Posted by Kacey Fahey, Games Developer Marketing, Google
Cross-posting from the Google Developers Blog.
Google has lots to share with the game development community at the Game Developers Conference (GDC) in March. Check out our plans and sign up to keep up to date with the latest GDC news and announcements from Android, Google Play, Firebase, and more.
For one week, tens of thousands of creators from the gaming community come together at GDC to hear the latest industry innovations and network with peers to enable better gaming experiences for players around the world.
Below is a preview of what to expect from Google, and remember, it’s just the beginning. Don’t forget to sign up for our newsletter as we reveal more leading up to the event, or you can check out our website, Google for Games at GDC.
We will start the week with the Google for Games Keynote on Monday, March 16 at 9:30 am PST. Join the livestream and learn about the latest tools and solutions to help game developers create great games, connect with players, and scale their businesses.
Google Developer Keynote photo at GDC 2019
We have two days of in-depth sessions where you can uplevel your skills across Google products and solutions. Topics range from new tools to optimize game development, how to reach more devices and players, using new Firebase features to alleviate infrastructure management challenges, and much more.
Learn more about the Google Developer Summit we’ll be hosting on March 16 -17 and how you can join in person with an official GDC ticket or via livestream.
We’ll be sharing more details about everything we have planned at GDC in the coming weeks so be sure to sign up to be among the first to hear the latest updates, and save the date to watch the keynote and other Developer Summit sessions at g.co/gdc2020.
More to come soon!
The Google for Games team
*On-site events are part of the official Game Developers Conference and require a pass to attend.
The last 12 months have seen Google Play continue to grow, with over 116 billion downloads of the apps and games that you created.
We’ve been working hard to build the latest technology and tools for modern Android development and distribution, improving Google Play and the Play Console to offer you new and better ways for your app to be discovered, promoted, and monetized.
A key focus has been addressing the challenge of keeping users safe and maintaining trust in Google Play.
We are focused on building great tools and services and your feedback is crucial in helping us do so. You have told us that you love Android’s openness, but we have also heard that you would like us to marry it with an opinion about the right way to do things. We call this approach modern Android development: opinionated and powerful, for fast, easy development, taking away everything that slows you down so you can focus on building incredible experiences. You can see modern Android development come to life in a number of investments we made this year:
Android 10, released earlier this year, is built around three important themes. First, Android 10 is shaping the leading edge of mobile innovation with advanced machine-learning and support for emerging devices like foldables and 5G enabled phones. Next, Android 10 has a central focus on privacy and security, with almost 50 features that give users greater protection, transparency, and control. Finally, Android 10 expands users' digital wellbeing controls so individuals and families can find a better balance with technology.
We introduced Android App Bundles last year as a mechanism to simplify and streamline app distribution, overcome the constraints of APK publishing, and introduce advanced distribution features such as dynamic delivery. There are now over 300K app bundle apps and games in production, covering nearly 30% of all active installs. If this doesn’t include your app or game, check out 16 reasons to publish your apps and games with the Android App Bundle.
This year we’ve made it much easier to test and implement app bundles and dynamic delivery. Internal app sharing makes it easy to share test builds with others. You can easily grant anyone on your team the ability to upload a test build to Play and get a download link to share with your testers. With internal app sharing, you can be sure that each device is receiving exactly what Play would deliver in the wild. You don’t need to use version codes or the prod signing key, and can even upload debuggable artifacts.You can also get download links for old versions of your app from the Play Console, whether they’re app bundles or APKs.
In 2019, you helped us make Google Play even safer, building user trust in your apps and Google Play as a whole. Thanks to your hard work, we have:
To help you protect your apps, we’ve improved our ability to detect impersonators, repackaging, bad content, and other forms of abuse. Additionally, we’re investing in resources like policy-focused Play Academy courses to help you better understand and navigate our policy changes.
Because the threats are always changing, it’ll take all of us working together to keep users safe and our platform secure. Thank you for continuing to work with us on this.
