Notes from Google Play: A look back at the tools that powered your growth in 2025

Hi everyone,

Thank you for making 2025 another amazing year for Google Play.

Together, we’ve built Play into something much more than a store—it’s a dynamic ecosystem powered by your creativity. This year, our focus was ensuring Play continues to be the best destination for people to discover incredible content and enjoy rewarding gaming experiences.

We're incredibly proud of the progress we've made alongside you, and we’re excited to celebrate those who pushed the boundaries of what’s possible—like the winners of our Best of 2025 awards. Watch our recap video to see how we’ve made Play even more rewarding for your business, or read on for a more in-depth look back on the year.

Evolving Play to be more than a store

This year, we focused on evolving Play into a true destination for discovery where billions of people around the world can find and enjoy experiences that make life more productive and delightful.

Making Play the best destination for your games business

Just a few months ago, we shared our vision for a more unified experience that brings more fun to gaming. Today, players often jump between different platforms to discover, play, and get rewarded. Our goal is to connect these journeys to create the best experience for players and, consequently, grow your business. Our first steps include these key updates:

• A new Gamer Profile that tracks cross-game stats, streaks, and achievements, customizable with a Gen AI Avatar.

• Integrated Rewards across mobile and PC that give players access to VIP experiences like our Four Days of Fantastic Rewards at San Diego Comic-Con,  Diamond District experience on Roblox, and Play’s own treasure-hunt mini-game Diamond Valley alongside new Play Games Leagues where players can compete in their favorite games, climb leaderboards, and win Play Points rewards.

• The new Play Games Sidekick, a helpful in-game overlay that curates and organizes relevant gaming info, and provides direct access to Gemini Live for real-time AI-powered guidance in the game. We recently rolled out the open beta to developers, and we encourage you to start testing the sidekick in your games and share your feedback.

• Integrated gameplay across devices is now fully realized as Google Play Games on PC has graduated from beta to general availability, solidifying our commitment to cross-platform play and making our catalog of over 200,000 titles available across mobile and PC.

Play Games Sidekick is a new in-game overlay that gives players instant access to their rewards, offers, and achievements, driving higher engagement for your game.

To help you get the most out of this unified gaming experience, we introduced the Google Play Games Level Up program, a new way to unlock greater success for your business. For titles that meet core user experience guidelines, you can unlock a powerful suite of benefits including the ability to:

• Re-engage players on the new You tab, a new personalized destination on the Play Store that is designed to help you re-engage and retain players by showcasing content and rewards from recently played games in one dedicated space. You can utilize engagement tools in Play Console to feature your latest events, offers, and updates.

• Maximize your game’s reach with prominent boosts across the store, including featuring opportunities, Play Points boosters and quests, and enhanced visibility on editorial surfaces like the Games Home and Play Points Home.

You tab is a personalized destination designed to help you re-engage and
retain players by showcasing your latest events, offers, and updates.

Unlocking more discovery and engagement for your apps and its content

Last year, we shared our vision for a content-rich Google Play that has already delivered strong results. Year-over-year, Apps Home has seen over an 18% increase in average monthly visitors with apps seeing a 9% growth in acquisitions and double-digit growth* in app spend for those monetizing on Google Play. We introduced even more updates to elevate discovery and engagement on and off the store.

• Curated spaces, launched last year, have been a success, fostering routine engagement by delivering daily, locally relevant content (such as football highlights in Brazil, cricket in India, and comics in Japan) directly to the Apps Home. Building on this, we expanded to new categories and locations, including a new entertainment-focused space in Korea. 

Curated spaces make it easier to find and engage with local interests.

• We significantly increased timely, relevant content on Google Play through Spotlight and new topic browse pages. Spotlight, located at the top of Apps Home, offers seasonal content feeds—like Taylor Swift’s recent album launch or holiday movie guides—in a new, immersive way to connect users with current cultural moments. Concurrently, new topic browse pages were integrated across the store in the U.S., Japan, and South Korea, allowing content deep dives into over 100,000 shows and movies.

Spotlight offers an immersive experience connecting users

with relevant apps during current cultural moments.

Last year, we introduced Engage SDK to help you deliver personalized content to users across surfaces and seamlessly guide them into the relevant in-app experiences. Integrating it unlocks surfaces like Collections, our immersive full-screen experience bringing content directly to the user's home screen. This year, we rolled out updates to expand your content’s reach even further:

• Engage SDK content expanded to the Play Store this summer, enabling seamless re-engagement across Apps Home and the new You tab.

• Rolled out to more markets, including Brazil, Germany, India, Japan, and Korea. 
  
  

Supporting you throughout your app lifecycle

In addition to evolving the store, we’ve continued to build on our powerful toolset to support you at every stage, from testing and release to growth and monetization.

Helping you deliver high-quality, trusted user experiences

We launched key updates in Android Studio and Play Console to help you build more stable and compliant apps.

