Android Developers Blog

Posted by Neethi Thomas, Dafna Gal and Ashnil Dixit, Google Play At Google Play, we’re committed to giving Android developers access to the largest possible market for your apps and games. Google Play already supports free and paid apps in over 165 markets. We had previously lowered minimum prices developers can set for their products for 20 markets like India and Brazil. Today, we’re happy to announce that we have reduced the minimum price limit for products in 20 more markets across Latin America, EMEA, and APAC. With these new lower limits, you can now set prices in the range of 10-30 cents US equivalent in most of these markets. These ultra-low price points, or “sub-dollar” prices, allow you to reach new potential buyers by adjusting your pricing to better reflect local purchasing power and demand. It also gives you more flexibility to set your global pricing strategy and gives more users the opportunity to enjoy monetized experiences in your apps and games. The minimum price limi...

Posted by Tom Grinsted, Product Manager, Google Play Console Google Play Console has something for everyone, from QAs and PMs to engineers and marketing managers. The new Google Play Console beta , available now at play.google.com/console , offers customized, secure access to everyone on your team. For a closer look at some of its new features and workflows, tune in to this week’s series of live webinars , which will also be available on demand. Granting your team members safe access to specific features in your developer account is one of the best ways to increase the value of our tools for your organization. We want to make sure that your developer account is as safe as possible so you feel confident when granting access. A key way to do that is to make sure that every person who has access to your account signs in using secure methods that follow best practices. That’s why, towards the end of this year, we’re going to start requiring users of Google Play Console to sign in using ...

Posted by Angela Ying, Product Manager, Google Play Subscription continues to be one of the fastest growing business models for apps in Google Play. As your subscription business evolves and becomes more sophisticated, our platform continues to evolve to better support your needs. Today we’re excited to tell you more about the new subscription capabilities we announced at the Android 11 Beta Launch , including promotional codes to help you access new subscribers, new opportunities to remind users of your value and win back churned users. Many of these capabilities are built on top of the Play Billing Library version 3 . In addition to the new capabilities, we are also making improvements to our existing platform. Over the past few years, we have launched many features, such as account hold, restore, and pause, which have been highly effective in reducing your voluntary and involuntary churn. We want to ensure that everyone can take advantage of them, which is why we are planning on cha...

Posted by Angela Ying, Product Manager, Google Play For many developers, subscriptions are an important part of your business. Google Play has continued to support the growth of subscription offerings through developer tools such as new insights in the Google Play Console , and an improved user experience, including the subscriptions center , where users can easily manage all of their subscriptions. Part of improving the subscription user experience comes from fostering a trustworthy platform for subscribers; making sure they feel fully informed when they purchase in-app subscriptions. To continue to build this trust, we announced an updated subscriptions policy today , as part of a broader policy update to build user trust and enhance user safety across Google Play. This new policy requires you to be transparent about your subscription offering, to ensure every user evaluating your service has an informed choice. When users lose trust in your app due to unclear subscription offers, ...

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 de...

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 ...

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. Good in-app user ...

Posted by Gloria On, Program Manager, Google Play Many developers are increasingly focused on growing their businesses globally, and there were more than 94 billion apps downloaded from Google Play in the last year, reaching more than 190 countries. The regulatory environment is frequently changing in local markets, and in some countries local governments have implemented withholding tax requirements on transactions with which Google or our payment processor partners must comply. We strive to help both developers and Google meet local tax requirements in markets where we do business, and where Google or our payment processor partners are required to withhold taxes, we may need to deduct those amounts from our payments to developers. Due to new requirements in some markets, we'll be rolling out withholding taxes soon to all those doing business in those countries. We wanted to bring this to the attention of Google Play developers to allow you time to prepare for these upcoming chang...

Posted by Gloria On, Program Manager, Google Play Many developers are increasingly focused on growing their businesses globally, and there were more than 94 billion apps downloaded from Google Play in the last year, reaching more than 190 countries. The regulatory environment is frequently changing in local markets, and in some countries local governments have implemented withholding tax requirements on transactions with which Google or our payment processor partners must comply. We strive to help both developers and Google meet local tax requirements in markets where we do business, and where Google or our payment processor partners are required to withhold taxes, we may need to deduct those amounts from our payments to developers. Due to requirements in some local markets, we'll be rolling out withholding taxes soon to all those doing business in those countries. We wanted to bring this to the attention of Google Play developers to allow you time to prepare for these upcoming cha...

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. Updating from versions 1 and 2 to the latest version 3 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. Migrating to version 3 If you use the Google Play API client libraries (available for Java , Python , and other popular languages), we recommend upgrading to their latest versi...

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. Updating from versions 1 and 2 to the latest version 3 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. Migrating to version 3 If you use the Google Play API client libraries (available for Java , Python , and other popular languages), we recommend upgrading to their latest versions,...

Posted by Steve Suppe, Product Manager, Google Play As part of our focus and dedication to improving the Google Play Store experience for our users, we are introducing new design specifications for your app icons. Left to right: original icon, new icon (example), original icon in legacy mode As of early April, you will be able to upload new icons to the Google Play Console and confirm you are compliant with the new specification. Original icons are still accepted in the Google Play Store during this time. As of May 1st, developers will no longer be able to upload icons in the Play Console which do not meet the new specifications, although existing original icons in the Google Play Store during this period can remain unchanged. By June 24, we require you to: Update your icon to the new specification . Upload your icon to Play Console. Confirm in Play Console that your icon meets the new specification. We highly recommend that you update your icons and confirm they meet the new...

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...

Posted by Vineet Buch, Director of Product Management, Google Play Apps & Games Read this in العَرَبِيَّة‎‎ , Deutsch , español (Latinoamérica) , le français , Bahasa Indonesia , Italiano , 日本語 , 한국어 , português do Brasil , русский язы́к , ไทย , Türkçe , tiếng Việt , 中文 (简体) or 中文 (繁體) . Today we kicked off our annual global Playtime series with back-to-back events in Berlin and San Francisco. Over the next month, we’ll be hearing from many app and game developers in cities around the world. It has been an amazing 2017 for developers on Google Play, there are now more than 8 billion new installs per month globally. To help you continue to take advantage of this opportunity, we're announcing innovations on Google Play and new features in the Play Console. Follow us on Medium where presenters will be posting their strategies, best practices, and examples to help you achieve your business objectives. As Google Play continues to grow rapidly, we want to help people understand our...