Tag Archives: android developers

Optimize your subscriptions with new insights in the Play Console

Posted by Daniel Schramm, Product Manager, Google Play

Since launching on Google Play nearly 7 years ago, subscriptions have proven to be an essential element in creating sustainable mobile app businesses; 89 of the top 100 highest grossing apps on Google Play in the US now provide subscription products. As the market matures, it is becoming increasingly important for subscription developers to optimize both subscriber conversion and retention in order to maintain growth. To help you do that, we're rolling out new insights available directly in the Play Console.

Subscription retention report

Example subscription retention report data in the Play Console. Source: Google Internal Data.

The recently updated subscription retention report shows how well you are retaining subscribers, along with how well subscribers convert from free trial, introductory price, and first to second payment.

You can configure two cohorts based on SKU, country, and subscription start date. This is particularly useful for evaluating the success of A/B tests; for example, to determine if changing the duration of a free trial has an impact on free trial conversion.

Example free trial conversion data in the Play Console. Source: Google Internal Data.

Cancellation survey results

Retaining your existing subscribers is just as important as acquiring new subscribers, so we have updated the subscription cancellations report to give more insight into voluntary and involuntary cancellations.

The launch of the subscriptions center last year introduced a cancellation survey allowing users to give developers feedback as to why they were cancelling, with results available through the Google Play Developer API. To make these results easier to access and monitor, we now surface daily aggregates directly within the Play Console, along with the ability to download written responses in a CSV.

Example cancellation survey responses in the Play Console. Source: Google Internal Data.

Recover more users

Involuntary cancellations, which occur when a user's form of payment fails, account for over a third of all cancellations. The new recovery performance cards in the cancellation report helps you understand how effectively you are recovering users with grace period and account hold, and the day the subscriptions were recovered to help you evaluate the effectiveness of recovery messaging.

Example account hold performance recovery card in the Play Console. Source: Google Internal Data.

Make sure you've set up grace periods and account hold for your apps! We've seen that developers who use both grace period and account hold see more than a 3x increase in decline recovery rate from 10% to 33%. Discover more information on grace period and account hold.

You can find the subscription retention and cancellation reports linked from the bottom of the Subscriptions page, in the Financial reports section of the Play Console. If you don't have access to financial reporting, ask your developer account owner for permission to view financial data.

Example account hold performance recovery card in the Play Console. Source: Google Internal Data.

We hope this new reporting gives you new insights to optimize your subscription business, and we look forward to sharing more with you at Google I/O in May.

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The latest Android App Bundle updates including the additional languages API

Posted by Wojtek Kaliciński, Developer Advocate, Android

Last year, we launched Android App Bundles and Google Play's Dynamic Delivery to introduce modular development, reduce app size and streamline the release process. Since then, we've seen developers quickly adopt this new app model in over 60,000 production apps. We've been excited to see developers experience significant app size savings and reductions in the time needed to manage each release, and have documented these benefits in case studies with Duolingo and redBus.

Thank you to everyone who took the time to give us feedback on our initial launch. We're always open to new ideas, and today, we're happy to announce some new improvements based on your suggestions:

  • A new additional languages install API, which supports in-app language pickers
  • A streamlined publishing process for instant-enabled app bundles
  • A new enrollment option for app signing by Google Play
  • The ability to permanently uninstall dynamic feature modules that are included in your app's initial install


Additional languages API

When you adopt the Android App Bundle as the publishing format for your app, Google Play is able to optimize the installation by delivering only the language resources that match the device's system locales. If a user changes the system locale after the app is installed, Play automatically downloads the required resources.

Some developers choose to decouple the app's display language from the system locale by adding an in-app language switcher. With the latest release of the Play Core library (version 1.4.0), we're introducing a new additional languages API that makes it possible to build in-app language pickers while retaining the full benefits of smaller installs provided by using app bundles.

With the additional languages API, apps can now request the Play Store to install resources for a new language configuration on demand and immediately start using it.

Get a list of installed languages

The app can get a list of languages that are already installed using the SplitInstallManager#getInstalledLanguages() method. 

val splitInstallManager = SplitInstallManagerFactory.create(context)
val langs: Set<String> = splitInstallManager.installedLanguages

Requesting additional languages

Requesting an additional language is similar to requesting an on demand module. You can do this by specifying a language in the request through SplitInstallRequest.Builder#addLanguage(java.util.Locale). 

val installRequestBuilder = SplitInstallRequest.newBuilder()
installRequestBuilder.addLanguage(Locale.forLanguageTag("pl"))
splitInstallManager.startInstall(installRequestBuilder.build())

The app can also monitor install success with callbacks and monitor the download state with a listener, just like when requesting an on demand module.

