Google Play Store will soon alert you via 'ad-supported' tags

Come 2016 and the Google Play Store takes it levels of transparency a notch higher with labels for all of its apps and games that run ads in them. What started out as an exercise with just the family apps section, is soon going to become the norm on the Play Store. Clearly, users of Google’s Play Store will benefit the most as they will know whether an app runs ads before installing the app. And there’s plenty of us who want ad-free apps and games for free indeed. On the developer side of things, Google has placed an 11 January deadline by when devs must label their apps and games if they run ads. Failing to do the same, will lead to problems as Google is pretty strict about the ads declaration and misinterpretation could lead to suspension. If you’re a developer, you could head to the Google Developer Support page. And you can expect some hatred from developers for making things mandatory as many Play Store users may soon avoid downloading an app labelled as ‘Ad-Supported’ altogether. But for once, the clarity makes sense as many users often hate ads running at the bottom, while playing games or using apps. This is more so, as even official apps from online publications run ads at the bottom when it is them who want you to use their app to begin with. Third-party note-taking apps with ads running at the bottom are a good example where users would not mind using a Lite version (with fewer features) instead of ads running at the bottom. Google plans to roll out the new label on its Play Store by January 2016.