Tag Archives: Google Play

Access Android vitals data through the new Play Developer Reporting API

Posted by Lauren Mytton, Product Manager, Google Play

Hand holding a phone 

Quality is foundational to your game or app’s success on Google Play, and Android vitals in Google Play Console is a great way to track how your app is performing. In fact, over 80% of the top one thousand developers check Android vitals at least once a month to monitor and troubleshoot their technical quality, and many visit daily

While the Android vitals overview in Play Console lets you check your app or game’s quality at a glance, many developers have told us that they want to work with their vitals data outside Play Console, too. Some of your use cases include:

  • Build internal dashboards
  • Join with other datasets for deeper analysis, and
  • Automate troubleshooting and releases

Starting today, these use cases are now possible with the new Play Developer Reporting API.

The Play Developer Reporting API allows developers to work with app-level data from their developer accounts outside Play Console. In this initial launch, you get access to the four core Android vitals stability and battery metrics: crash rate, ANR rate, excessive wake-up rate, and stuck background wake-lock rate, along with crash and ANR issues and stack traces. You can also view anomalies, breakdowns (including new country filters in Vitals), and three years of metric history.


Set up access to the new Play Developer Reporting API from the API Access page in Play Console.

Set up access to the new Play Developer Reporting API from the API Access page in Play Console.

Getting started with the API

To enable the API, you must be an owner of your developer account in Play Console. Then you can set up access in minutes from the API Access page in Play Console. Our documentation covers everything you need to know to get started.

Using the API

You can find sample requests in the API documentation, along with a list of available endpoints (for both alpha and beta releases).

Best practices

Once you have enabled the API, you may wish to send some requests manually to get a sense of the API resources and operation before implementing more complex solutions. This can also help you establish query times, which will vary depending on the amount of data being processed. Queries over long time ranges, across many dimensions, and/or against very large apps will take longer to execute.

Most of our metric sets are refreshed once a day. To avoid wasting resources and request quota, we recommend you use the provided methods to check for data freshness and verify that new data is available before issuing a query.

Thank you to all the developers who requested this feature. We hope it helps you continue to improve your apps and games. We hope it helps you continue to improve your apps and games. To learn more about Android vitals and the Play Developer Reporting API, view our session from the Google for Games Developer Summit.

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Things to know from the 2022 Google for Games Developer Summit

Posted by Greg Hartrell, Product Director, Games on Play/Android

Google for Games Developer Summit 

Over the years, we’ve seen that apps and games are not just experiences - they’re businesses - led by talented people like yourselves. So it's our goal to continue supporting your businesses to reach even greater potential. At our recent Google for Games Developer Summit, we shared how teams across Google have been continuing to build the next generation of services, tools and features to help you create and monetize high quality experiences, more programs tailored to your needs, and more educational resources with best practices.

We want to help you throughout the game development lifecycle, by making it easier to develop high quality games and deliver these great experiences to growing audiences and devices.


Easier to bring your game to more screens
To enable games on new screens and devices, we want to help you meet players where they are, giving them the convenience of playing games wherever they choose.

  • Gameplay across tablets, foldables, and Chromebooks is on the rise and offers the opportunity to be more engaging and immersive than ever before. In 2021, Android usage on CrOS grew 50% versus the previous year, led by games.
  • Google Play Games for PC Beta rolled out in January to South Korea, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. This standalone Windows PC application built by Google, allows users to play a high quality catalog of Google Play games seamlessly across their mobile phone, tablet, Chromebook, or (now) their Windows PC. Learn more and start to optimize your game for more screens today.
  • Play as you download beta program was announced last year and we will soon open it up to all Android 12 users. PAYD allows users to get into gameplay in seconds while game assets are downloaded in the background. and can happen with minimal developer changes to your underlying implementation. Sign up for the beta.

Easier to develop high quality games

We’re committed to supporting you build high quality Android games, by continuing to focus on tools and SDKs that simplify development and provide insights about your game, while also partnering with game engines, including homegrown native c/c++ engines. Last year, we released the Android Game Development Kit (AGDK), a set of tools and libraries to help make Android Game Development more efficient, and have made several updates based on developer feedback.

  • Android Game Development Extension allows game developers to build directly for Android from within Visual Studio. To make debugging easier across Java and C, AGDE will now include cross compatibility between Android Studio and Visual Studio so you can open and edit your AGDE projects in Android Studio’s debugger.
  • The new Memory Advice API (Beta) library added to AGDK helps developers understand their memory consumption by combining the best signals for a given device to determine how close the device is to a low memory kill.
  • We’ve fully launched the Android GPU Inspector Frame Profiler to help you understand when your game is bottlenecked on the GPU vs. CPU, and achieve better frame rates and battery life.

More tools to help you succeed on Google Play

The Play Console is an invaluable resource to help in your game lifecycle, with tools and insights to assist before and after launch.

