Posted by Jian Zhou, Director of Engineering, Google Play CommerceGoogle Play Commerce provides buyer support in over 190 markets, extensive support for local payment methods, and monetization tools to increase buyer conversion, engagement, and retention – all built on our trusted and secure platform. This year, we’ve made improvements across our platform, with new purchase optimizations, more flexibility and control when selling subscriptions, and enhancements to monetization insights and programs aimed at boosting your revenue.

Smoother, more frictionless purchase experience

Google Play offers users a consistent, familiar purchase experience, and over the past year we’ve launched two major new features to make in-app purchases even more frictionless.

• Multi-quantity purchases allow your users to purchase more than one of a popular item with ease. You can configure which products are eligible for multi-quantity directly in Play Console to let users easily select the quantity they want to purchase directly in the cart.

  Implement multi-quantity purchases to allow users to easily purchase more than one item at a time.

• We are also improving the experience for purchases made by supervised accounts, and users will start seeing this update rollout this month. Parents or “the family manager” can now make app & in-app purchases for their child without requiring to set up a family payment method.

For example, when a child account attempts to make a purchase in your app without a family payment method set up, instead of prompting them to ask the family manager to set one up, a purchase request is sent to the family manager who can complete the purchase with any payment method on their profile, including gift cards. If preferred, the family manager still has the option to set up a family payment method.

Parents can now easily approve purchases requested by child accounts with their own profile without needing to set up a family payment method.

More flexible subscriptions to improve reach, conversion, and retention

Digital subscriptions continue to be one of the fastest-growing ways for developers to monetize on Google Play, so we reimagined the developer experience and added new tools to give you more flexibility and control when it comes to growing and retaining your subscribers.

• New subscription capabilities separate your subscription products – what you sell – from how you sell them, allowing you to configure multiple base plans and offers for each subscription. This can help you reduce operational costs by eliminating the need to create and manage an ever-increasing number of SKUs.

  In the past, multiple billing durations and special offers were each defined as fully independent SKUs. If multiple SKUs provided the same benefits with different combinations of billing periods or pricing, this quickly became complex.

  New model separates your subscription products – what you sell – from how you sell them

  Check out the video below and take our Play Academy course to learn more about configuring base plans and offers for your subscription, including offering prepaid plans that allow users access to pay a fixed amount of time, and then top-up as desired. If you haven’t yet integrated, check out this guide, documentation, and sample app to get started.

• We also launched In-App Messaging, a new way to retain more subscribers following a declined payment. Simply call the In-App Messaging API when a user opens the app, and if the user’s payment has been declined, they will be prompted to update their payment information.

*Based on experiments with early users

• Another way to improve retention is by adding benefits describing your subscription in Play Console. Benefits can remind users of the value they get from your subscription at key moments, such as when the user comes to manage their subscription on Play.

Add benefits descriptions to remind users of the value received from your subscription

Monetization insights and programs to boost your revenue

Ensuring your app or game’s monetization strategy reaches its full revenue potential is an important focus for us. This year we’ve launched a new monetization insights tool and continued to invest in programs that can complement your strategy.

• We realize how important it is to contextualize which metrics drive your topline revenue and which lower-level metrics can be further optimized to maximize your game’s revenue. Strategic guidance provides a visual metric hierarchy in Play Console of how your game’s revenue metrics impact your business goals and helps you to identify which metrics to prioritize, as well as opportunities to optimize a chosen metric by providing peer group benchmarks, country breakdowns, and trends. Check out the video below to learn more about strategic guidance and how its metric-specific recommendations can help transform insights into action.

• Google Play Points is another way to boost your revenue. Since launch, over 100 million members have joined the program! This year, those members have invested over billions of earned points into titles, increasing revenue on average between 5% and 30% for participating developers. Play Points has expanded to over 30 markets, including this year’s launches for users in India, Mexico, Czech Republic, and Poland. We’ve also added the ability to track Points coupon and out of app product transactions through financial reports in Play Console.
• Google Play Pass is a great way to complement your app or game’s monetization strategy - already featuring 1,100+ titles from over 500 developers. For Play Pass participating titles, we’ve seen Play revenue nearly double on average. Play Pass is now available in 92 markets, including expansion to two new key markets this year: India and Japan. We’ve also added over 200 new apps and games to our catalog this year and continue to invest in Play Pass’s growth by investing $2 million in local game studios, with our first Indie Games Fund in LATAM.

