Play Store Reviews to add search bar, ending the endless scroll

Play Store Reviews are indispensable—and maddening. The insight you crave is often buried under low-effort posts, AI-generated fluff, and the occasional paid shill. Now, the Google Play Store appears to be building a feature that could cut through the noise: a “Search reviews” tool to find comments that match your exact use case.

Play Store Reviews today: filters, not true search

When sizing up an app, the most useful feedback often comes from a user with your exact scenario. Play currently lets you sort by date or relevance and filter by preset topics, but it doesn’t let you search freely within reviews. If you want to know whether an app, say, exports to CSV or supports a specific Android feature, you’re stuck skimming.

Evidence in the code: “Search reviews” string and a new flag

Recent strings added to the Play Store reference a “Search reviews” label—clear in intent. There’s also an internal flag, AllReviewsPage__enable_search_bar, which doesn’t do anything public yet but strongly implies a search bar on the reviews screen. While the UI isn’t live, the presence of both a user-facing string and an enablement toggle suggests active development.

Where it might live in the UI (educated guess)

Play’s reviews page currently surfaces preset topics at the top. The most logical placement for a search field is alongside or above those chips, replacing one-size-fits-all filters with ad-hoc queries (e.g., “CarPlay,” “SAML,” “CSV export,” “HDR10”). That’s speculative for now—the final layout could change—but the goal seems obvious: type a need, get relevant reviews.

Why this matters

A working search box would turn the reviews section from a scroll marathon into a targeted lookup, making decisions faster and more confident—especially for niche workflows or accessibility needs that generic filters miss. If implemented well, it could become one of Play’s most quietly powerful discovery tools.