Remember to handle the SplitInstallSessionStatus.REQUIRES_USER_CONFIRMATION state. Please note that there was an API change in a recent Play Core release, which means you should use the new SplitInstallManager#startConfirmationDialogForResult() together with Activity#onActivityResult(). The previous method of using SplitInstallSessionState#resolutionIntent() with startIntentSender() has been deprecated.

Check out the updated Play Core Library documentation for more information on how to access the newly installed language resources in your activity.

We've also updated our dynamic features sample on GitHub with the additional languages API, including how to store the user's language preference and apply it to your activities at startup.

Please note that while the additional languages API is now available to all developers, on demand modules are in a closed beta for the time being. You can experiment with on demand modules in your internal, open, and closed test tracks, while we work with our partners to make sure this feature is ready for production apps.

Instant-enabled App Bundle

In Android Studio 3.3, we introduced a way to build app bundles that contain both the regular, installed version of your app as well as a Google Play Instant experience for modules marked with the dist:instant="true" attribute in their AndroidManifest.xml: 

<manifest ... xmlns:dist="http://schemas.android.com/apk/distribution">
    <dist:module dist:instant="true" />
    ...
</manifest>

Even though you could use a single project to generate the installed and instant versions of your app, up until now, developers were still required to use product flavors in order to build two separate app bundles and upload both to Play.

We're happy to announce that we have now removed this restriction. It's now possible to upload a single, unified app bundle artifact, containing modules enabled for the instant experience. This functionality is now available for everyone.

After you build an instant-enabled app bundle, upload it to any track on the Play Console, and you'll be able to select it when creating a new instant app release. This also means that the installed and instant versions of your app no longer need different version codes, which will simplify the release workflow.

Opt in to app signing by Google Play

You need to enable app signing by Google Play to publish your app using an Android App Bundle and automatically benefit from Dynamic Delivery optimizations. It is also a more secure way to manage your signing key, which we recommend to everyone, even if you want to keep publishing regular APKs for now.

Based on your feedback, we've revamped the sign-up flow for new apps to make it easier to initialize the key you want to use for signing your app.

Now developers can explicitly choose to upload their existing key without needing to upload a self-signed artifact first. You can also choose to start with a key generated by Google Play, so that the key used to locally sign your app bundle can become your upload key.

Read more about the new flow.

Permanent uninstallation of install time modules

We have now added the ability to permanently uninstall dynamic feature modules that are included in your app's initial install.

This is a behavior change, which means you can now call the existing SplitInstallManager#deferredUninstall() API on modules that set onDemand="false". The module will be permanently uninstalled, even when the app is updated.

This opens up new possibilities for developers to further reduce the installed app size. For example, you can now uninstall a heavy sign-up module or any other onboarding content once the user completes it. If the user navigates to a section of your app that has been uninstalled, you can reinstall it using the standard on demand modules install API.

We hope you enjoy these improvements and test them out in your apps. Continue to share your feedback as we work to make these features even more useful for you!

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Introducing a new Google Play app and game icon specification


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:
  1. Update your icon to the new specification.
  2. Upload your icon to Play Console.
  3. 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 specification as soon as possible to ensure that you provide the highest quality experience for users.

What exactly is changing?

  • Icon assets will remain the same size (512 x 512), but transparent backgrounds will no longer be allowed.
  • Google Play on Android and Chrome OS will dynamically apply rounded corners and drop shadows to icons. The corner radius will be 20% of the icon size, to ensure consistency at different sizes.
  • There will be no changes to Google Play on other form factors (TV, Wear, Auto).
  • Note this does not affect your APK launcher icons for Android.
Timelines Changes
Early April You can start uploading your new icons in Play Console and confirm they meet the new specification.
  • Original icons will continue to display correctly in Google Play.
  • New icons will display correctly in Google Play.
May 1st Any new icons uploaded in Play Console must be confirmed as meeting the new specification.
  • Original icons will continue to display correctly in Google Play.
  • New icons will display correctly in Google Play.
June 24th Original icons are converted to "legacy mode." You must confirm that any new icons uploaded in Play Console meet the new specification.
  • Original icons will be automatically converted to "legacy mode" icons.
  • New icons render correctly in the Google Play Store.

