Google Play Books offers several ways to find great deals and discounts on ebooks and audiobooks that are just right for you.
Posted by Sheenam Mittal, Product Manager, Google Play
Google Play Commerce enables you to monetize your apps and games at scale in over 170 markets, without the complexities and time consumption required to run your own global commerce platform. It enables you to easily transact with millions of users around the world and gives users trusted and safe ways to pay for your digital products and content. Ensuring developers and users have a secure purchase experience has been a key pillar of Play Commerce, and we achieve this by continuously preventing and monitoring for bad actors looking to defraud and abuse your apps.
In 2022, we prevented over $2 billion in fraudulent and abusive transactions. Bad actors looking to carry out abuse on apps implement an array of strategies across both one–time purchases as well as auto-renewing payments. For example, they may attempt to purchase an item in your app with a compromised form of payment, or request a refund for an in-app purchase that’s been already consumed or sold, or use scammed gift cards for purchases. When a combined or coordinated attempt is carried out by bad actors, it can result in large-scale abuse on your app. Preventing such fraud and abuse requires a comprehensive approach, consisting of automated solutions and an array of internal monitoring tools combined with human expertise.
Information asymmetry between Google Play and developers is commonly exploited by bad actors. Two of the most effective solutions that you can implement to help address this are Voided Purchases API and Obfuscated Account ID. Over 70% of our top 200 monetizing developers have integrated these solutions to reduce fraud and abuse on their apps.
 |
| Benefits of Voided Purchases API |
You can also use Play Integrity API to protect your apps and games from potentially risky and fraudulent interactions, such as cheating and unauthorized access. You call the Play Integrity API at important moments to check that user actions or server requests are coming from your unmodified app, installed by Google Play, running on a genuine Android device. If something is wrong, your app’s backend server can respond with appropriate actions to prevent attacks and reduce abuse. Developers using the API have seen an average of over 50% reduction in unauthorized access of their apps and games. Stay tuned for new highly-requested feature updates.
 |
| Flowchart of how Play Integrity API works |
This month, we launched Purchases.product.consume, which allows you to consume in-app items using the Play Developer API, reducing the risk of client-side abuse by shifting more business logic to your secure backends. For example, if a bad actor purchases an item from your app but tampers with the client side, the purchase will be automatically refunded due to lack of acknowledgement after 3 days of purchase. Using server side consumption will prevent this type of app abuse.
Google Play Commerce is committed to providing developers and users a secure purchase experience. Learn more about how to prevent bad actors from harming users and abusing your app by visiting this guide, as well as other 2023 initiatives helping keep Android and Google Play safe.
Posted by Parul Tyagi, Developer Marketing
Every month, over 2.5 billion people visit Google Play to discover millions of apps and games, which are created by people with all sorts of backgrounds, who founded companies big and small.
#WeArePlay celebrates this community of people building apps and games businesses, with monthly spotlights of founders from across the world.
Last summer we went on a virtual tour of the USA, sharing stories from every state, and today we’re continuing our tour across the world with our next stop: India.
To kick us off, we are spotlighting 20 stories from across the country, with many more coming throughout the year.
First, we begin with Pramit from Gurugram, Haryana. He was climbing the corporate ladder when medication he was taking damaged his retina, therefore losing his vision. No longer able to read, he required help from friends and family to perform daily tasks. One day, when a friend was booking a driver for him, Pramit got the idea to create a tool that could function exactly like a virtual friend through voice-activated commands. Using his app Louie Voice Control, people can operate other apps using their voice, making technology infinitely more accessible for the visually impaired.
Next, meet Sourav and Gunjan from Kolkata, West Bengal. When Sourav and Gunjan had their son, they noticed how fascinated he was watching videos on their phones. This gave Gunjan the idea to provide meaningful screen time for him by making educational games for young children. Fast forward to today and they have 42 apps, including Yoga for Kids where youngsters follow along with simple yoga poses and unlock animated pets as rewards.
Now onto Tejas from Rajkot, Gurajat. He was always determined to go his own way in life and pursue programming, rather than his family's construction business. After discovering how popular cooking games are, his company TheAppGuruz makes versions catered specifically for Asian audiences - with some full of Indian dishes and specialties. Now, Tejas and his team are developing more cooking simulation titles, as well as traditional board games for a global audience.
And last but not least, Anshul and Rohan from Mumbai, Maharashtra. After bonding over their experiences in overcoming mental health struggles, they discovered they had the same goal: to create something in the mental wellness space. So they built Evolve - an app with guided meditations, breathing exercises and daily affirmations. During the pandemic, the pair realized the LGBTQ+ community was one of the most underserved in mental health support, so they adapted Evolve to meet their needs.
Check out all the stories now at g.co/play/weareplay-india and stay tuned for even more coming soon.
Posted by Parul Tyagi, Developer Marketing
Every month, over 2.5 billion people visit Google Play to discover millions of apps and games, which are created by people with all sorts of backgrounds, who founded companies big and small.
#WeArePlay celebrates this community of people building apps and games businesses, with monthly spotlights of founders from across the world.
Last summer we went on a virtual tour of the USA, sharing stories from every state, and today we’re continuing our tour across the world with our next stop: India.
To kick us off, we are spotlighting 20 stories from across the country, with many more coming throughout the year.
First, we begin with Pramit from Gurugram, Haryana. He was climbing the corporate ladder when medication he was taking damaged his retina, therefore losing his vision. No longer able to read, he required help from friends and family to perform daily tasks. One day, when a friend was booking a driver for him, Pramit got the idea to create a tool that could function exactly like a virtual friend through voice-activated commands. Using his app Louie Voice Control, people can operate other apps using their voice, making technology infinitely more accessible for the visually impaired.
Next, meet Sourav and Gunjan from Kolkata, West Bengal. When Sourav and Gunjan had their son, they noticed how fascinated he was watching videos on their phones. This gave Gunjan the idea to provide meaningful screen time for him by making educational games for young children. Fast forward to today and they have 42 apps, including Yoga for Kids where youngsters follow along with simple yoga poses and unlock animated pets as rewards.
Now onto Tejas from Rajkot, Gurajat. He was always determined to go his own way in life and pursue programming, rather than his family's construction business. After discovering how popular cooking games are, his company TheAppGuruz makes versions catered specifically for Asian audiences - with some full of Indian dishes and specialties. Now, Tejas and his team are developing more cooking simulation titles, as well as traditional board games for a global audience.
And last but not least, Anshul and Rohan from Mumbai, Maharashtra. After bonding over their experiences in overcoming mental health struggles, they discovered they had the same goal: to create something in the mental wellness space. So they built Evolve - an app with guided meditations, breathing exercises and daily affirmations. During the pandemic, the pair realized the LGBTQ+ community was one of the most underserved in mental health support, so they adapted Evolve to meet their needs.
Check out all the stories now at g.co/play/weareplay-india and stay tuned for even more coming soon.
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.
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.
 |
| 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.
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.
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.
 |
| 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.) |
Rebecca Gutteride and Madona Wambua, Co-Hosts of #TheAndroidShow
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!
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.
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.
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 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.
#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!
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.”
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.
 |
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.
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.
How useful did you find this blog post?
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.
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.
How useful did you find this blog post?
For International Women’s Day, our latest #WeArePlay stories feature inspirational women building apps and games.