All these features and tools are now available on Google Play. To take full advantage of In-App Messaging, prepaid plans, and the new subscription capabilities, update to Play Billing Library 5.0 or newer. As we continue to invest in Play Commerce, we look forward to expanding your buyer reach and developing new monetization tools to help you grow your business.

Posted by Tom Grinsted, Group Product Manager, Google Play

Supporting and rewarding great Apps and Games on Google Play

At Google Play, our mission is to facilitate relationships between Android users and app and game developers, enabling tens of thousands of businesses worldwide to grow and thrive in the mobile ecosystem. Every day, together, we help billions of people discover engaging, helpful, and enriching experiences on their devices, which is why we care so deeply about the quality of the experience we offer on the Play Store.

To do that, we’re constantly developing new ways to promote and support high-quality titles throughout the entire lifecycle, from acquisition and engagement to retention and reacquisition. Over the coming months, we’re rolling out enhancements to Google Play and Google Play Console that embed your key events, content, and offers across the Google Play experience. These changes are designed to help you reach more people, improve discovery of higher-quality titles, and optimize your presence for the greatest possible impact.

To help you navigate these updates, we’re sharing our key thinking and direction early, and launching new features to help power your growth across your users’ lifecycle with you. So read on!

Powering developer success across the lifecycle

As a partner, we’re focused on helping developers succeed. In today's app ecosystem, where loyalty and re-engagement are more top of mind than ever before, we’re creating even more opportunities for developers to use our surfaces to not only find first-time users but also to engage, and re-acquire them. 

For select titles, LiveOps is a key channel to reach users directly on Google Play with great offers, launches, and events. LiveOps has helped titles like Rise of Kingdoms, Paramount+, and MyFitnessPal add exciting new content that inspire discovery, re-engagement, and monetization. On average, developers using LiveOps drive +3.6% increase in revenue and a +5.1% increase in 28DAU versus similar titles who don’t. Individual events are already garnering compelling uplifts from Play.

Play data: additional growth by a real LiveOp  Analysis: 90th percentile of over 70 recently run liveOps vs. control groups with 0.9 confidence interval

New content formats will help users discover and rediscover high-quality content to enjoy. Final design may vary.

To help you take full advantage of the opportunity that content on Play presents, we’re making key changes in Play Console. These start with the renaming of LiveOps to “Promotional Content.” This reflects the breadth of content you can submit to Play today, and new content types we’ll be adding over time. We’ve also updated format guidelines, priority quotas, and now enable bulk data downloads. If you're one of the thousands of titles that already use Promotional Content, look for messages in your Play Console Inbox to find out more. We're looking to expand access to even more apps and games next year.

These changes bring even more opportunities to leverage your events to grow your active audience and revenue. Visibility and promotion across Play are also dependent on the quality of your title and individual content. So make sure you check our updated content guidelines and recommendations.

Driving reacquisitions

Another key part of the lifecycle is bringing back users who’ve tried your title before. As mobile ecosystems continue to mature and developers continue to invest for the long-term, this growth channel is only getting more important.

That’s why we’re introducing Churned-user Custom Store Listings. These enable you to tell a different story to users on Play who’ve tried but uninstalled your apps or games before. Because our store listings power experiences like the overlay you see when interacting with an app ad on YouTube, your custom re-acquisition messages can be seen by users across different Google surfaces.

Over the coming months, we will also look at how Google Play can help enable more reacquisition for great, high-quality titles. Churned-user Custom Store Listings will begin rolling out towards the end of this year and you can express your interest in being one of the first to use them by filling out this form.

Caring about quality - driving acquisitions for high-quality apps and games

We focus on crafting exciting and fresh journeys for users on Play. Among other signals, quality evaluation factors in our teams’ judgements and editorial decisions. Users expect great experiences, and we aim to support titles that deliver on their expectation which is why quality is a key aspect of discovery.

