Boris Valusek, Design Lead, Google Play
The Google Play Store has over two billion monthly active users coming to find the right app, game, and other digital content. To improve the overall store experience, we’re excited to roll out a complete visual redesign. Aligning with Material design language, we’re introducing several user-facing updates to deliver a cleaner, more premium store that improves app discovery and accessibility for our diverse set of users.
To make browsing faster and easier, we’ve introduced a new navigation bar at the bottom of the Play Store on mobile devices and a new left navigation on tablets and Chrome OS. There are now two distinct destinations for games and apps, which helps us better serve users the right kind of content. Once users find the right app or game, the updated store listing page layout surfaces richer app information at the top of each page as well as a more prominent call-to-action button. This makes it easier for users to see the important details and make a decision to install your app. You’ll also notice our new icon system with a uniform shape, helping content to stand out more over UI. If you haven’t done so already, make sure to update your icon following the new icon specifications as soon as possible.
If you’re looking for best practices to make a compelling store listing page, we have several resources to help. To ensure your page resonates well with Android users, use store listing experiments to test for the best app icon, images, video, and descriptions on Google Play. You can also tailor your marketing messages to specific user groups based on their country, install state or even pre-registration by creating custom store listings. For even more, try our free e-learning resource, Academy for App Success.
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Posted by Tom Grinsted, Product Manager, Google Play
At this year’s Google I/O, we announced a slate of new features to help you take your business further with Google Play. Launching today, these changes include several improvements designed to help you make better decisions about your business by providing clearer, more actionable data.
We know the right data is critical to help you improve your app performance and grow your business. That’s why we’re excited to share a major update that enables you to better measure and analyse your core statistics — the most fundamental install and uninstall metrics by user and device. We’ve also enhanced the Statistics page on the Play Console to show change over time, enable more granular configurations, and, coming soon, exclusive benchmarks for core stats!
More granular configurations are now available on the Statistics page to help you better understand your acquisition and churn.
More accurate and more expansive than before, the new metrics will help you better understand your acquisition and churn. For the first time, we are including data on returning users and devices - something that we understand is critical to many developers' growth strategies.
We’re also including new install methods (such as pre-installs and peer-to-peer sharing) and the ability to aggregate and dedupe over periods that suit your business needs. With these new updates, you can perform analyses that weren’t possible before, such as how many people re-installed your app last month.
Here’s what else is new:
As a result of these updates, you will notice a few changes to your metrics. Old metrics names will be deprecated, but you can configure new metrics that map to the old ones with this cheat sheet. And don’t forget to use the ‘save report’ feature on the stats page so you can easily return to any configurations you find particularly helpful!
Don’t forget to use the ‘save this report’ feature on the stats page to easily return to any configurations you find particularly helpful.
Other metrics like active user and active device will see a step-change as the new definitions are more expansive and include previously under-counted data.
Some new metrics map onto older ones. Where this happens, all historic data will be automatically included. But in other cases new metrics will only be generated from launch day. For unique devices or users, weekly metrics will start to appear two weeks after launch, monthly metrics once there’s a single full month’s data, and quarterly metrics once there’s a full quarter’s data.
We know it’s a lot to take in at once, so make sure to bookmark the cheat sheet for helpful tips as you navigate the transition and explore your new metrics. Additionally, our Decision-Making with the Google Play Console session from Google I/O and our Play Academy training are other great resources to help you get up to speed. Check out these updates in the Google Play Console today — we hope you find them useful. Your comments help to shape the future of Google Play, so please continue to let us know what you think.
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Posted by Kosuke Suzuki, Product Manager, Google Play
Every month, more than 2 billion users from over 190 countries visit the Google Play Store to browse and discover new apps and games. As part of making Google Play a great discovery experience, we continue to increase our focus on quality. Over the coming weeks, we’ll be updating our featuring and ranking logic to further prioritize high quality apps and games with strong technical performance and engaging content.
If you’re looking for ways to improve your app quality, below are three key areas to focus on. Along with these suggestions, we've highlighted several tools available in the Google Play Console to help you better understand user behavior, monitor technical performance, and deliver the best in-app experience for users. Remember, app quality will impact where and how prominently you're eligible to surface in the store, so always look to create the most compelling and delightful experience possible.
Have you thought about your UI and if your app has intuitive navigation, controls, and menu access? Do you have a good first-time-user experience, overall polished design, and enough content to keep users engaged for the long term?
Quality guidelines: meet user expectations and maximize your exposure opportunities by testing against the quality guidelines for different platforms.
Testing tracks: release early versions of your app to gather early user feedback and make improvements before full release.
Engaging content: build loyalty and sustainable app engagement by satisfying your users needs
Ad placement: for apps with ads integrated, ensure a good user experience by choosing the right ad format and placement throughout your app.
Have you considered whether your app has good overall technical performance, and if it is power-thrifty, responsive, efficient, and well-behaved? 42% of users who leave a 1-star review mention stability or bugs.