These updates will help us all provide a more unified and consistent look and feel for Google Play, allowing us to better showcase your apps and games and provide a higher quality user experience.
We will be keeping you up-to-date with these changes in the coming months - so look out for more updates. In the meantime, check out our new icon design specifications.
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Grow your indie game with Google Play

Posted by Patricia Correa, Director, Platforms & Ecosystems Developer Marketing

Google Play empowers game developers of all sizes to engage and delight people everywhere, and build successful businesses too. We are inspired by the passion and creativity we see from the indie games community, and, over the past few years, we've invested in and nurtured indie games developers around the world, helping them express their unique voice and bring ideas to life.

This year, we've put together several initiatives to help the indie community.

Indie Games Showcase

For indie developers who are constantly pushing the boundaries of storytelling, visual excellence, and creativity in mobile we are announcing today the Indie Games Showcase, an international competition for games studios from Europe*, South Korea and Japan. Those of you who meet the eligibility criteria (as outlined below) can enter your game for a chance to win several prizes, including:

  • A paid trip and accommodation to the final event in your region to showcase your game.
  • Promotion on the Google Play Store.
  • Promotion on Android and Google Play marketing channels.
  • Dedicated consultations with the Google Play team.
  • Google hardware.
  • And more...

How to enter the competition

If you're over 18 years old, based in one of the eligible countries, have 30 or less full time employees, and have published a new game on Google Play after 1 January 2018, you can enter your game. If you're planning on publishing a new game soon, you can also enter by submitting a private beta. Submissions close on May 6 2019. Check out all the details in the terms and conditions for each region. Enter now!

Indie Games Accelerator

Last year we launched our first games accelerator for developers in Southeast Asia, India and Pakistan and saw great results. We are happy to announce that we are expanding the format to accept developers from select countries in the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America, with applications for the 2019 cohort opening soon. The Indie Games Accelerator is a 6 month intensive program for top games startups, powered by mentors from the gaming industry as well as Google experts, offering a comprehensive curriculum that covers all aspects of building a great game and company.

Mobile Developer Day at GDC

We will be hosting our annual Developer Day at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco on Monday, March 18th. Join us for a full day of sessions covering tools and best practices to help build a successful mobile games business. We'll focus on game quality, effective monetization and growth strategies, and how to create, connect, and scale with Google. Sign up to stay up to date or join us via livestream.

Developer Days

We also want to engage with you in person with a series of events. We will be announcing them shortly, so please make sure to sign up to our newsletter to get notified about events and programs for indie developers.

Academy for App Success

Looking for tips on how to use various developer tools in the Play Console? Get free training through our e-learning program, the Academy for App Success. We even have a custom Play Console for game developers course to get a jump start on Google Play.

We look forward to seeing your amazing work and sharing your creativity with other developers, gamers and industry experts around the world. And don't forget to submit your game for a chance to get featured on Indie Corner on Google Play.

* The competition is open to developers from the following European countries: Austria, Belgium, Belarus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Israel, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Romania, Russia, Slovakia, Spain, Sweden, Ukraine, and the United Kingdom (including Northern Ireland).


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Supplement your earnings with rewarded products

Posted by Patrick Davis, Product Manager, Google Play

Developers are increasingly using multiple methods to monetize their apps and games. One trend has been to reward users for a monetizable action, like watching a video, with in-game currency or other benefits. This gives users more choice in how they experience the app or game, and has been an effective way to monetize non-paying users.

To support this monetization method, Google Play is excited to announce rewarded products, a new product type now available in open beta in the Play Console.

Rewarded products make it easy for Google Play developers to increase their monetized user base. Our first rewarded product offering will be in a video format. Users can elect to watch a video advertisement and upon completion be rewarded with virtual goods or in-game currency. In the example below, the user selects "watch ad", views the video, and then is granted 100 coins.

Rewarded products can be added to any app using the Google Play Billing Library or AIDL interface with only a few additional API calls. No extra SDK integration is required. This significantly reduces the work required to implement compared to other offerings. Rewarded products are powered by AdMob technology to give access to the broad range of content from advertisers currently working with Google.

Get started with rewarded products.

For developers interested in best practices on how to diversify revenue and how rewarded products fit in, please visit us at Google's Mobile Developer day at GDC or watch via the livestream.

