Tag Archives: Google Play

Key product updates from the 2023 Google for Games Developer Summit

Posted by Greg Hartrell, Product Director, Games on Android & Google Play

Whether you’re working on your first game or your next season pass, Google remains committed to helping you across the development and publishing lifecycle. At our Google for Games Developer Summit, I was privileged to share some exciting new tools and insights from Android and Google Play that will help developers like you build games for everyone.

Check out our video playlist to watch the keynote and product sessions on demand, or keep reading for a quick recap of the highlights.

Building great Android games

App quality is the foundation of everything we do at Android and Google Play, and because every user matters, we have updated our approach to technical quality with more emphasis on the user experience.

Google Play’s technical quality bar now uses new user-perceived crash and ANR metrics, which we evaluate on a per-device basis as well as overall. We have introduced an 8% quality bar at the device level, and we now steer users on Google Play away from titles that do not meet this threshold on their phone. To help you meet these guidelines, we’ve launched a number of new features in Android vitals to make it easier to monitor and act on issues. Learn more about these features in this session and about our quality bar in this blog post.

  • Performance is another key aspect of technical quality and for a smooth user experience, games on Google Play should aim for at least 30 frames per second. To help you reach this goal, we’ve just launched frame rate metrics for games in Android vitals. You can see these metrics in Play Console or with the Developer Reporting API. In due course, we will start steering users away from games that cannot achieve 20 frames per second on their phone. Learn more about the new metric in this session.

Screenshot of Android vitals in Play Console
Android vitals in Play Console now offers frame rate metrics to help you understand how smooth and fluid your game feels to users.

We’ve also introduced a range of new tools and services to help you improve the quality of your game.

  • We announced updates to Firebase Crashlytics to improve the quality of Unity stack traces, including Unity on-demand-fatal event reporting. We also now support the symbolication of native Android ANRs, and will soon support memory debugging for GWP-ASAN-enabled games.

  • We’re also introducing a suite of Adaptability APIs to the Android Game Development Kit to help your game respond to changing device performance and thermal scenarios. The Android Dynamic Performance Framework includes a hinting library that can send signals about your workload to the CPU, so your game can tap into performance when you need it and save power when you don’t. There’s also a Thermal API to listen during runtime for when the device is about to thermally throttle so that you can adjust your workloads to smooth performance without overheating the device.


Connecting with players

Building and connecting with your players is key to success for many games, which is why we’re creating more opportunities to help you find new players or engage and re-acquire existing ones.

  • We relaunched our LiveOps tools as Promotional content and made it available to more developers. Eligible developers can upload promotional assets in Play Console to promote in-game events, offers and deals, and major updates, and customize that content for new or returning users.

  • Custom store listings allow you to create up to 50 different store listings with different descriptions and graphic assets based on country, pre-registration status, and more. We’ve now introduced inactive custom store listings, so you can target churned users with a different story about how to come back to your game.

  • We also announced the early access program for Machine Translation in the Play Console, which can translate your game’s strings in minutes. This uses Google Translate and the best-in-class transformer-based language models for quality translation in over 8 languages including Simplified Chinese and Japanese. Sign up here to be one of the first developers to try it.

Reaching higher with large screens

Large screens offer new opportunities for an enhanced gaming experience. Our research shows that the majority of phone owners have access to a large screen, like a tablet, Chromebook, or PC, and gamers want to play their games across those screens. Large screens give you the real estate to implement high-resolution graphics, take advantage of multi-tasking or foldable-specific experiences, and add keyboard, mouse, and game controller support to give users more control.

The beauty of Android is that your games can be easily adapted for all these screens and we’ve made several updates to make the user experience better.

Four different screen sizes displaying seamless sync across devices playing Asphalt 9:Legends
Easily adapt your game to different form factors so your users can play whenever and wherever they want.
(Example shown here is Asphalt 9: Legends, subject to game availability and PC compatibility.)

  • Although each form factor has its unique advantages, you don’t need to customize your game for each one independently. Watch this session to ensure great playability across large-screen platforms.

  • Google Play Games for PC, now in beta in 13 countries, is expanding to Japan and countries in Europe in the coming months and is also expanding its catalog to include top games like Garena Free Fire, Ludo King, and MapleStory M.

  • And starting today, we’re making it much easier to join Google Play Games on PC with your existing mobile build, whether you support x86 or not. Through our partnership with Intel, you can now submit your mobile build while you work on optimization — no need to recompile for x86 right away.


