Google Play App Description Markup

[Updated 25 Aug 2013: This article applies specifically to the "App Description" section of the application profile – not verified to work in the "What's New?" section (thanks Mark Carter!)]

[Updated 22 Mar 2012: Title reflects Google rebrand. References to "Android Market" should be interpreted to mean "Google Play"]

When publishing our mobile app to the Android Market recently, I noticed that some publishers had application descriptions that were styled more richly than the publishing UI would have you believe is possible. So I tried out a bit of markup. As of the date of this post, the following describes what I found…

What Worked

• Basic emphasis: <b>, <i>, <u> all seemed to work as you might expect
• Forced line breaks: <br/> forced a line break where a simple carriage return in the publishing UI's editor would not
• DNS names as hyperlinks: when rendered after publishing, Android Market turned our site's DNS name (e.g. appendixk.thejameskearney.me) into a working hyperlink

What Didn't Work

• URL Links: I tried to insert an href link (<a href="...">), but this simply rendered as text (with the first few characters of the tag stripped out)

Conclusion

The Android platform, its tools and development universe are flush with undocumented and underdocumented features. Fortunately, that's just the sort of thing Appendix K was created for. If you try other markup and get a definitive result, feel free to add a comment – I'll update the post. At some point, I hope Google will update the developer documentation and I'll be able to just link to that… :-)