Posted by Dan Lavelle, Head of Learning Operations, Google Play
One year ago, we introduced the Academy for App Success , an e-learning platform to help apps and games businesses who want to grow on Android and Google Play. In that time we've seen tens of thousands of people register for free learning, complete over 50,000 courses, and provide an average course rating of 4.66 out of 5 stars. Thank you to everyone who has spent time learning about best practices, Play Console features, policies and other aspects that are critical to growing your business - we hope to see more of you in the future.
Since the debut of Play Academy, we've been working hard to expand our offering to cover the topics you want to learn about. In this time, we have:
We've also been listening to your feedback and have updated Play Academy with content to cover key areas that might interest you:
Google Play policy
Subscription model for games
Track installs, uninstalls, and upgrades
Our goal at Play Academy is to provide you with a free learning resource to optimize your use of Play Console features, learn best practices to apply to your app or game business, and stay on the right side of Google Play policy.
Over the coming year, we will continue to create and update content in these key areas, in addition to investing in new learning formats to complement our interactive e-learning content.
At Google Play, we're looking forward to another great year of learning with you.
It's easy to get started with Play Academy - simply head to g.co/playacademy, sign up for your free account, and choose from over 75 e-learning courses and assessments. While you're there, leave a rating and review on any courses you complete.
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In May, we launched new Families policies to provide additional protections for children and families on Google Play. As part of this policy change, we’re requiring all developers to provide information on their app’s target audience and content via the Google Play Console by September 1st. Thanks to everyone who has completed it already. If you haven’t done so, please fill it out as soon as possible and consult our developer guide and training course for additional information.
Apps that include children in their target audience need to adhere to our new policy requirements including appropriate content, showing suitable ads (learn more), and disclosing personally identifiable information correctly. We’ve found that checking for these requirements takes longer than the normal review process, and can result in review times of up to 7 days (or longer in certain exceptional circumstances). Apps who submit inaccurate responses in the target audience and content section will also be subject to these reviews. You can find more details on Google Play’s app submission process in this Help Center article.
We respect that you are running a business and longer review times can impact how you work. Our goal is to prepare you for this change and minimize disruptions for you. These apps will be subject to extended reviews for every update, and you may need to update your processes to accommodate for additional review time. Suggestions for how to best adapt to this change include submitting your app at least a week before any important launch dates and (unless urgent) avoid resubmitting your app while it is under review.
These changes help make the Play Store safer through deeper and longer reviews, which is a tradeoff we think everyone is willing to make. Thanks for your continued support in building a positive and safe experience for all users on Google Play.
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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With billions of Android devices in use around the world and millions of apps available on the Play Store, it might seem difficult to drive change across the entire ecosystem, but the Accessibility Developer Infrastructure team is doing just that.
Every time a developer uploads an APK or app bundle to the open or closed tracks, Play tests this upload on various device models running different versions of Android and generates a pre-launch report to inform the developer of issues.
One year ago, the team added accessibility suggestions to the report based on industry best practices and Google’s own experience. These tests check for common issues that can make an app harder to use by people with disabilities. For example, they check that buttons are large enough to be comfortable for people to press, and that text has enough contrast with the background to be easier to read.
Since launching in July 2018, more than 3.8 million apps have been tested and over 171 million suggestions have been made to improve accessibility. Along with each suggestion, the developer gets detailed information about how to implement it. Every developer, from a one-person startup to a large enterprise, can benefit from the accessibility suggestions in the pre-launch report.
We are already seeing the real-world impact of these efforts. This year at Google I/O, the number of developers signing up for in-person accessibility consultations was four times the number from 2018. Googlers staffing these sessions reported that the developers had specific questions that were often based on the suggestions from the pre-launch report. The focused questions allowed the Googlers to give more actionable recommendations. These developers found that improving accessibility isn't just the right thing to do, it also makes good business sense by increasing the potential market for their apps.
Accessibility tests in the pre-launch report are just one way Google is raising awareness about accessibility in the global developer community. We partnered with Udacity to create a free online course about web accessibility, released our Accessibility Scanner for Android on the Play Store, and published iOS Accessibility Scanner on GitHub, allowing iOS developers to easily instrument apps to accessibility tests. Together, these efforts support Google's mission to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.
Learn more about developing with accessibility in mind by visiting the Android Developer Guidelines and the Google Developer Documentation Style Guide.
Posted by Kacey Fahey, Google Play Developer Marketing
Nexon Korea Company has published several games across PC, mobile, and console. With the launch of their mobile game FAITH, a MMORPG released exclusively in Japan, they wanted to promote the game before launch and find a way to capture early consumer demand that would help boost early installs at launch.