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Google Mobile Developer Day is coming to GDC 2019

Posted by Kacey Fahey, Developer Marketing, Google Play

We're excited to be part of the Game Developers Conference (GDC) 2019 in San Francisco. Join us on Monday, March 18th at the Google Mobile Developer Day, either in person or over live stream, for a full day of sessions covering tools and best practices to help build a successful mobile games business on Google Play. We'll focus on game quality, effective monetization and growth strategies, and how to create, connect, and scale with Google.

This year's sessions are focused on tips and tools to help your mobile game business succeed. Come hear our latest announcements and industry trends, as well as learnings from industry peers. We will hold a more technical session in the second half of the day, where we'll share ways to optimize your mobile game's performance for the best possible player experience.

Also, make sure to visit the Google booth from Wednesday March 20th until Friday March 22nd. Here, you will be able to interact with hands-on demos, attend talks in the theater, and get your questions answered by Google experts. We're bringing a big team and hope to see you there.

Learn more about Google's activities throughout the week of GDC and sign up to stay informed. For those who can't make it in person, join the live stream starting at 10am PST on Monday, March 18th. These events are part of the official Game Developers Conference and require a pass to attend.

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Wrapping up for 2018 with Google Play and Android

Posted by Patricia Correa, Platforms & Ecosystems

Earlier this year we highlighted some of Google Play's milestones and commitments in supporting the 1M+ developers on the Play Store, as well as those of you working on Android apps and games and looking to launch and grow your business on our platforms. We have been inspired and humbled by the achievements of app and game developers, building experiences that delight and help people everywhere, as some stories highlighted in #IMakeApps.

We continue to focus on helping you grow thriving businesses and building tools and resources to help you reach and engage more users in more places, whilst ensuring a safe and secure ecosystem. Looking to 2019, we are excited about all the things to come and seeing more developers adopt new features and update to Android P.

In the meantime let's share some of the 2018 highlights on Google Play and Android:

Building for the future

Along with Android P we have continued to help the Android developer ecosystem, launching Android Jetpack, the latest Android Studio, and Kotlin support. Developers are also now able to add rich and dynamic UI templates with Slices in places such as Google Search and Assistant, APIs for new screens support, and much more. Discover the latest from Android 9, API Level 28.

Smaller apps have higher conversion rates and our research shows that a large app size is a key driver of uninstalls. At I/O we launched a new publishing format, the Android App Bundle, helping developers to deliver smaller and more efficient apps with a simplified release process, and with features on demand - saving on average 35% in download size! On devices using Android M and above, app bundles can reduce app size even further, by automatically supporting uncompressed native libraries, thereby eliminating duplication on devices.

You can build app bundles in the Android Studio 3.2 stable release and in Unity 2018.3 beta, and upload larger bundles with installed APK sizes of up to 500MB without using expansion files, through an early access feature soon to be available to all developers.

Richer experiences and discovery

Discovery of your apps and games is important, so we launched Google Play Instant and increased the size limit to 10MB to enable TRY NOW on the Play Store, and removed the URL requirement for Instant apps. Android Studio 3.3 beta release, lets you publish a single app bundle and classify it or a particular module to be instant enabled (without maintaining separate code).

For game developers, Unity introduced the Google Play Instant plug-in and instant app support is built into the new Cocos Creator. Our app pre-registration program, has seen nearly 250 million app pre-registrations, helping drive app downloads through richer discovery.

Optimizing for quality and performance

Android vitals are now more actionable, with a dashboard highlighting core vitals, peer benchmarks, start-up time and permission denials vitals, anomaly detection and alerts, and linking pre-launch reports - all so that you can better optimize and prioritize issues for improved quality and performance.

There are more opportunities to get feedback and fix issues before launch. The Google Play Console expanded the functionality of automated device testing with a pre-launch report for games, and the launch of the internal and closed test tracks lets you push your app to up to 100 internal testers, before releasing them to production.

Insights for your business, now and in the long term

Metrics are critical to optimize your business and we've added new customizable tools in the Play Console, with downloadable reports to help you evaluate core metrics. Including cumulative data, 30-day rolling averages, and roll-ups for different time periods to better match the cadence of your business.

You can now configure the statistics report to show how your instant apps are performing, analyze different dimensions and identify how many install the final app on their device. The acquisition report shows users discovery journey through to conversion - with average revenue per user and retention benchmarks against similar apps. You can also find the best performing search terms for your store listing with organic breakdown - helping to optimize efforts to grow and retain a valuable audience.

