android - Google Play app description formatting

Question

I've made an Android application that is available on Google Play. Now I want to add some more formatting to my app description (eg. indent, links, lists..). But I cannot find any website where possible formatting is listed. Google Help pages cannot help me either on this subject. There exists a lot of different formats and I don't really know which one to use (eg. HTML or wiki formatting..)

I could test it with trial and error, but that would take some time, because Google Play only refreshes after 2-3 hours. And while I'm testing, my app description would be rather ugly if the wrong format was used.

tl;dr Is there a list of all possible formatting I could use in the app description for Google Play?

Answer 1

Experimentally, I've discovered that you can provide:

• Single line breaks are ignored; double line breaks open a new paragraph.
• Single line breaks can be enforced by ending a line with two spaces (similar to Markdown).
• A limited set of HTML tags (optionally nested), specifically:
  • <b>…</b> for boldface,
  • <i>…</i> for italics,
  • <u>…</u> for underline,
  • <br /> to enforce a single line break,
  • I could not find any way to get strikethrough working (neither HTML or Markdown style).
• A fully-formatted URL such as http://google.com; this appears as a hyperlink.
  (Beware that trying to use an HTML <a> tag for a custom description does not work and breaks the formatting.)
• HTML character entities are supported, such as → (→), ™ (™) and ® (®); consult this W3 reference for the exhaustive list.
• UTF-8 encoded characters are supported, such as é, €, ￡, ‘, ’, ★ and ☆.
• Indentation isn't strictly possible, but using a bullet and em space character looks reasonable (•  yields "• ").
• Emoji are also supported (though on the website depends on the user's OS & browser).

Special notes concerning only Google Play app:

• Some HTML tags only work in the app:
  • <blockquote>…</blockquote> to indent a paragraph of text,
  • <small>…</small> for slightly smaller text,
  • <big>…</big> for slightly larger text,
  • <sup>…</sup> and <sub>…</sub> for super- and subscripts.
  • <font color="#a32345">…</font> for setting font colors in HEX code.
• Some symbols do not appear correctly, such as ‣.
• All these notes also apply to the app's "What's New" section.

Special notes concerning only Google Play website:

• All HTML formatting appears as plain text in the website's "What's New" section (i.e. users will see the HTML source).