Android vitals: review the Android vitals dashboard to see how your app is performing on core vitals metrics including crash rate, ANR rate, excessive wakeups, and stuck partial wake locks in the background. Look at developer selected peer benchmarks to see how you measure up to others in your category. Exhibiting bad behavior in Android vitals will negatively affect the user experience in your app and could limit your exposure opportunities on Google Play.
Pre-launch reports: identify where your app has problems to ensure you’re presenting the highest possible quality to users upon launch. The pre-launch reports use automated tests on real devices that can identify layout issues, provide crash diagnostics, locate security vulnerabilities, and more.
Last but not least, a quality app also means having an effective and accurate listing page. Does your store listing page make a great first impression? Does it clearly and accurately communicate the value and intended use cases of your app?
Best practices: use strong creative assets, including your app title, icon, screenshots and video, along with a clear and informative app description, that provide an accurate representation of your app. To improve discovery opportunities, we suggest all pages have a video (set to public or unlisted and non-monetized) to inform users about your app, and for game developers to provide three or more 16:9 aspect ratio screenshots.
New icon specification: create a more polished experience on the store by updating your icon before June 24th.
Ratings and reviews: monitor your user ratings and reviews and respond to negative reviews where possible. When receiving a reply from developers, users increase their rating by +0.7 stars on average. Paying attention to ratings and reviews will be increasingly important as we rollout the new rating score in August 2019. This will place more weight on your most recent ratings in the Google Play Store.
Store listing experiments: A/B test different versions of your listing page amongst actual Google Play users. Make sure to test each component independently and run tests for at least a week in order to gather significant results.
Custom store listings: tailor your marketing messages to specific user groups based on their country, install state or even pre-registration. This is a great way to highlight key features and updates best suited for existing or lapsed users.
Localization: take advantage of Google Play’s worldwide reach to identify key markets, translate your app store listing, and even run store listing experiments to optimize for each country.
Get the most out of the Google Play Console and learn about improving app quality on the Academy for App Success, a free e-learning resource.
Posted by Vlad Radu, Product Manager and Nicholas Lativy, Software Engineer
The Google Play Developer API allows you to automate your in-app billing and app distribution workflows. At Google I/O ‘18, we introduced version 3 of the API, which allows you to transactionally start, manage, and halt staged releases on all tracks, through production, open testing, closed testing (including the new additional testing tracks), and internal testing.
In addition to these new features, version 3 also supports all the functionality of previous versions, improving and simplifying how you manage workflows. Starting December 1, 2019, versions 1 and 2 of the Google Play Developer API will no longer be available so you need to update to version 3 ahead of this date.
If you use the Google Play API client libraries (available for Java, Python, and other popular languages), we recommend upgrading to their latest versions, which already support version 3 of the API. In many cases, changing the version of the client library should be all that is necessary. However, you may also need to update specific code references to the version of the API in use - see examples in our samples repository.
Usage of the API can also be indirect, not by the app itself, but by a third-party plugin (e.g. a plugin for rolling out new releases). Many third-party plugins are already using version 3 of the API. If you use a plugin that does not support version 3, you will need to contact the maintainer.
Google Play Console has been displaying warnings since mid-May if we detected that your app was still using version 1 and version 2 endpoints. The message is based on all calls to the API in the last seven days and is refreshed daily. If you see this message, it means calls to the Publishing API version 1 or 2 are referencing your app.
If you currently use version 1 of the API, you may also need to link your API project to the Google Console before converting to version 3. Learn more about this process.
For in-app billing developers This deprecation only affects the APIs which are used to interact with Play Billing via server to server communication. Android apps that use the AIDL / Billing Library to provide in-app purchase functionality are unaffected.
We hope you benefit from the new features of the Google Play Developer API and are looking forward to your continued feedback to help us improve the publishing experience on Google Play.
Left to right: original icon, new icon (example), original icon in legacy mode
Posted by Chris Yang, Program Manager, Translation Service
It is not uncommon for developers to have the following concerns and thoughts when considering whether to localize their apps: "I just don't have the time!" "Translation is too expensive." "High-quality translation is just hard to find.'' Does this sound familiar?
At Google, we consider translation a key component of making the world's information universally accessible and useful. This commitment extends not only to localizing our own products, but also to providing tools to help developers and translators more easily localize their apps.
Introducing the Google Play App Translation Service
Available in the Google Play Console, the Google Play App Translation Service simplifies localization of your app user interface strings, store listing, in-app product names, and universal apps campaign ads. Thousands of developers have already used this service to reach hundreds of millions of users worldwide.
Here is an overview of some of the ways it can help:
1. Quick and easy - Order in minutes and receive your translation in as little as two days.
2. Professional and human - Get high-quality translations by real human translators.
3. Value for money - Translate your app for as little as $0.07 per word.
Ordering a Translation
Find the Translation Service in the Google Play Console:
When you're ready to translate, just select the languages to use for translation, choose a vendor, and place your order.
Select languages to translate into.
Choose what type of content you want to translate.
Easily complete purchase of the service.