Increasingly developers are adopting subscriptions as their core monetization model. The dedicated new subscriptions center means you can easily change subscription prices, offer partial refunds for in-app products and subscriptions, and also make plan changes in Play Billing Library version 1.2. Learn how to keep subscribers engaged; users can pause plans, giving you more control with order management and the cancellation survey.

Discover how to use all the new features and best practices on the Academy for App Success, our interactive free e-learning platform, offering bite-sized courses that help you make the most of Play Console and improve your app quality.

Make sure you follow @googleplaydev and sign up to our newsletter to stay ahead of all our updates in 2019! We hope these features and tools will enable us to continue a successful partnership with you in the New Year - follow our countdown for a daily highlight. From all of us at Google Play - happy holidays.

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SDK Developers: sign up to stay up to date with latest tips, news and updates

Posted by Parul Soi, Strategic Partner Development Manager, Google Play

Android is fortunate to have an incredibly rich ecosystem of SDKs and libraries to help developers build great apps more efficiently. These SDKs can range from developer tools that simplify complicated feature development to end-to-end services such as analytics, attribution, engagement, etc. All of these tools can help Android developers reduce cost and ship products faster.

For the past few months, various teams at Google have been working together on new initiatives to expand the resources and support we offer for the developers of these tools. Today, SDK developers can sign up and register their SDK with us to receive updates that will keep you informed about Google Play policy changes, updates to the platform, and other useful information.

Our goal is to provide you with whatever you need to better serve your technical and business goals in helping your partners create better apps or games. Going forward we will be sharing further resources to help SDK developers, so stay tuned for more updates.

If you develop an SDK or library for Android, make sure you sign up and register your SDK to receive updates about the latest tools and information to help serve customers better. And, if you're an app developer, share this blogpost with the developers of the SDKs that you use!

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Free training for Android developers – learn how to succeed on Google Play

Dan Lavelle, Head of Learning Operations, Google Play

Having a great idea for an app or game is just the beginning. At Google Play, it's our goal to provide you with the tools and skills to build successful mobile app and games businesses. Training continues to be among the top requested features from Android developers, and we've heard your feedback.

That's why we're launching a brand new, free e-learning platform to help you realize the full potential of your business on Google Play.

Introducing Google Play's Academy for App Success

Whether you're looking to grow your audience, understand performance metrics, or increase revenue, Play Academy is here to help you understand the best practices and Play Console features to succeed on Google Play. We built Play Academy to fit into your busy schedule. Learn from your home or office computer, or take courses on-the-go with your mobile device.

Key features of Play Academy

Learning paths

Choose from 10 collections of bite-sized courses organized around features and best practices, including; Test your app before release, Evaluate your app's technical performance, and Monetize your app.

Interactive lessons

Learn through a rich multimedia and interactive e-learning experience.

Assessments

Test your new knowledge of key Play Console features and mobile app best practices.

Achievements

Get recognition for your new skills. Wear your achievement badges with pride on your Play Academy profile.

Start learning today

It's easy to get started with free e-learning content from Google Play. Head over to g.co/play/academy to sign up and start your developer journey. Also, make sure you keep an eye on upcoming Play Academy news - we'll regularly update our courses to keep pace with the newest features and programs so that you can stay up-to-date with the latest insights you'll need to grow your app or game business.

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Google Play offline peer to peer installs beta

Posted by James Bender, Product Manager, Google Play

In June we started adding security metadata to all apps and app updates to help verify product authenticity from Google Play. We're doing this is to help developers reach a wider audience, particularly in countries where peer-to-peer app sharing is common because of costly data plans and limited connectivity.

Now, when a user shares an app via Play-approved partner peer-to-peer apps, Play will be able to determine shared app authenticity while a device is offline, add those shared apps to a user's Play Library, and manage app updates when the device comes back online. This will give users more confidence when using Play-approved peer-to-peer app beta partners, starting today with SHAREIt. Additional integrations from Files Go by Google and Xender are planned in the coming weeks. Please visit the Play Store to make sure you have the latest versions of these apps.

This also benefits you as a developer as it provides a Play-authorized offline distribution channel and, since the peer-to-peer shared app is added to your user's Play library, your app will now be eligible for app updates from Play.

No action is needed by developers or your users. This is an important step that improves the integrity of Google Play's mobile app ecosystem. Offline Play peer-to-peer sharing presents a new distribution opportunity for developers while helping more people keep their apps up to date.

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