You can learn more about these updates in this blog post or express interest in joining Google Play Games on PC.

For more announcements from the Google for Games Developer Summit, please visit g.co/gamedevsummit. Thank you as always for your thoughtful feedback and partnership as we create high-quality game experiences for players around the world.

Google Play Games on PC is available to download in 13 countries. Please see g.co/googleplaygames for more information. Game titles may vary by region.

Happening now! Unpacking the latest in large screens and foldables + MAD Skills on #TheAndroidShow

Rebecca Gutteride and Madona Wambua, Co-Hosts of #TheAndroidShow

We’re just about to kick off another episode of #TheAndroidShow, you can watch live here! In this episode, we’re unpacking the latest Android foldables and large screens and the incredible opportunity these open up for you and your users, we’re continuing our MAD Skills series on Compose layouts and modifiers with a live Q&A, plus more! If you haven’t already, there’s still time to get your burning questions answered from the team, using #AskAndroid. We've assembled a team of experts ready to answer your questions live!

The latest Android large screens and foldables from our Android friends

One of the coolest moments for hardware enthusiasts was last week at Mobile World Congress, where Android device makers from around the world gather to unveil the latest innovations. It was an especially big year for foldables in particular, with a number of compelling devices coming out. We had the opportunity to catch up with three Android partners and see their latest hardware: the Oppo Find N2 Flip, the HONOR Magic Vs, and the Tecno Phantom V Fold. These launches bring new, high-quality devices into the foldable category, giving users more options as they look for their next mobile device and signaling an investment in foldables across the Android ecosystem. For developers, foldables can present unique opportunities (and challenges); large screen devices like foldables and tablets can challenge assumptions that you might have made in the past around configuration changes, cameras, and the shape and size of the screen - or screens. On devices with more screen real estate and folds, users are expecting better multi-tasking and more content-rich app experiences that adapt to these form factors.

As this category continues to expand, we want to make large screen optimization as easy as possible for you. We’ve established tiered quality guidelines to help prioritize which behaviors are the most important to focus on across screen sizes and, late last year, we announced new guidance and updated tools to help you update your app to meet those guidelines. To make it easier to quickly test apps on a variety of representative devices, we have a growing collection of resizable, foldable, tablet and desktop emulators, and updated Material adaptive design guidance for these devices with more specific Canonical Layout designs!

To get started, check out the gallery page to get inspired with high fidelity mockups, links to material design guidance, implementation guides, and case studies from apps like yours. Then, test your app for large screens using the resizable emulator in Android Studio to see how your app looks today!


MAD Skills: Compose Layouts & Modifiers

Our latest MAD skills series deep-dives into Compose layouts and modifiers. The initial episodes cover layout fundamentals including what out-of-the-box APIs Compose offers, how you can use modifiers to stylize your composables, and the different phases in Compose. We then dive deeper into modifier chaining and building custom layouts for complex use cases. The series culminates in a live Q&A–happening right now, where we'll be answering the questions you've been asking us using #AskAndroid. You can view the YouTube playlist to rewatch the videos in the series.

What it means to be an Android Google Developer Expert

The Android Developer community is at the heart of everything we do and at the core of this is our Android Google Developer Experts. Spanning all over the world, the community comes together to share best practices through speaking, open-source contributions, workshops, and articles, and gets involved in early access Android releases - providing valuable feedback to make improvements for developers everywhere! Tune in to #TheAndroidShow to hear from six GDEs about their journey as an Android Developer and Google Developer Expert and what this role means to them.


App Quality Insights in Android Studio

In 2022 we released Android Studio’s App Quality Insights (AQI) which helps you discover, investigate, and reproduce issues reported by Crashlytics within the context of your local Android Studio project. In this segment we go behind the scenes with David Motsonashvili, a Software Engineer on the Firebase team, to learn more about where the idea came from. We also explore how crash management has evolved throughout the years with Annyce Davis, VP of Engineering at Meetup and GDE. Tune into #TheAndroidShow to watch the segment, read the AQI documentation to learn more, and download the latest version of Android Studio to try it out.


Now in Android

Now in Android is your ongoing guide to what’s new and notable in the world of Android development, and this week we covered the second Android 14 Developer Preview, Google Play policy changes around Wear OS app quality, the release of the full Android Basics with Compose course, Advanced Compose Layout Concepts, Drawing in Compose, Multi-Window and Activity Embedding, TensorFlow Lite in Google Play Services, and more.

