About the desk

Who we are

The Weekly Report was founded in people whose previous job was looking at app submissions all day. That work leaves a mark. You stop reading a store page as marketing and start reading it as a set of declarations — what the app says it needs, what it says it costs, what it says it contains — and you notice quickly how often those declarations disagree with the app that actually installs.

We describe ourselves by role rather than by name: our reviewers, the desk. That is deliberate. A four-entry shortlist is an institutional judgement argued out in a meeting, not the taste of one person with a byline, and dressing it up as the latter would misrepresent how it is produced.

What we publish

One ranking, kept short, plus the method behind it and a small journal. That is the whole publication. There is no catalogue of hundreds of titles, no profile page for every game, and no attempt to be a directory. A directory cannot hold an opinion, and an opinion is the only thing we have that a store page does not already give you.

The shortlist is standing rather than periodic. We re-check it on a schedule and sooner whenever a price or a permission set changes on one of the listings, because both of those go straight to the third of our three criteria. Entries move down as easily as up, and nothing has a permanent place.

Where the figures come from

Every star rating, review count, download band and price on our pages is read from the game's own Google Play listing on the day we compile the edition. We reproduce those values as they stand and we do not round, restate or refresh them by guesswork. The listing is the record; our page is a snapshot of it, and by the time you read it a figure may have moved.

Our own score is separate and clearly labelled. It runs from 5.0 to 9.8, it is a judgement rather than a calculation, and it is deliberately not the store average. The reasoning is set out in full on how we rate.

Independence

No position on any page has been paid for. We do not sell placement, we do not accept developer submissions, and we have no affiliate or commission arrangement with any store or publisher. When a developer writes to ask for consideration, the message is filed and no action follows — that is the only way the answer can be the same for everyone.

We do not rank by download count alone, and we do not publish a score we cannot explain in a single sentence. If the reasoning will not fit in a sentence, the entry is not ready to publish.

The Weekly Report is an independent editorial publication. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by or sponsored by Google LLC, and nothing on this site should be read as speaking for the store.

Corrections

Every change we make is dated. Where a store figure moved after publication, we say that it moved rather than quietly restating the new value, because a reader who checked our page yesterday deserves to know which number they saw. If you can show that something here is wrong, write to us and tell us which listing you read and when you read it.

The honest limit of the method is worth stating on this page too: three criteria and one number cannot capture how a game will feel on your particular device, at your particular tolerance for repetition. We rank so that you have somewhere to start, not so that you stop checking.