Android Vitals is Google Play's set of technical-quality metrics, led by user-perceived crash and ANR rates, whose bad-behavior thresholds can cost an app visibility when exceeded.
Android vitals reports an app's stability, performance, battery and memory behavior in Play Console under Monitor and improve. For phone apps, the core vitals with visibility consequences are the user-perceived crash rate, the user-perceived ANR (app not responding) rate and excessive partial wake locks, whose enforcement began rolling out in March 2026. Each has a bad-behavior threshold, and Play generally assesses the last 28 days. Overall, the line is 1.09% of daily users experiencing a user-perceived crash and 0.47% experiencing a user-perceived ANR; on any single phone model it is 8% for either. Apple publishes no comparable thresholds tied to App Store visibility.
For ASO, vitals set a ceiling that metadata can't raise. Google says a title that exceeds a threshold may have its visibility reduced and may carry a warning on its store listing, and a per-model breach steers users of that phone model away from the app. Google has also said memory metrics may affect store visibility from February 2027. In practice, teams check vitals after every release and work through the largest crash and ANR clusters first, as Google advises, because a warning on the listing works directly against conversion.
Example
A photo-editing app ships an update that crashes on one popular mid-range phone. Its overall crash rate stays under 1.09%, but that model crosses 8%, so the team ships a hotfix within days rather than let Play steer owners of that phone away or show them a listing warning.