Tune in!

#TheAndroidShow is your conversation with the Android developer community, this time hosted by Rebecca Gutteridge and Madona Wambua. Tweet us your questions, and let us know what you’d like to hear in future videos from the Android team. It’s all happening right now – and you can rewatch it at any time!

What it means to be an Android Google Developer Expert

Posted by Yasmine Evjen, Community lead, Android DevRel

The community of Android developers is at the heart of everything we do. Seeing the community come together to build new things, encourage each other, and share their knowledge encourages us to keep pushing the limits of Android.

At the core of this is our Android Google Developer Experts, a global community that comes together to share best practices through speaking, open-source contributions, workshops, and articles. This is a caring community that mentors, supports each other, and isn’t afraid to get their hands dirty with early access Android releases, providing feedback to make it the best release for developers across the globe.

We asked, “What do you love most about being in the #AndroidDev and Google Developer Expert community?”

Gema Socorro,”I love helping other devs in their Android journey,” and Jaewoog Eum shares the joy of “Learning, building, and sharing innovative Android technologies for everyone.”

Hear from the Google Developer Expert Community

We also sat down with Ahmed Tikiwa, Annyce Davis, Dinorah Tovar, Harun Wangereka, Madona S Wambua, and Zarah Dominguez - to hear about their journey as an Android Developer and GDE and what this role means to them - watch them on The Android Show below.

Annyce, VP Engineer Meetup shares, “the community is a great sounding board to solve problems, and helps me stay technical and keep learning”

Does the community inspire you? Get involved by speaking at your local developer conferences, sharing your latest Android projects, and not being afraid to experiment with new technology. This year, we’re spotlighting community projects! Tag us in your blogs, videos, tips, and tricks to be featured in the latest #AndroidSpotlight.

Active in the #AndroidDev community? Become an Android Google Developer Expert.

A group of Android Developers and a baby, standing against a headge of lush greenery, smiling

#WeArePlay | Meet Ania from Canada. More stories from USA, Australia and Montenegro

Posted by Leticia Lago, Developer Marketing

This International Women’s Day, we’re dedicating our latest #WeArePlay stories to the inspirational women founders creating apps and games businesses on Google Play. Like Ania from Victoria in Canada, who is making mental health support more accessible worldwide.

When Ania was a student, she started experiencing debilitating panic attacks. Realizing there wasn’t much help readily available on mobile, she took it upon herself to do her own research and learn how to manage her anxiety. After feeling more confident again, she wanted to share what she had learned and help people, so began developing Rootd.

The app provides in-the-moment relief: with lessons to understand panic attacks, breathing exercises, and ways to make short-term and long-term changes to reduce anxiety. She is growing the app’s reach by expanding to different countries, with the hope it will eventually become one of the most widely used tools to overcome panic attacks in the world.

Celebrating more women founders

Alongside Ania, there are many other women founders doing incredible work in the apps and games space: like Bria from USA - founder of Honey B Games and creator of bubble tea game Boba Story, Lauren and Christina from Australia - co-founders of Lumi Interactive and their wellbeing app Kinder World: Cozy Plants, and Jelena from Montenegro - CEO of games studio 3Hills.

Check out their stories now at g.co/play/weareplay.


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#WeArePlay | Meet Ania from Canada. More stories from USA, Australia and Montenegro

Posted by Leticia Lago, Developer Marketing

This International Women’s Day, we’re dedicating our latest #WeArePlay stories to the inspirational women founders creating apps and games businesses on Google Play. Like Ania from Victoria in Canada, who is making mental health support more accessible worldwide.

When Ania was a student, she started experiencing debilitating panic attacks. Realizing there wasn’t much help readily available on mobile, she took it upon herself to do her own research and learn how to manage her anxiety. After feeling more confident again, she wanted to share what she had learned and help people, so began developing Rootd.

The app provides in-the-moment relief: with lessons to understand panic attacks, breathing exercises, and ways to make short-term and long-term changes to reduce anxiety. She is growing the app’s reach by expanding to different countries, with the hope it will eventually become one of the most widely used tools to overcome panic attacks in the world.

Celebrating more women founders

Alongside Ania, there are many other women founders doing incredible work in the apps and games space: like Bria from USA - founder of Honey B Games and creator of bubble tea game Boba Story, Lauren and Christina from Australia - co-founders of Lumi Interactive and their wellbeing app Kinder World: Cozy Plants, and Jelena from Montenegro - CEO of games studio 3Hills.

