Google is rolling out a series of upgrades to its Play Store to help Android app developers better market their software and services to consumers. Among the highlights are new tools for managing subscription apps, topic pages that let users explore a specific subject on the Play Store, a new feature that allows people to sample audio from developers’ apps, and a more flexible checkout experience that will make it easier for developers to sell add-ons, among other things.
Google last week shared a number of Android-related announcements at a pre-show before the start of its annual developer conference, Google I/O. However, it saved the Play Store improvements for Tuesday’s keynote at Google I/O, highlighting their importance to Google’s bottom line.
Today, tech giants like Apple and Google are facing a market where app developers have more choice in how they price and sell their mobile software, thanks to anticompetitive regulations, new laws, and recent court victories. As a result, Google has been working to make its own Android app marketplace more compelling for developers, who now collectively sell over a quarter-billion subscriptions.
For starters, the company said it’s giving developers the useful ability to halt fully live app releases if the developer identifies a problem that needs to be quickly addressed.
Another feature, initially only available in the U.S., will add new “topic browse” pages for media and entertainment on the Play Store, allowing users to connect with apps related to over 100,000 different shows and movies.
For example, you could look up a favorite show, movie, or sports event and find out which apps you could use to stream them. (Plus, the existing “Where to Watch” feature that deep links users to their subscribed apps will roll out to the U.K., Korea, Indonesia, and Mexico after it initially launched in the U.S. last year.)
These pages will be accessible from multiple places within the Play Store, including the Apps Home page, store listing pages, and search.
Developers will also be able to add a hero content carousel and YouTube playlist carousel to app listings on the Play Store. For apps that have audio content, the Play Store will soon launch audio samples on the Apps Home page. (This feature is already live for Health & Wellness app developers in the U.S. Google says in early tests, audio samples helped improve app installs by 3x.)
Curated spaces, a feature launched last year to Google Play users to connect with their interests — like comics or soccer, for instance — will also roll out to more locations and categories this year. Google noted that the curated space for comics was fairly popular, reaching over 920,000 users in Japan per month.
In the Play Console for managing apps, a new asset library will help developers organize their visual assets, including uploading them from Google Drive, tagging them, and cropping them for reuse. Other new metrics will offer insights into apps’ listing performance.
New dedicated overview pages for testing and releasing software will arrive, as well as pages focused on monitoring and improving app releases. Both of these will include additional metrics and actionable advice for developers in a new “Take Action” section.
Subscription management tools are getting an upgrade, too, with added support for multi-product checkout for subscriptions, which means developers will be able to sell subscription add-ons alongside their base subscriptions under a single payment schedule.
For users, this leads to a simplified checkout experience, while also letting them better control their subscriptions when it comes time to upgrade or downgrade their add-ons.
The Play Store will remind users of their subscription benefits in more places, including in the Subscription Center, in reminder emails, and during purchase and cancellation flows. The changes, which have already rolled out, are decreasing voluntary churn by 3%, Google claims. Developers will additionally be able to choose to offer a grace period of 30 days or account hold of up to 60 days when their customers’ payment method declines, giving the users time to fix the problem before their account is cancelled.
The Engage SDK, launched last year, has offered developers a way to send personalized content recommendations to users’ home screens on Android devices. Now it’s adding support for more categories, like Travel, and is rolling out to more markets, including Brazil, India, Indonesia, Japan, and Mexico.
Plus, content created with the SDK will be featured on the Play Store later this summer, in addition to existing spaces like Collections on users’ Android smartphones or the Entertainment Space on select Android tablets.
Google notes that the Play Integrity API, which is designed to help combat emerging threats on the Play Store, has been enhanced with stronger abuse detection for all developers and device security update checks to safeguard an app’s more sensitive actions, like transfers or data access. It will also be able to detect if a device is being reused for abuse or repeated actions, even after a device reset. This latter feature will be offered in beta.