Language recommendations
You can also expand your global footprint with translation recommendations that can help increase installs. The recommendations can be found in the Google Play Console.
The language recommendation feature is developed using machine learning and is based on your app's install history and market data.
Did you know that you can reach almost 80% of internet users worldwide with only 10 languages. In particular, the Google Play opportunity in Russia and the Middle East continues to grow. Let us know once you have localized for these markets so we can consider featuring your app or game in the Now in Russian and Now in Arabic collections on the Play Store.
Launching the translation
Once you download the translation, you'll be ready to publish your newly translated app update on Google Play.
Get started with the App Translation Service today and let us know what you think!
At the Google Play Indie Games Festival over the weekend, we welcomed hundreds of attendees to try out and enjoy a diverse range of amazing games from the indie community. The competition was very tough, and in the end, we recognized three winners:
We'd also like to congratulate the rest of the Top 10 developers and all of the finalists who shared their games to make for such a fun and exciting event. Check out the great collection of games on Google Play.
Here are the other seven games that rounded out the Top 10:
The day started with time for attendees to play the 20 finalists' games. They experienced different genres and styles of gameplay and were encouraged to talk with the developers about their work and what it's like to make mobile games for a living. The event brought together kids, adults, gaming enthusiasts and non-gamers, and was a great representation of the fun experiences mobile games create.
In the afternoon, attendees voted for their favorites and the Top 10 moved on to the presentation round. These developers had three minutes to deliver their best pitch to the panel of judges. After the judges voted, results were in and the three winners and seven runners up were named.
If you like indie games and want to keep up with our favorite indie picks, visit the Indie Corner on Google Play.
Every app on Android is signed with a key. This key is used to ensure the app's integrity by checking that updates are signed with the same signature. In the past, the burden of securely holding the signing key has always been with the developer. We're now offering an app signing service on Google Play that can help you if you lose or compromise your key.
Until recently, losing your key would make it impossible to update your app with a new version. A compromised key would be a serious issue too: a third-party could maliciously replace an authentic app or corrupt it. Unfortunately in such cases, the only solution was to publish a new app, with a new package name and key, and ask all of your users to install it.
App signing in the Play Console allows us to offer help in such circumstances. For existing apps, it requires transferring your app signing key to Google Play. For new apps, we can generate your app signing key. Once enrolled in app signing, you sign your APK with an upload key, which we use to authenticate your identity. We'll then strip that signature and re-sign your app with the app signing key.
The app signing key is now securely managed by Google Play meaning that you are only responsible for managing your upload key. If your upload key is compromised or lost, our developer operations team can assist by verifying your identity and resetting your upload key. We'll still re-sign with the same app signing key, allowing the app to update as usual.
Rest assured, your key will be fully protected by Google's robust cloud security infrastructure and will benefit from the ongoing investment we're making to our security systems. In the future, we plan to offer developers who sign with Google Play automatic optimizations to enhance their app distribution. Stay tuned for more news in this area!
Learn more about how app signing works in the help center or watch the session about app signing from Google I/O 2017. Get started on securing your app in the release management section of the Play Console.
Based in Berlin, Zalando is Europe's leading online fashion platform. With more than 70% of its traffic now coming from mobile, the company has invested a lot in improving the quality of its app to provide a good user experience. Investing in bridging the online and the offline worlds, as well as providing a seamless cross-platform experience, has had positive results on their user engagement and revenue. Using features like A/B testing, the pre-launch report and the new release dashboard from the Google Play Console, Zalando saw a 6% increase in installs and a 15% increase in the users' lifetime value.
Watch Rushil Dave, Senior Product Specialist and Meritxell Rivera, Android Developer discuss how the company has improved user experience and key revenue and engagement metrics by investing in app quality for their Zalando app.
With so many great mobile games launching this year, we saw a huge amount of interest from indie developers to showcase their art at the Google Play Indie Games Festival in San Francisco next month. While it was a tough selection process, we're excited to announce the 20 finalists, as well as our esteemed judging panel. Fans will be able to play the new and un-released indie games in a fun festival atmosphere where they can also meet the creators themselves. To attend and learn more about the event, register now for free at g.co/play/sfindiegamesfest2017.
So how did we choose the 20 finalists? We powered up our phones, put our game-faces on, and looked for games that not only met the festival requirements, but also stood out with their overall design, fun, and quality. These are the 20 finalists who will be joining us at the festival to demo their games.
In addition to playing these games and meeting the developers who made them, fans will have a chance to vote for their favorites throughout the festival. The Top 10 will then move on to present a short pitch in pursuit of going home as one of the three overall festival winners. The winners will be chosen by this year's panel of judges representing a diverse lineup of gaming expertise.
Emceeing this year's event is J.D. Witherspoon, aka runJDrun. No stranger to gaming, YouTuber/actor/comedian, J.D. plays a wide array of games and frequently uploads gaming, vlog, and comedy content to his channels.
If you want to try out these games and celebrate the indie community, learn more about the event and register at g.co/play/sfindiegamesfest2017.
