The big-platform-energy answer is: yes. Eventually. In the way Netflix announces a show, loudly, globally, and then, quietly, “not available in your region.”
So here’s what actually changed this year, and what “changed” really means when it’s coming from these two.
Google Play
Ask Play. Gemini is now inside the store. Conversational queries return AI-generated, “researched with Gemini” recommendation lists, and traditional organic results get pushed further down the page. Semantic coverage, making your listing clearly understandable to a model, is becoming the new center of ASO, at least for broad, conversational searches.
Play Shorts. Full-screen portrait video with one-tap install, living inside the Apps tab. Read that again: your store page was built for search. This is a feed. Different behavior, different creative, different discipline entirely, closer to TikTok than to a keyword ranking.
Post-install is now an explicit ranking signal. D1 retention, onboarding quality, and ratings feed discoverability directly. Product is officially part of ASO. (Was it ever not? The documentation always implied it. Now it’s stated out loud.)
Apple
Personalized Collections. The App Store now surfaces apps before the user searches, building per-user collections from download history and behavior, each with a plain-English note explaining why the app was recommended. Keyword ranking is no longer the only game in the store; affinity and behavior are now a parallel path to visibility.
Creative Assets. Header images and video in search results, managed in a central library and decoupled from your app releases. Your store creative is no longer held hostage to the release cycle, you can merchandise on marketing’s schedule, not engineering’s.
And more paid slots. Which makes organic that much harder to protect. Read the room.
The cynical read (which is also the accurate one)
Google’s AI features are server-side, so two identical phones sitting in the same room can get different experiences, and you won’t always know why. Apple’s Collections are live for a limited set of apps, in US English, “expanding over time.” So some of this you can act on today. Some of it won’t reach your market until you’ve long forgotten this post existed.
But here’s the thing: the direction is locked on both sides. Discovery is becoming behavioral, AI-driven, and increasingly it’s happening outside the store listing itself, in a feed, in an assistant, in a personalized collection you didn’t rank your way into.
So, back to the question
Should these updates dictate your next ASO pivot? Yes. Not because the features are all fully live in your region, they’re not. But because the teams adapting now are compounding a head start on everyone who’s waiting for their region to load.
Not available in your market yet? Start anyway.