Check out their stories now at g.co/play/weareplay.


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How Stripe leveraged Google Play to build an SDK for Tap to Pay on Android

Posted by the Stripe and Android teams

What is Stripe Terminal and what does it offer Android developers?

Stripe Terminal is a set of tools for accepting in-person payments, including developer

interfaces, card readers, and logistics management. Android developers can build in-person commerce experiences with the Terminal Android SDK and the Tap to Pay on Android SDK. The Terminal Android SDK allows users to go to market with Stripe’s pre-certified card readers, and the Tap to Pay on Android SDK enables merchants to accept contactless payments on their existing compatible Android devices. The Tap to Pay on Android SDK eliminates the need for additional hardware, allowing POS providers and their users to quickly scale, increase revenue, and reach new markets. Both SDKs integrate seamlessly with the Stripe platform, so businesses can manage online and in-person payments in one place. Existing Terminal users have integrated Tap to Pay on Android with the Stripe Terminal SDK in just a couple of weeks.

Moving image of a transaction being completed on an Android device with Tap to Pay on Android SDK

Stripe has used Google Play SDK Console since the product’s launch in 2020 to monitor the performance of our SDKs, including the Terminal Android SDK and Android SDK for online payments. Google Play SDK Console is a platform for widely-used commercial SDKs to share important updates with developers—such as critical issues related to recent releases—and provide precise mitigation instructions for out-of-date SDK versions. Features of Google Play SDK Console such as usage statistics, crash reporting, and version reporting make it possible for SDK providers such as Stripe to streamline communication with customers and help keep a pulse on the health of their SDKs.

How have Google Play features shaped the development of the Tap to Pay on Android SDK?

Security was key to the development of the Tap to Pay on Android SDK due to the need to secure sensitive card data for the acceptance of contactless payments on a broad range of consumer devices. We originally incorporated the SafetyNet Attestation API into our broader security strategy for Terminal to address the need for device attestation. Looking ahead to 2023, we plan to use the new Play Integrity API, which replaced SafetyNet Attestation and offers device attestation and other integrity services. The Play Integrity API will also help us meet the recently published PCI MPoC (Mobile Payments on COTS) standard for mobile payment acceptance solutions. This standard requires Stripe to verify that Android applications using the Tap to Pay on Android SDK are unmodified, and that those applications have been installed from a trusted source like the Google Play Store. The Play Integrity API will not only help us meet industry standards, but will also mitigate the risk that a compromised device or application could be used to collect payments, which protects Stripe users and upholds the security of payments made using the Tap to Pay on Android SDK.

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In addition to security, ubiquity across Android devices has also been a driving force in the development of the Tap to Pay on Android SDK. A fundamental goal for Stripe was to build a solution that would work on a wide range of consumer and enterprise Android devices. The decision to use the Play Integrity API was therefore also largely influenced by the appeal of Google Mobile Services and the wide range of functionality afforded by its associated APIs and applications.

What is Stripe planning next for the Tap to Pay on Android SDK?

We’re excited to partner with Google as an early adopter of the Play Integrity API for SDKs. This will allow the Stripe SDK to access the Play Integrity API with an API key, streamlining the experience for developers using the SDK as they won’t have to separately integrate with the Integrity API. Google plans to offer this to more SDKs in 2023.

Where can I learn more about Stripe’s Tap to Pay on Android SDK?

Visit our Tap to Pay page for more information. Tap to Pay on Android is currently available through the Stripe Terminal Android SDK in the US, Canada, the UK, Singapore, Australia, and New Zealand. Reach out here to start building.

Feature Engineering in the Google Play Store

Posted by Harini Chandrasekharan, Staff Software Engineer, Google Play

The Google Play Store, launched 10 years ago in 2012 sits at the heart of Android, connecting billions of users with an equally staggering and ever-growing collection of apps and games worldwide.

Let's take a peek behind the curtains to learn what it takes to design the serving infrastructure of the worlds largest Android marketplace. In the world of consumer facing software, it's not a surprise that out of box engineering solutions fail to meet the requirements that Google scale demands. Therefore every system at Google is carefully crafted and honed with iterative enhancements to meet the unique availability, quality and latency demands of the Google Play Store.

What is feature engineering?

Features can be user-facing such as formats, content, arrangement of content, the page layout or information architecture. Formats represent how app content from our recommendation systems, advertisers, merchandisers and various other sources are presented on UI. The goal is to create tailor-made experiences weaving in the right content and UI to suggest the most relevant apps and games to meet the users where they are in their journey on the play store.