Nexon ran a pre-registration campaign on Google Play with a multi-channel marketing campaign driving players to pre-register and receive an exclusive pre-registration reward. Their campaign used consistent creative assets throughout TV commercials, YouTube influencer campaigns, social media, performance marketing campaigns, and more. Offering a pre-registration reward provided an incentive and benefit for players who pre-registered on Google Play during the month-long campaign leading up to launch.
“It was very easy to run, since the steps to activate the campaign were very clear and simple. All we needed to do was prepare the store assets and APK, then set them up in the Google Play Console,” said Hyomin Kim, Head of Platform Partnerships at Nexon Korea Corporation. Their exclusive pre-registration reward of 300 diamonds (in-game currency) was set up as a unique managed product as part of the campaign. At launch, Google Play provides the reward to all players who pre-registered, allowing Nexon to consume and grant the reward to players in-game using the Google Play Billing API. Not only did this create additional value for users, but it allowed Nexon to identify those who pre-registered in-game so they could measure the cohort’s performance after launch. Once the game became available on launch day, everyone who pre-registered on Google Play received a notification to install.
Nexon reported they had historically seen around 50% of Google Play pre-registrations convert to installs. By offering a pre-registration reward for FAITH, they increased their conversion rate by 20%. And not only that, the campaign drove other strong performance metrics with players who pre-registered for FAITH on Google Play having almost 50% higher day 60 retention than those who did not pre-register. This audience has also shown stronger monetization behavior, with over 70% higher ARPDAU than non-pre-registrants.
“Google Play pre-registration is now a ‘must-do’ strategy when Nexon launches games. From our previous experience, Google Play pre-registration is one of the most effective pre-registration platforms amongst all the channels we utilize, especially for organic impressions and installation conversion,” said Kim.
All app and game developers can run pre-registration campaigns and offer a pre-registration reward. Get started today!
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.
Posted by Patricia Correa, Director, Developer Marketing
We just wrapped up the Indie Games Showcase in Europe, Japan & South Korea! Back in March we started our search for some of the newest and most creative indie titles from these regions. The search culminated last week with the celebration of indie developers at events in London, Tokyo, and Seoul, and the selection of the winners from our finalists. Developers from 12 countries traveled to the events and showcased their games to the audience of gamers, industry experts, YouTube creators, and journalists.
The games were on show to the public, who spent several hours trying out their games and voting for their favourites, alongside the Google Play team. The top 10 finalists were then selected, and went on to pitch their games, and compete for big prizes in front of the jury.
Now, we are happy to announce the winners from each region! They will be returning home with a prize package that includes promotions on the Google Play Store, consultations with Google teams, Google hardware, and more.
We also want to take this opportunity to congratulate all the other finalists and developers who entered the competition this year. We are impressed by your creativity and passion, and hope you will continue to create amazing experiences for players worldwide.
G30 - A Memory Maze by Ivan Kovalov (Russia)
Ordia by Loju (United Kingdom)
Photographs by EightyEight Games (United Kingdom)
The other finalists as selected by audience and Google Play votes were:
#DRIVE by Pixel Perfect Dude (Poland)
Fly THIS! By Northplay (Denmark)
Golf Peaks by Afterburn (Poland)
Rest in Pieces by Itatake (Sweden)
see/saw by Kamibox (Germany)
STAP by Overhead Game Studio (United Kingdom)
Tesla vs. Lovecraft by 10tons (Finland)
Infection - 感染 - by CanvasSoft
MeltLand by 個人
Bear's Restaurant by 個人
Lunch Time Fish by SoftFunk HULABREAKS
ReversEstory by 個人
Kamiori - カミオリ by TeamOrigami
キグルミキノコ Q-bit -第一章- by 個人
クマムシさん惑星 ミクロの地球最強伝説 by Ars Edutainment
Girl x Sun - Terasene - Tower defence & Novel game by SleepingMuseum
Persephone by Momo-pi
ROOMS: The Toymaker's Mansion by HandMade Game
Seoul2033: Backer by Banjiha Games
Cartoon Craft by Studio NAP
Hexonia by Togglegear
Hexagon Dungeon by Bleor Games
7Days - Decide your story by Buff Studio
WhamBam Warriors by DrukHigh
Onslot Car by Wondersquad
Maze Cube by IAMABOY
언노운 나이츠 by teamarex
Posted by Vineet Tanwar, Business Development Manager, Google Play
In April we opened applications for the 2019 class of Indie Games Accelerator, a program to help top mobile game startups from emerging markets achieve their full potential on Google Play. We’re truly awed by the response we have received with over 1,700 applications from developers across 37 countries*. We continue to be impressed by the innovation and creativity of game developers everywhere.
Now, it's time to introduce you to the developers selected for the class of 2019. Here they are:
Congratulations to the selected participants and we look forward to meeting you in Singapore!
Find out more about the program or express your interest in joining the next class of the Indie Games Accelerator.
