Posted by Tom Grinsted, Product Manager, Google Play
Google Play Console metrics can help you understand your app’s performance across growth and acquisition, engagement and monetization, quality, and churn. But with dozens of metrics — and thousands of variations — we know not every metric is relevant to every person. One of the challenges you’ve shared with us is that it can sometimes be difficult to find exactly the metrics that you need for your personal job role, and to access them quickly and regularly once you have found them. .
That’s why today, we’re pleased to announce that you can now customize and pin the precise metrics that matter to you in a personalized KPIs section at the top of your app dashboard. These customizations are unique to you, so you can configure your KPIs however you want without affecting the rest of your team.
Getting started is easy. On the dashboard for any app, scroll down to the KPI section and select “choose KPIs.” You can either build your own or start with suggested KPIs for job specialities, such as Growth, Quality and Health, or Monetization.
There’s an extensive list of available metrics, including our new engagement data and peer comparisons. Search filters make it easy to find just what you want, and once selected you can edit the dimensions and filters to suit your exact needs. For instance, you could display Daily Active Users for your top-five languages; or if you’re a country manager, only show revenue from a specific country or territory.
You can name any of your KPIs to make them easy to remember, and even include emojis!
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Once you’ve configured a list of KPIs that suit you, you can order them to control where they appear. This way, you can make sure that your most important metrics are always first to be seen.
You can include up to 20 KPIs, so your dashboard can be as robust or as streamlined as you want.
In addition to our suggested metrics, you can also pin any other dashboard card to your KPIs. For even finer control, you can even add any reports you’ve saved from the Statistics page. This allows you to create hyper-specific custom KPI cards from any of our core metrics.
There are as many ways to customize your KPIs as there are people using the console. Instead of seeing default KPIs, now everyone can have a customized dashboard showing exactly the metrics that matter to their individual workflows.
Ready to see for yourself? Just log into Google Play Console to try it out.
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Posted by Lisa Martinez, Head of Security & Privacy Business Development, Google Play and Andrew Ahn, Product Manager, Play and Android App Safety
Google helps protect billions of users every day through the use of a robust set of tools designed to keep users safe online. We’re proud to provide a wide range of these same resources to help developers build safe and successful apps. User participation increases when people have a safe and positive app engagement. We’d like to highlight a few of these free tools that developers can consider to help make user experiences safer for everyone.
Reducing toxic conversation with Perspective API
Perspective API, a free product offered by Jigsaw, uses machine learning to identify toxic language, like insults, profanity, or identity based attacks, making it easier to host healthier conversations in your apps. Perspective can be used to give feedback to commenters, help moderators more easily review comments, and keep conversations open online. Many online publishers and developers, such as the New York Times, El PaĆs, FACEIT, and Coral by VoxMedia have started to adopt this tool to promote constructive online dialogues. Learn how to get started here.
Increase child safety with Content Safety API
Google’s Content Safety API uses artificial intelligence to help developers better prioritize abuse material for review. We offer this service to NGOs and private companies to support their work protecting children. The API steps up the fight for child safety by prioritizing potentially illegal content for human review and helping reviewers find and report content faster. Quicker identification of new abuse images increases the likelihood that children being abused could be identified and protected from further abuse. Making review queues more efficient and less noisy also reduces the toll on human reviewers, who review images to confirm instances of abuse. Learn more about this on our Protecting Children site.
Prevent links to unsafe files and sites with the Safe Browsing API
Google Safe Browsing helps protect billions of devices every day by showing warnings to users when they attempt to navigate to dangerous sites or download dangerous files. Safe Browsing also notifies webmasters when their websites are compromised by malicious actors. Safe Browsing protections work across Google products and power safer browsing experiences across the Internet. Technical information on how to get started can be found here.
Thank you for continuing to partner with us to provide a positive experience for our shared users on Google Play.
Posted by Eric Bahna, Product Manager
In March, we published the Android for Cars App Library as part of Jetpack and most developers have already migrated their implementations to it! In addition to fantastic partner adoption, drivers have been enthusiastic about the new apps and our quality metrics have been positive.
Partner apps running on the Jetpack library (clockwise from upper left): T map, Chargepoint, Sygic, PlugShare, AmiGO, 2GIS, A Better Route Planner, and Flitsmeister
Today, we’re thrilled to announce that you can publish your Android Auto navigation, parking, and charging apps to production! We’ve been hard at work stabilizing the library, Android Auto, and the publishing process to reach this milestone. Publishing to production enables drivers to use your Android Auto app on their car screen without needing to sign up for a beta program. Here’s how:
Thank you for your collaboration and feedback on the Android for Cars App Library 1.0! One of the most common requests from Android Auto users has been for more categories of apps. Our goal with the library is to enable you to easily bring your app to 500+ models of Android Auto-compatible vehicles while meeting our app quality guidelines. The library abstracts away the complexities of screen form factors and input modes so you can focus on what makes your app shine.
Enabling navigation, parking, and charging apps in production is both a big step and the start of a much longer journey. We’re excited to see what you build and look forward to working together to deliver awesome in-car experiences.
Posted by Caren Chang, Developer Relations Engineer
In case you missed it, we’ve just finished a MAD Skills series on WorkManager. We started by introducing WorkManager for those new to the library and then proceeded to talk more about advanced usages including how to test and debug your WorkManager code. The series ended with an episode on how to migrate your old code from GCMNetworkManager and FirebaseJobDispatcher to use WorkManager instead.
Here’s a quick summary of what we covered.
In our first episode, we explored the basics of WorkManager through the WorkManager codelab. We started by understanding how to define work we want done, and how to schedule the work. We then moved on to implementing different types of work: unique and periodic. Finally, we ended the episode by taking a look at app standby buckets to better understand how WorkManager schedules work.
If you’re new to WorkManager, we also recommend taking a look at the following articles:
The series continued with Ben giving a more in-depth look at how WorkManager deals with multi-threading. When working with threads, you have the option of using Executors, coroutines or RxJava, and Ben demonstrated each of these approaches with WorkManager. The episode concluded by demonstrating how to return a result when the work is completed so that the UI can be updated.
In episode 3, we took a look at how to customize the initialization of WorkManager and support apps that span multiple processes. We’ve gotten a lot of questions from developers around testing and debugging, so Ben also dove into how to test your Workers, and useful debugging techniques.
In episode 4, we focused on how to migrate from old job scheduling libraries (GCMNetworkManager and FirebaseJobDispatcher) to WorkManager. Once your app starts targeting API level 30 and above, GCM NetworkManager and FirebaseJobDispatcher will no longer work on devices running Android Marshmallow (6.0) and above. If your app is still using either of those libraries, now is the time to update your apps to use WorkManager instead!
Android GDE Hugo Visser talked about why he chose to use WorkManager in a health app he recently worked on and how the library has helped his development process.
The series wrapped up with a live Q&A session where we answered your WorkManager related questions. Watch the recording to see all your questions answered, including future plans for WorkManager, handling duplicate work, retrying failed work, and more!
Platform
Android Studio
Google Play
Jetpack
Kotlin
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