Posted by Purnima Kochikar, Director, Apps and Games Business Development, Google Play
During a special ceremony last tonight at Google I/O, we honored ten apps and games for their outstanding achievements as part of the inaugural Google Play Awards.
As we shared onstage, when you look at how Google Play has evolved over the years, it’s pretty amazing. We’re now reaching over 1 billion users every month and there’s literally something for everyone. From real-time multiplayer to beautiful Indie games, industry changing startups to innovative uses of mobile technology, developers like you continue to push the boundaries of what apps can do.
Congrats to the following developers in each category!
Posted by Purnima Kochikar, Director, Google Play Apps & Games
Google Play reaches over 1 billion monthly active users giving developers the world’s largest app distribution platform. Last year, Play users installed apps 65 billion times. To keep that great momentum going, we’re continuing to listen to your feedback and invest in more ways to help you grow your app or game business. Today, we’re sharing new features that benefit developers of all sizes.
Improvements to beta tests and app discovery on Google Play
Beta testing is a crucial tool that many developers use in the Google Play Developer Console to test their apps with real users, gather feedback, and make improvements before launching widely. Open beta tests are helpful to get feedback from a large group of users and allow any user to join a beta test. We're making open beta tests easier to find and participate in: apps that are available only as open betas and aren’t in production yet will soon appear in Play search results, users will be able to opt-in from Play store listings directly, and users will be able to send you private feedback through your Play store listing too.
We'll also be adding a new featured section to the store, called Google Play Early Access, showcasing a hand-picked group of promising open betas that haven’t gone to production yet.
There are more than a million apps available on Google Play and we continue to work on making it easy for people to discover the apps they’ll love. To that end, you’ll start seeing new collections on the store for tasks that might require a combination of apps. For example, when you're buying a house, you’ll see the best apps for finding real estate, keeping notes, getting a mortgage, and travelling in the area in one handy collection. Developers don’t need to take any action to take advantage of this benefit, apps will automatically be chosen. These contextual collections make it easier for users to discover complimentary apps as well as new types of apps.
Users can now opt-in to beta tests from the Play Store
An example of a new collection for apps relating to buying a house
Improve your app with the Play pre-launch report
Your app business relies on having high quality apps. To achieve quality, your apps need to be tested on a range of real devices before you ship them to your users. Play’s new pre-launch report summarizes issues found when testing your app on Firebase Test Lab for Android on a wide range of devices.
The pre-launch report in the Developer Console
Along with diagnostics to help you fix any crashes we detected in your app, your reports will also include screenshots from devices that use different Android versions, languages, and screen resolutions. These can help you find layout issues. We’ve also included early warnings of known security vulnerabilities that may have sneaked into your app -- even via third party libraries you rely on. You can enable the pre-launch report in the Developer Console.
Gain deeper insights from user reviews at a glance and reply to user reviews more easily
Your app reviews offer a wealth of information on what your users like and dislike about your app. We’re expanding on the improvements we made to ratings and reviews earlier this year, to offer you more ways to take advantage of reviews and better engage your audience.
Review benchmarks let you see your app’s rating distribution compared to similar apps in your category for a list of common topics which are relevant for all apps – like design, stability, and speed. You are also able to see how each area impacts your app’s rating. Review topics will let you see your app’s rating distribution for a list of topics which are specific to your app. With this analysis functionality, you can more easily identify what users think of your app and where to focus your improvement efforts.
Review benchmarks in the Developer Console
Developers frequently tell us they find replying to reviews valuable as a channel to directly engage their audience and gather feedback. In fact, we have found that users who update their star rating after a developer has responded to their review increase it by an average of 0.7 stars. For developers who have their own customer support solutions, we’re making replying easier with a new Reply to Reviews API. In the last few months, we’ve tested the API with Zendesk and Conversocial, so you can now start replying to reviews directly from those popular platforms or build your own custom integration.