During 2019 we continued to look for new ways to help you market and monetize your apps and games:
With such scale comes responsibility. We’re committed to ensuring our users’ safety for the future, to making development easier and distribution faster, and to offering you more effective ways for your app to be discovered and monetized.
On this note, we hope we can all continue working together to make Android and Google Play better for billions of people around the world, in 2020, and the years to come. From everyone on our team, we wish you all a happy holiday season and a prosperous new year.
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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.
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.
Starting August 1, 2019:
Google Play connects a thriving ecosystem of developers to people using more than 2 billion active Android devices around the world. In fact, more than 94 billion apps were installed from Google Play in the last year alone. We’re continuing to empower Android developers with new features in the Play Console to help you improve your app’s performance and grow your business. And, at Google I/O 2018, we’re introducing our vision for a new Android app model that is modular and dynamic.
The Android App Bundle is Android's new publishing format, with which you can more easily deliver a great experience in a smaller app size, and optimize for the wide variety of Android devices and form factors available. The app bundle includes all your app's compiled code and resources, but defers APK generation and signing to Google Play. You no longer have to build, sign, and manage multiple APKs.
Google Play's new app serving model, called Dynamic Delivery, uses your app bundle to generate and serve optimized APKs for each user's device configuration. This means people download only the code and resources they need to run your app. People see a smaller install size on the Play Store, can install your app more quickly, and save space on their devices.
(Left) An example of all resources being delivered to a device via a legacy APK. (Right) An example of Dynamic Delivery serving just what’s needed to a device.
With the Android App Bundle, you're also able to add dynamic feature modules to your app. Through Dynamic Delivery, your users can download your app's dynamic features on-demand, instead of during the initial install, further reducing your app's download size. To publish apps with dynamic feature modules, apply to join the beta.
Start using the Android App Bundle in the latest Android Studio canary release. Test your release using the testing tracks in the Play Console before pushing to production. Watch these I/O sessions to hear from the team as they introduce the new app model:
An internal study Google ran last year found that over 40% of one-star reviews on the Play Store mentioned app stability as an issue. Conversely, people consistently reward the best performing apps with better ratings and reviews, leading to better rankings on Google Play and more installs. Not only that, but people tend to be more engaged and willing to spend more time and money in those apps. To help you understand and fix quality issues we're improving a number of features in the Google Play Console.
Watch these I/O sessions where we introduce the new features and share examples of how developers are using them successfully:
The Play Console has tools and reports to help your whole team understand and improve your app's store performance and business metrics. The Play Console's access management controls were recently improved so you can more easily grant access to your whole team while having granular control over which data and tools they can see and use.
Subscriptions continue to see huge growth, with subscribers on Google Play growing over 80% year over year. Google Play Billing offers developers useful features to acquire, engage, and retain subscribers, and gives users a consistent and familiar purchase flow. We're making improvements to help you prepare your subscriptions business for the future and to give users more information on their subscriptions.
Watch our I/O session where we explain the new features:
As we have announced, Google Play will require new apps (from August 2018) and app updates (from November 2018) to target API level 26 or higher. For more information and practical guidance on preparing for the new requirement, watch the I/O session, Migrating your existing app to target Android Oreo and above, and review our migration guide. If you develop an SDK or library that's used by developers, make sure it's ready to target Oreo too and sign up to receive news and updates for SDK providers.
To find out more about all these new features, learn best practices, understand how other developers are finding success, and hear from the teams building these features, watch the Android & Play sessions at I/O 2018. For more developer resources about how to improve your app's performance on Google Play, read this guide to the Google Play Console and visit the Android developers website. Finally, to stay up to date, sign up to our newsletter and follow us on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Medium where we post regularly.
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We've been working hard to make Google Play the premier platform for game discovery and a place for you to grow your business. In the last year, the number of Android users who installed a game has more than doubled. Nearly 40% of that growth came from emerging markets, including Brazil, India, Indonesia and Mexico. Our investments extend beyond the Play Store and include many key Google products:
Today, during our annual Google Developer Day at the Game Developers Conference, we introduced new tools and platforms to improve the overall game discovery on Google Play and give you more ways to deliver engaging player experiences.
