How we rate

Where the shortlist comes from

A list starts as an argument. Somebody plays something on the way home, says so in the group chat, and either the rest of us go and try it or the message sinks without trace. The titles that survive that first stage go on a running shortlist, and when the shortlist is long enough to be worth sorting, we sort it and publish the result. That is the whole origin story; there is no submission form, no queue that money moves, and no editor with a quota to fill.

We only rank games we have actually opened on a phone. That sounds like a low bar until you notice how many lists are assembled from store copy and screenshots. If nobody here has played it, it does not appear, even when it is obviously popular and would do well for traffic. It also means our lists are short. Five entries that somebody sat with are more use than fifty that nobody did.

The three criteria

Every game is scored against the same three things, in the same order, and the notes are written while playing rather than reconstructed later from memory. Memory is generous to games with good art.

1. First session

   What happens in the opening minutes: tutorial length, time-to-fun, and whether the game respects an interrupted commute. Slow starts drop a title even when the mid-game is strong. A game that needs forty minutes of setup before it becomes itself is a poor fit for a device you check in the gaps of a day.

2. Fit on a phone

   Layout, text size, one-handed reach, and how often UI covers the playfield. Games ported from larger screens start at a disadvantage unless they adapt. We watch for controls that sit under the thumb rather than beside it, and for text that survives being read standing up on a moving bus.

3. Fair monetisation

   Where ads and purchases appear, and whether the core loop remains playable without either. We do not punish free games for being free; we note when payment gates ordinary progress. A single up-front price is not automatically virtuous either — it has to buy something, usually quiet.

From notes to a number

At the end of a cycle the notes are read side by side and each game gets a score out of ten with one decimal place. The scale runs from five to a little under ten, and we describe it in words rather than pretending it is a measurement.

A score in the low fives means the game works and there is something in it, but we would only point a specific kind of person towards it. The sixes are games with a real flaw we can name — a difficulty spike, a cramped interface, an interruption pattern that grates — sitting next to something worth the trouble. The sevens are solid recommendations with a caveat attached. The eights are the ones we hand over without much explanation. Nines are rare and we have not handed one out often; nothing here reaches ten, because ten would mean we had stopped noticing.

There is no weighting formula. We are not going to tell you that first session is worth forty per cent and monetisation thirty-five, because we did not calculate it that way and neither did anyone else who claims to. The number is a considered editorial judgement made against three published criteria by people who played the game. That is a smaller claim than a formula, and a more honest one.

Why our number is not the store's stars

The star average on a listing is an enormous, long-running poll with no controls on it. It mixes people who played for a year with people who left one star because an update moved a button. It rewards age and volume, and it says almost nothing about whether a game is a sensible thing to install this week. We quote it because it is public and useful context, and we quote it exactly as the listing showed it when we looked.

Our number answers a narrower question: given a phone, a few free minutes and the three criteria above, how strongly do we recommend this? Those two questions have different answers often enough that our ranking regularly disagrees with the stars. On the current edition a game with the highest star average on the page finishes last, and a game with the lowest finishes first. When that happens we say why in the entry itself, because an unexplained disagreement is just noise.

What we do not do

We do not take money for a place in a ranking, and there is no arrangement under which a developer can influence the order. We do not score games we have not launched. We do not import scores from other publications or average them in. We do not invent hours-played counts, test-device inventories or reader surveys to make the method sound more rigorous than it is. If a figure appears on this site, it either came from a store listing or it is our own score, and the entry makes clear which.

Corrections

When we get something wrong — a misread figure, a mechanic described badly, a game that has changed since we wrote about it — the correction goes into the entry itself with the date it was made, rather than quietly replacing the old text. Anything you spot can go to the desk through the contact page.

One last thing

A ranking is not advice to spend money. It is our reading of a handful of games at one moment in time. Prices, permissions, in-app purchases and availability all live on the Google Play listing, and that listing is the authority on them, not us. Every link out of this site goes to the game's own page on Google Play so you can check the current details yourself before deciding anything. The Quiet Index is an independent editorial publication and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Google LLC.