Developers can now reply to reviews on Google Play from platorms such as Zendesk and Conversocial
Understand more about user acquisition and conversion, and see how you’re doing compared to others
The User Acquisition performance report in the Developer Console gives you a snapshot of how many users visit your store listing, how many install your app, and how many go on to make purchases. We’ve now added the ability to see user acquisition data by country and you’ll soon be able to see user acquisition benchmarks and compare your app’s conversion rates to similar apps on the Play store. With this data, you can find opportunities to focus your marketing efforts and increase your installs with tools like Store Listing Experiments.
User acquisition country data in the Developer Console
Building apps and games for billions of users
Hundreds of millions of users, many of them in emerging markets, are coming online and, for many of them, their first experience is on an Android device.
To help you get your app ready for this opportunity, we’ve created Building for Billions guidelines with a development checklist to help you optimize your app. You can also get more in-depth tips and best practices for expanding to new markets in the accompanying Building for Billions Playbook.
To help you meet local expectations when you set your prices and make purchases more attractive to your users, the Developer Console will now automatically round prices to local conventions in each market. For example, for a US app priced at $1.99, a user in Japan would see ￥200 rather than a non-rounded price from a straight FX conversion. You can also set up pricing templates to change pricing for products in bulk. You can make this change in the Developer Console.
While you're working on getting your app ready for billions of users, we've been enhancing the Google Play experience for them too. With improved compression, we've made app updates more data efficient, and we're focusing on making the Play Store itself faster than ever on all connection types.
We’ve also revamped how we select visible apps in key markets like India and Brazil to better showcase apps that are more relevant locally and apps made by local developers. And we continue to add more payment methods in new countries, including carrier billing and gift cards in India and Indonesia.
Two new apps: Get your app data and important notifications on the go, and stay up to date with best practices
To give you access to your data when you need it, and to keep you informed of crucial business updates with notifications, we’re launching the Play Console app. You can access your app’s data including installs, uninstalls, crashes, ratings, and reviews. You can also receive push notifications for important news like when your app update is live on Google Play. And you can even reply to reviews directly in the app, making it easier and quicker to engage your audience when you want to. Get the Play Console app on Google Play today.
Staying on top of all the features and best practices and strategies you should consider when growing your business can be a challenge. We’ve built another app, the Playbook by Google Play. The Playbook is a tailored list, based on your objectives, of the latest articles and videos from Google experts and across the web to help you grow a successful business on Google Play. Join the Playbook beta today and let us know your feedback.
The Play Console app
Playbook by Google Play
Finally, we will be soon making some updates to the Developer Distribution Agreement (DDA), which includes the ability for family members to share purchased apps on Google Play. Here you can see the updated DDA.
Developers have built amazing Android apps. They use your mobile device to the fullest, including the camera, GPS, and sensors to connect to the real world. They’re beautiful and immersive, with Material Design and smooth animations running at 60 frames per second. They use access to identity and payments to create seamless experiences.
But developers tell us they wish they could bring users into their apps more quickly and easily. With the web, you can click on a link and land on a web page — it takes one click and just a few seconds. It should be easier for users to access a wider range of apps, and for developers to reach more people.
So, we asked ourselves: How do we make it possible for people to access a wider range of apps, seamlessly? How do we help developers reach more people? And how do we do that while giving developers access to the range of capabilities and experiences that Android apps provide?
Today we’re sharing a preview of a new project that we think will change how people experience Android apps. We call it Android Instant Apps, and it evolves Android apps to be able to run instantly, without requiring installation. With Instant Apps, a tap on a URL can open right in an Android app, even if the user doesn’t have that app installed.
As a developer, you won’t need to build a new, separate app. It’s the same Android APIs, the same project, the same source code. You’ll simply update your existing Android app to take advantage of Instant Apps functionality. In fact, it can take less than a day to get up and running for some developers, though the effort involved will vary depending on how your app is structured. You modularize your app, and Google Play downloads only the parts that are needed, on the fly. And when you do upgrade, your app will be available to more than a billion users on Android devices going back to Jelly Bean.