With all the great games available on Google Play, we want to make discovery easier and remove friction during the install process. Installing and opening a game takes time and results in many players never getting to experience your game. We're thrilled to announce that instant apps is now available for games.
This means that with a tap, players can try a game without having to download it first. Games available instantly today include: Clash Royale, Words with Friends 2, and Bubble Witch 3 Saga, and other titles from Playtika, MZ, Jam City, and Hothead Games.
We're calling this new experience Google Play Instant. To try it out, simply launch the Google Play Store on your Android device and visit the Instant Gameplay collection. Or, you can visit the "Arcade" in our redesigned Google Play Games app and launch any of the "Instant Gameplay" collection games. Google Play Instant makes it easier to have your players invite their friends to try out games right away through social invites and lets you share games through marketing campaigns.
Google Play Instant is still in closed beta and we look forward to opening it more broadly later this year. It provides a collection of extensions to the instant apps framework that better support the needs of game developers; including a higher APK size limit to 10MB, progressive download support for executable code and game assets, and support for NDK and game engines using existing tool chains. We're also working with popular game development platform Unity, and others including Cocos, to add IDE support making it easy for developers to build instant apps. Developers can sign up for more information about Google Play Instant as it becomes available.
Discover insights from game developers who have successfully benefited from Google Play Instant. Read how Zynga, King, Hothead Games, Jam City, Playtika, MZ and Magma Mobile successfully used instant apps to acquire new users, improve retention, and effectively cross-promote their games.
We also added some useful tools to the Play Console to help you build great games, including:
This is just the start of what we have planned for 2018. We can't wait to see Google Play Instant bring new audiences to your games.
The subscription business model is one of the best ways to make more regular, reliable, and recurring revenue on Android and Google Play. In fact, both developers and users love subscription apps so much that we’ve seen a 10X growth in consumer spend over the past three years and double the number of active subscribers in the past year. Thousands of developers are offering subscriptions through Google Play and are already seeing success with our billing platform. That’s why we’ve been working hard to help you take advantage of this opportunity and give you greater insights into your business and Android users.
You've got a high-performing product with fantastic features and compelling content, but your business can't succeed without acquiring new users. In addition to free trials, intro pricing, flexible billing periods, and more, we recently launched the ability to pay for subscriptions with Google Play balance. Although people have already been using gift cards to pay for Play content in over 20 countries, the use of gift cards to pay for subscriptions in regions where cash is a popular form of payment, such as Latin America, has resulted in as high as a 15% increase in subscription spend.
But it's not just about acquiring new customers, it's about retaining the ones you have. That's why we are introducing account hold, where we work with you to block access to your content or service if a user's form of payment fails. This directly links a payment failure to the user losing access to your content and/or premium features, which is enough to get them to go and choose a new form of payment. When Keepsafe–the developer of Keepsafe Photo Vault, a photo locker for private pictures and videos with over 50M downloads–integrated account hold, their renewal rate on Android increased by 25%. We have over a dozen developers in early access today, and we will be announcing public availability at the end of June.
We know data is vital to running your business, so we're excited to announce a new subscriptions dashboard in the Play Console, and a new report on Android app subscribers.
The dashboard brings together subscription data like new subscribers, cancellations, and total subscribers. It also displays daily and 30-day rolling revenue data, and highlights your top-performing products. This will give visibility into your subscription products and users and will help guide your business decisions.
In addition to products and features, understanding people's needs is core to building a successful subscription business. We talked to 2,000 Android app subscribers in the US and UK and asked them how and why they use the apps they do. The results shared in 'Subscription apps on Google Play: User insights to help developers win' report highlight some of the opportunities for you to grow your subscriptions user base, set pricing strategies and learn to keep your users engaged, including:
