• "#1", "best", "top rated", or any ranking claim. Play's policy rejects them, and a rejected release costs more days than the words could ever earn.
• Recasting the app to chase a term. If a keyword only fits by describing a different product, it will rank badly and convert worse. A keyword you rank for and nobody installs from is worth less than nothing — it teaches the store your listing does not satisfy that search.

Deciding how often to say something

The useful question is not "how many times should I mention a keyword" but "which keywords does the body still have to carry". If a term is already in your title and short description, the body is largely off the hook for it. If it is not — and most of your list will not be, since 110 characters do not go far — the body is the only place it can live, and it needs enough mentions to be unambiguous and no more.

Which terms are worth carrying at all is a question about their value. The equivalent rules on the other store are in App Store metadata — the fields, the limits and the treatment of repetition are all different, and a listing shared between them is wrong on one.