In the domain of consumer facing features, users’ opinions and choices, developer ecosystem and demand often changes faster than infrastructure can. In such an environment, the biggest challenge engineers face is how to be nimble and design infrastructure that’s not only future-proof but also meets the needs of the consumer space within the constraints of scalability and performance. Let’s take a deeper look at some engineering challenges in such a dynamic space.


What does success look like?

In a data driven organization such as the Play store, metrics are built for measuring anything and everything of importance. Here are some of the dimensions that come in handy when measuring and tracking success:

  • Product/business metrics - These are metrics specific to the product or service under consideration. Running A/B experiments to measure changes to these metrics for the new treatment builds confidence, particularly when decision making involves several tradeoffs.
  • Performance - Measuring latency, error rates and availability makes the backbone of almost every service and for good reason. Knowing these baseline metrics is essential since this closely tracks user experience and perception of the product.
  • System health - These are internal system metrics tracking resource utilization and fleet stability.

Challenges in feature engineering infrastructure

Designing backend systems that scale to the requirements of the Play Store that also meet the performance criteria required to make user interactions feel fluid and responsive is paramount. From an engineering perspective, infrastructure needs to continuously evolve to meet the needs of the business. The Play store is no different—the store infrastructure has evolved several times in the last decade to not only support the needs of new features that are available to users today, but also to modernize, eliminate tech debt and most of all reduce latency.


Frequent iteration

Challenge: Features often require large amounts of iteration over time, it's hard to plan engineering infrastructure that meets all the future requirements.

In an experiment driven culture, the optimum approach for rapidly building features at scale often results in tech debt. Tech debt has various forms—relics of past features that did not make it result in layers that are hard to clean up, affect performance, make code error prone and hard to test.

Independent evolution

Challenge: In large organizations spanning 100s of engineers, several features are often being built in parallel and independent of each other.

Infrastructure reuse and sharing innovations are often impossible without significantly compromising on velocity. In a space where the product evolves at a rapid pace there is often a large amount of uncertainty with the different levers and knobs one can build into systems to make them flexible. Too many levers can lead to large system complexity. Too few levers and the cost of iteration is sky high. Finding the balance between the two is one of the core competencies of a feature engineer in this space.

Time to experiment

Challenge: There is often an opportunity cost to pay for time spent building elegant engineering solutions.

Time to experiment is one of the most important metrics to keep in mind when designing solutions for user facing features. Flexible design that enables rapid iteration and meets the latency and other performance SLOs is ideal.

In practice, there is often a large amount of guesswork that goes into estimating impact of a particular user facing change, while we can use past data and learnings confidently to estimate in some scenarios, it's not sufficient for a brand new ambitious, never before tried idea.


Feature engineering guiding principles

Let’s see how the Play Store solves these challenges to enable state of the art innovation.

Data driven experiments and launches - understand your success metrics

Optimizing for time to market i.e getting the feature to the user and measuring how it impacts app installs and other store business metrics using A/B experiments is of prime importance. Iterating fast based on data helps tune the final feature to the desired end state. Google has several home grown technologies for running A/B experiments at worldwide scale with seamless integration with metric presentation tools that make running these experiments smooth and easy, so developers can spend more time coding and less in analysis.

Design and experiment with polished MVPs - with a focus on quality

Deciding what to build, whether it meets Google quality standards, understanding engineering costs and the user needs it solves are all important questions that need to be answered before designing anything. Feature Engineering is therefore often done in close collaboration with Product Managers. Aligning on the perfect MVP that can be built in a reasonable amount of engineering time that meets the user journey is the key to a successful product.

Frequently modernize the infrastructure - clean up tech debt

Frequent iterations and a fast MVP development culture often comes with its set of cons, the biggest being tech debt. In optimizing for fast velocity, cutting corners results in obsolete code (due to unlaunchable metrics) or discarded experiment flags. These often make testing, maintaining and impact future development velocity if left unfixed. Additionally, using the latest and greatest frameworks to get to the last milliseconds of latency or making development easier yields great dividends in the long run. Frequently modernizing the infrastructure either via refactoring or full rewrites may traditionally spell signs of poorly designed code, but it's one of the bigger tradeoffs that feature engineers often have to make, because after all what use is all the fancy infrastructure if users don't interact with the feature in the first place!


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