This is a big change, so it's going to take some time. We’ve been working with a small set of partners to help refine the experience, including developers like BuzzFeed, B&H Photo, Medium, Hotel Tonight, Zumper and Disney. We’ll be gradually expanding access for developers and bringing Instant Apps to users later this year.
B&H Photo
(via Google Search)
BuzzFeedVideo
(via a shared link)
Park and Pay (example)
(via NFC)
If you’re interested in learning more about Android Instant Apps, please check out the Android developers website, where you can sign up for updates as they become available. We can’t wait to see what you build when your app is just a tap away.
We’re constantly investing in new tools and services to help developers build secure Android applications. This includes the application sandbox and Security APIs in the platform, Security APIs in Google Play Services, and even open source testing tools. Last year, Google Play also helped developers enhance the security of their applications by looking directly at the code they’ve written and offering suggestions for improvements.
The Google Play App Security Improvement Program is the first of its kind. It has two core components: We provide developers with security tips to help them build more secure apps, and we help developers identify potential security enhancements when uploaded to Google Play. This week, to help educate developers, Kristian Monsen, one of our engineers, gave a presentation about security best practices at the Samsung Developer Conference. And in 2015, we worked with developers to improve the security of over 100,000 apps through the program.
How it works
Before any app is accepted into Google Play, it is scanned for safety and security, including potential security issues. We also continuously re-scan the over one million apps in Google Play for additional threats.
If your app is flagged for a potential security issue, you will be notified immediately to help you quickly address the issue and help keep your users safe. We’ll deliver alerts to you using both email and the Google Play Developer Console, with links to a support page with details about how to improve the app.
Typically, these notifications will include a timeline for delivering the improvement to users as quickly as possible. Applications may be required to make security improvements before any other app updates can be be published.
You can confirm that you’ve fully addressed the issue by uploading the new version of your app to the Google Play Developer Console. Be sure to increment the version number of the fixed app. After a few hours, check the Developer Console for the security alert; if it’s no longer there, you’re all set!
The success of this program rests on our partnership with you—the developers of apps on Google Play—and the security community. We’re all responsible for providing safe, secure apps to our users. For feedback or questions, please reach out to us through the Google Play Developer Help Center. To report potential security issues in apps, please reach out to us at security+asi@android.com.
We recently updated The Secrets to App Success on Google Play with tools and tips to help app and game developers grow successful businesses on Google Play. However, many great apps are created by agencies and freelancers on behalf of companies. Today, we’re releasing a new playbook to help companies of any size who are considering outsourcing their Android app development.
How do you choose an agency? What are the pitfalls you should avoid? What can you do to make your app successful? These are some of the questions tackled by the new Outsourcing Playbook that you can read on Google Play.
Let us know your feedback
Once you’ve checked out the guide, we’d love to hear your feedback so we can continue to improve our developer resources and support. Let us know what you think.
Posted by Purnima Kochikar, Director, Apps and Games Business Development, Google Play
Google Play has seen tremendous growth over the past year, reaching more than 1 billion Android users across 190 countries. As a way to recognize our incredible developer community and highlight some of the best apps and games, we’re kicking off our first-ever Google Play Awards.
The program will showcase five nominees across 10 award categories and feature them in a dedicated collection on Google Play. Nominees were selected by a panel of experts on the Google Play team based on criteria emphasizing app quality, innovation, and having a launch or major update in the last 12 months. The winners of each category will be announced at Google I/O in May.
The full list of categories and nominees are below:
Standout Startup
Apps from new developers that offer a unique experience while achieving strong install growth. And the nominees are...
Join us live at the ceremony on May 19th at 7:00 pm PDT on stage 7 at Google I/O or via the live stream. You can also track the conversation on Twitter and G+ using the hashtags #io16.