First, we consider in-app quality. We look at a range of factors including: Does your title have a polished design, and content that keeps users engaged for the long term? Is your onboarding experience clear, and are any ads well-integrated? Does your title have intuitive navigation, controls, and menu access? Do you meet the guidelines for functional behavior across all the form factors that you support? And is your title accessible to all users?

Technical quality is another important consideration. It can differ greatly depending on user and device, so we're introducing new more user-focused crash and ANR metrics in Android vitals. These will increasingly influence Play Store treatments—steering users away from titles that are likely to provide a poor experience on their specific devices, and towards ones that may be more suitable. In some cases, a warning could be displayed on store listings.

Users may see a store listing warning if a title has a user-perceived crash rate or user-perceived ANR rate above 8% on their phone model starting November 30, 2022. Note that final design and text is subject to change.

We’ll warn you in Android vitals if there’s a risk that your app will get this treatment before it’s visible in Play, so you can take remedial action. Please read our App Quality blog post to learn more.

Finally on the topic of quality, we’re setting a minimum ratings bar of 3.0 stars to improve top charts. We will first launch the ratings change to Top Free charts worldwide and across all form factors in February 2023. Later next year, we plan to bring this change to top paid and grossing charts as well.

Play Console has tools for you to triage your rating, deep dive into top issues users are writing about and respond to reviews directly. Find out more here.

Being transparent about our contributions

As we continue to make Play an even more valuable platform for developers, we want to make sure that you can see the positive impact our surfaces have on your growth. So we’re updating Store Performance reports to better reflect how users discover your titles on Play. This includes more data from off-Play experiences, differentiating paid-for and direct traffic from users’ organic behavior on Play, and the inclusion of key discovery journeys - for instance, searching for categories like ‘Puzzle Games’ - in Explore traffic. Coming soon, we’ll send you a message in Play Console when this update goes live.

All of these changes, along with other exciting features we have in the works, work together. So if you’re invested in the quality of your experiences, evolving your offer, and crafting exciting events and compelling content, Play is the platform and partner to super-charge your growth and success.

Posted by Ron Aquino, Senior Director, Trust and Safety, Chrome, Android and Play

Google Play has been the launchpad for millions of developer businesses to connect with consumers around the world as we strive to deliver a safe place to find great apps and games. Our safety initiatives and policies are core ways that we create the trusted experience that users have come to expect. By responsibly evolving these features, policies, and programs, we’re able to help you safely launch new experiences to more than 2.5 billion users in 190 countries around the world.

Today, we’re sharing a number of new features and programs to better partner with you and continue making Google Play a safe platform for everyone.

Protecting your business and your users from risky, unknown traffic

We launched Play Integrity API to all developers earlier this year to help you detect risky, unknown interactions such as from tampered versions of your app or unsupported app environments. You call this API when a user performs an action in your app to check whether it’s your genuine app on a genuine Android device. If something’s off, you can decide what defensive actions to take. Early data show that this feature has helped developers reduce unauthorized usage of their apps by over 50%.

In addition to customizing your API responses and setting up tests in Play Console, we’re launching reporting so you can analyze and break down API responses across your install base. And, soon, you’ll be able to debug Integrity API responses from the Play Store app’s developer settings on any device. This will help you spot issues and refine your anti-abuse strategy. Get started today with the Play Integrity API here.

Introducing new protections against review attacks on Play apps

Expanding our program to give developers direct Play Policy support

Launching the Strike Removal pilot program

Previewing a more privacy-friendly approach to advertising

As a reminder, Privacy Sandbox for Android is a multi-year initiative to create innovative technologies that will both protect user privacy and give you tools to build thriving digital businesses. These solutions aim to make current tracking mechanisms obsolete and limit covert tracking techniques, like fingerprinting. To do this, we're working on core advertising capabilities that don’t need access to cross-app identifiers, like the Ad ID. You'll be able to use these solutions individually or together to target ads and measure them to create efficient campaigns, all while better protecting user privacy. We’re working in close partnership with the industry and developers. Today, you can test Developer Previews, begin designing integrations, and send us feedback.As a platform, we only succeed when our developers succeed. We work with partners, like you, every day to understand the challenges you face, help launch innovative apps to Google Play, and ensure that the apps remain safe and trusted by our shared users. Thank you for your partnership in making Google Play a safe and trustworthy platform for everyone.