* The competition is open to developers from the following countries: Bangladesh, Brunei, Cambodia, India, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, Nepal, Pakistan, Philippines, Singapore, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Vietnam, Egypt, Jordan, Kenya, Lebanon, Nigeria, South Africa, Tunisia, Turkey, Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Guatemala, Mexico, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Uruguay and Venezuela
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 Kanika Sachdeva, Product Manager, Google Play
At Google Play, we’re committed to providing a positive, safe environment for children and families. Over the last few years, we’ve helped parents find family-friendly content through the Designed for Families program and empowered them to set digital ground rules for their families with Family Link parental controls.
After taking input from users and developers we are evolving our Google Play policies to provide additional protections for children and families. These policy changes build on our existing efforts to ensure that apps for children have appropriate content, show suitable ads, and handle personally identifiable information correctly; they also reduce the chance that apps not intended for children could unintentionally attract them.
Over the next few months, we will continue to roll out additional features that will help parents make informed choices before they install apps for their kids.
We are asking every developer to thoughtfully consider whether children are part of your target audience.
As part of the new policy, all developers must complete the new target audience and content section of the Google Play Console.
The new target audience and content section of the Google Play Console.
For most developers, the target audience does not include children and this section should be relatively quick to complete. If children are part of your target audience, we will ask you follow-up questions.
We will use the information you provide in the Google Play Console, along with our own review of your app marketing assets, to categorize your app and apply policies according to the following target audience groups: children, children and older users, older users.*
We recommend you review our new policies, developer guide, and this training before starting the target audience and content section so that you clearly understand the implications of your answers.
These changes affect every developer on Play, so if your app is already live on the Google Play store, we want to give you time to make any necessary updates. Below are the key dates to keep in mind:
We’re committed to providing the resources you need to understand and implement these changes. You can view more information on the Android developers website and access training on our new policies on Google Play's Academy for App Success. We have also increased our staffing and improved our communications for app review and appeals processes to help you get timely decisions and understand any changes that are needed.
Thanks in advance for the work you are putting in. We will continue to listen to your feedback and use it to improve the way we roll out these updates and communicate with the developer community.
*Note: The word “children” can mean different things in different locales and in different contexts. It is important that you determine what obligations and/or age-based restrictions may apply for the countries where you target your app.
Posted by Patricia Correa, Director, Platforms & Ecosystems Developer Marketing
Back in March we opened submissions for the Indie Games Showcase, an international competition for games studios from Europe*, South Korea, and Japan who are constantly pushing the boundaries of storytelling, visual excellence, and creativity in mobile.
We were once again impressed by the diversity and creativity that the indie community is bringing to mobile, and we’re happy to announce the 20 finalists.
Check out the local websites to learn more about the finalists and the events.
AntVentor by LoopyMood (Ukraine)
CHUCHEL by Amanita Design (Czech Republic)
Fobia by Tapteek (Russia)
Gold Peaks by Afterburn (Poland)
Grayland by 1DER Entertainment (Slovakia)
Hexologic by MythicOwl (Poland)
Lucid Dream Adventure by Dali Games (Poland)
OCO by SPECTRUM48 (United Kingdom)
Peep by Taw (Russia)
Returner Zhero by Fantastic, yes (Denmark)
Tiny Room Stories: Town Mystery by Kiary games (Russia)
ALTER EGO by 株式会社カラメルカラム
Jumpion - Make a two-step jump ! by Comgate
SumoRoll - Road to the Yokozuna by Studio Kingmo
Escape Game: The Little Prince by 株式会社 Jammsworks
ゴリラ！ゴリラ！ゴリラ！by Gang Gorilla Games
タシテケス by 個人
Destination: Dragons! by GAME GABURI
Cute cat's cake shop by 個人
Hamcorollin' by illuCalab.
Food Truck Pup: Cooking Chef by 合同会社ゲームスタート
다크타운 - 온라인 by 초콜릿소프트
Bad 2 Bad: Extinction by Dawinstone
셧더펑 : 슈팅액션 by Take Five Games
Catch Idle by HalftimeStudio
Mahjong - Magic Fantasy by Aquagamez
Road to Valor: World War II by Dreamotion Inc.
Rhythm Star: Music Adventure by Anbsoft
Super Jelly Pop by STARMONSTER
UNLINK Daily Puzzle by Supershock
몬스터파크 온라인 by OVENCODE
We will welcome all finalists at events in London, Seoul, and Tokyo, where they will showcase their games to an audience of players, press and industry experts, for a chance to win the top prizes.
The events are open to the public, so if you would like to meet these games developers, try out their creations, and help choose the winners, sign up on the regional websites.
Congratulations to all finalists!
* The competition is open to developers from the following European countries and Israel: Austria, Belgium, Belarus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Romania, Russia, Slovakia, Spain, Sweden, Ukraine, and the United Kingdom (including Northern Ireland).
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