• Policy insights in Android Studio help you catch potential violations early by showing in-context guidance, such as policy summaries and best practices, whenever code related to a Google Play policy is detected. 

• You can now halt fully rolled-out releases to stop the distribution of problematic app versions through Play Console and the Publishing API.

• We also added new Android vitals performance metrics, including low memory kill metrics which provides device-specific insights to resolve stability problems and excessive partial wake lock metrics to help you address battery drain.

Boosting your productivity and workflow

We refined the Play Console experience to make managing your app and your marketing content more efficient.

• We put your most essential insights front and center with a redesigned app dashboard and overview pages.

• To repurpose creative content across Play Console more easily, we launched an asset library that lets you upload from Google Drive, organize with tags, and crop existing visuals.

• You can now automatically translate app strings with Gemini at no cost. This feature eliminates manual translation work for new releases, making updates seamless. You remain in full control with the ability to preview translations using a built-in emulator, and can easily edit or disable the service.

Translate app strings automatically with Gemini, while maintaining full control for previewing and editing.

Maximizing your revenue with secure, frictionless payments

We introduced new features focused on driving purchases and maximizing subscription revenue globally.

• We’re improving purchase conversion globally with over 800 million users now ready to buy. We launched features that encourage users to set up payment methods early, provide AI-powered payment method recommendations, and expanded our payment library to support more local payment methods globally.

• To maximize recurring revenue from over 400 million paid subscriptions, we introduced multi-product checkout, allowing you to sell base subscriptions and add-ons under a simple, single transaction. 

• To combat churn, we began showcasing subscription benefits in more places and provided you with more flexible options like extended grace periods and account holds for declined payments, which has proven effective in reducing involuntary churn by an average of 10%*.

To help reduce voluntary churn, we’re showcasing your subscriptions benefits across Play.

Investing in our app and game community with developer programs

We’re proud to invest in programs for app and game companies around the world to help you grow and succeed on Play. 

• Google Play Apps Accelerator: We’ve opened submissions for our program that will help early-stage app companies scale their business. Selected companies from over 80 eligible countries will join a 12-week accelerator starting in March 2026, where they can learn more about creating high-quality apps, go-to-market strategies, user acquisition, and more.

Submissions are still open for our 12-week accelerator, which starts in March 2026. 
Apply by January 7, 2026 for consideration.

• Indie Games Fund (Latin America): Now in its fourth year, this fund provides support to 10 promising game studios in Latin America with funding and hands-on support from Google Play. In October, we announced the 2025 recipients.

• ChangGoo Program (South Korea): Now in its seventh year, this program works with over 100 Korean mobile app and game startups to foster their growth and expansion in collaboration with the Ministry of SMEs and Startups and the Korean Institute of Startup and Entrepreneurship Development (KISED).

• Google Play x Unity Game Developer Training Program (Indonesia): The third edition launched in April, offering a 6-month online curriculum, meetups, and mentorship for Indonesian game developers in partnership with Indonesia’s Ministry of Creative Economy and the Indonesian Gaming Association.

• Google Play x Unity Game Developer Training Program (India): The first India cohort kicked off in November with 500 aspiring and professional game developers. The 6-month journey provides online curriculum and meetups in partnership with GDAI and the govt of Tamil Nadu and Maharashtra.

• Google for Startups Accelerator program (India): We provided Seed to Series-A AI-powered app startups in India with insights on the latest AI advancements, mentorship, and expert guidance.

To offer stronger protection for your business and users, we continued to enhance the Play Integrity API and our anti-fraud systems. On average, apps using Play Integrity features see 80% lower unauthorized usage, and our efforts have safeguarded top apps using Play Billing from $2.9 billion in fraud and abuse in the last year.

• Automatically fix user issues: New Play in-app remediation prompts in Play Integrity API automatically guide users to fix common problems like network issues, outdated Google Play Services, or device integrity flags, reducing integration complexity and getting users back to a good state faster.

• Combat repeat bad actors: Device recall is a powerful new tool that lets you store and recall limited data associated with a device, even if the device is reset, helping protect your business model from repeat bad actors.

• Strengthen revenue protection: We've introduced stronger protections against abuse, including refining pricing arbitrage detection and enhancing protection against free trial and intro pricing abuse for subscriptions, helping your business models remain profitable.

For a full breakdown of new ways we’re keeping the ecosystem safe, check out our deep-dive blog post here.

Thank you for your partnership

This is an incredible time for Google Play. We’ve made huge strides together – your passion, creativity, and feedback throughout 2025 has made Play that much stronger. We’re grateful to work alongside the best developer community in the world, and we look forward to unlocking even greater success together in the new year.

Happy holidays!

Sam Bright

VP & GM, Google Play + Developer Ecosystem

* Source: Internal Google data