Grow with Google Play: Scaled Publishing and New App Insights

By Kobi Glick, Google Play team

If you're growing your business on Google Play, the Google Play Developer Console is one of the most important tools at your disposal. At Google I/O, we introduced a number of new changes that give you valuable insight into how your app is performing. Here's an overview of some of the improvements you can now take advantage of.

Publishing API for scaling your app operations

Today we're happy to announce that the Google Play Developer Publishing API is now available to all developers. The API will let you upload APKs to Beta testing, Staged rollout and Production, and integrate publishing operations with your release processes and toolchain. The Publishing API also makes it easier for you to manage your in-app products catalog, provide tablet-specific screenshots, and localize your store listing text and graphics. The Publishing API will help you focus on your core business, with less time managing your releases, even as your business grows to more apps and markets.

Actionable insights at the right time

Email notifications for alerts

Recently, we added Alerts in the Developer Console to let you know when there are sudden changes in important stats like app installs, ratings, and crashes. You can now turn on email notifications for Alerts so that, even while you’re not in the Developer Console, you’ll be informed of relevant events before they can have a broader effect on your app. You can turn on email notifications for one or more of your apps under Email Preferences in the Developer Console settings.

New Optimization Tips

You’ll now see new Optimization Tips with instructions when we detect opportunities to improve your app. For example, we’ll let you know when updated versions of APIs you use are available — such as new Google Play in-app billing or Google Maps APIs. For games developers, we’ll also surface opportunities to use Google Play game services that can help improve users’ gaming experience and drive engagement. To see what tips we suggest for you, go to your app in the Developer Console and click on Optimization Tips.

Better data to inform your business decisions

Enhanced revenue statistics

To help you better understand your commercial success, we’ve enhanced revenue statistics in the Finance section of the Developer Console. We now let you see the average revenue per paying user (ARPPU) and give you more ways to analyse buyer data, such as comparing returning buyers (i.e., those who also made purchases in the past) to new buyers.

Bulk export of reviews

You can already engage with your users by reading and replying to reviews in the Developer Console and we’ve now added bulk export of reviews so you can download and analyze your app’s reviews en masse. This is particularly useful if you receive a large volume of reviews and want to perform your own sentiment analysis.

Improved stats for beta releases and staged rollouts

Since last year’s launch, you’ve used beta testing to release alpha and beta versions of your app, and staged rollout to gradually launch your app to production. To help you make the most of this feature, we’re now improving the way alpha, beta and staged rollout specific stats are displayed. When viewing your app and crash statistics you can now filter the app version by alpha, beta, or staged rollout to better understand the impact of your testing.

Improved reporting of native crashes

If you develop in native code, we’ve improved the reporting and presentation specifically for native crashes, with better grouping of similar crashes and summarizing of relevant information.

Deep-linking to help drive engagement

Finally, we’ve also added website verification in the Developer Console, to enable deep-linking to your app from search results. Deep-linking helps remind users about the apps they already have. It is available through search for all apps that implement app indexing. For example, if a user with the Walmart Android app searches for “Chromecast where to buy”, they’ll go directly to the Chromecast page in the Walmart app. The new App Indexing API is now open to all Android developers, globally. Get started now.

We hope you find these features useful and take advantage of them so that you can continue to grow your user base and improve your users’ experience. If you're interested in some other great tools for distributing your apps, check out this blog post, or any of the sessions which have now been posted to the Google Developers Channel.