  • We continue to invest in programs to help developers of all sizes grow their businesses with Google Play. For our largest developers, we launched the Google Play Partner Program for Games, offering additional growth tools and premier services, tailored for the unique needs of developers at this scale.
  • Reach and devices helps you make foundational decisions about what devices to build for, where to launch and what to test, both pre-launch and post-launch. It already shows your install and issue distributions across a range of device attributes. Today, we’re launching Google Play revenue and revenue growth distributions for your game and its peers, so you can build revenue-based business cases for troubleshooting or device targeting, if that suits your business model better than using installs.
  • We recently launched Strategic guidance in Console, which provides an intuitive way to help you evaluate how well your game is monetizing, and see opportunities to grow revenue. You can think of Reach & devices as helping you to understand revenue opportunities from a technical perspective; strategic guidance does the same from a business perspective, so you can use them together to provide a holistic picture of your IAP revenue drivers.
  • Android vitals is your destination to monitor and improve your game’s stability on Google Play. For those of you who have games with global presence, we’ve just launched country breakdowns and filters for Vitals metrics, so it’s easier for you to prioritize and troubleshoot stability issues. In addition, today we’re launching the Developer Reporting API which gives you programmatic access to your core Android vitals metrics and issue data, including crash and ANR rates, clusters, and stack traces.

Learn more about everything we shared at the Google for Games Developer Summit and by visiting g.co/android/games for additional resources and documentation. We remain committed to supporting the developer ecosystem and greatly appreciate your continued feedback and investment in creating high quality game experiences for players around the world.

App Excellence Summit 2022

Posted by The Google Play Team

ALT TEXT GOES HERE 

Did you know that 54% of users who left a 1-star review in the Play Store mentioned app stability and bugs? *

To help product managers and business decision makers understand how high quality app experiences drive business growth and what tools they can use to make sound business and technical decisions, we are hosting our first Android App Excellence Summit in just a few weeks! Join us on April 12 to get the knowledge needed to build high quality Android Apps and scale your business.

Tune in on April 12 at 9 AM Pacific to join the virtual fireside chat and in-depth product sessions. After our fireside chat, we’ll be releasing sessions focused on;

  • Achieving quality with the Play Console: What devices should you build for? How can you track issues? Which countries should you target next? Learn how to use the Google Console’s Reach and devices dashboard for foundational questions like minspec and country targeting, including new features for apps that monetize on Google Play.
  • Improving Developer Productivity: The developer productivity best practices can help you spend less time in maintenance and more time working on new features to delight users, improve your monetization, and achieve business success. Learn the best tools and recommendations to accelerate your development of high-quality apps.
  • Better together: Did you know that in 2021 the average US household had 25 connected devices? That’s twice as many since 2019. Learn how Android is making the ecosystem of devices more helpful, what users expect from your apps and how to optimize them across form factors.
  • And more!

We’re excited to bring you the latest announcements, insights, and best practices at our first Android App Excellence Summit.

Register today to save your spot and follow our Twitter channel and join the conversation by using #AppExcellenceSummit.

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* Source: Google Play internal data, May 2021.

Freeing up 60% of storage for apps

Posted by Lidia Gaymond and Vicki Amin, Product Managers at Google Play

One of the main reasons users uninstall apps is to free up space. To prevent unnecessary uninstalls and help users get more out of their devices, we started working on a new feature that would enable app archiving.

Archiving is a new functionality that will allow users to reclaim ~60% of app storage temporarily by removing parts of the app rather than uninstalling it completely. An archived app will remain on the device and can easily be restored to the latest available compatible version, whilst preserving the user data.

With the release of the upcoming version of Bundletool 1.10, we are taking the first step toward making archiving available to all developers using App Bundles. For apps built with the Android Gradle Plugin 7.3, we will start generating a new type of APK - archived APKs. Archived APKs are very small APKs that preserve user data until the app is restored. While we will start creating archived APKs now, they won’t be functional until the archiving functionality is launched to consumers later in the year.

Once launched, archiving will deliver great benefits to both users and developers. Instead of uninstalling an app, users would be able to “archive” it - free up space temporarily and be able to re-activate the app quickly and easily. Developers can benefit from fewer uninstalls and substantially lower friction to pick back up with their favourite apps.

As before, all APKs generated will be available to download and inspect through Generated APKs API or in Play Console under App Bundle Explorer. Since the functionality is open source, developers will be able to inspect the code, and other app stores can benefit from it too.

If you want to opt-out of the generation of archived APKs, you can modify the build.gradle file of the project: 

android {
    bundle {
        storeArchive {
            enable = false
        }
    }
}

Alternatively, if you are not using Gradle to build your apps, you can opt-out with a new option in the BundleConfig: 

{
  "optimizations": {
    "storeArchive": {
      "enabled": false
    }
  }
}

Keep an eye out for more information about app archiving on the Android Developers blog.

Grow your game’s revenue with Google Play Console’s new strategic guidance

Posted by Phalene Gowling, Product Manager, Google Play

light blue illustration with coin bouncing

Last year, mobile game consumer spending grew 7.3% to $93.2 billion with no signs of slowing down. In this competitive, growing market, effectively monetizing your audience has never been more important. But without access to a strategy consultant, how can you know if your monetization strategy is as strong as it can be?

That’s why we’re expanding the suite of tools available in Play Console to help it be exactly that. Last year, we released new engagement and monetization metrics on the Statistics page to help you grow your business, and now we’re pleased to announce new strategic guidance tools to help you drive successful monetization.

In this new section, you’ll see our metric-driven guidance to help you better monetize your game by:

  1. Contextualizing your topline revenue: Understand how your game’s revenue metrics contribute to your overall business goals, and learn when to prioritize optimizing for one metric over another.
  2. Identifying opportunities: Find out where there is an opportunity to improve a metric by benchmarking against peer groups, and explore insights by country.
  3. Recommending next steps: Learn how to take advantage of monetization opportunities with specific actions you can take right away.
screenshot of strategic guidance for monetization webpage in Google Play Console

The strategic guidance metric hierarchy. (Learn more or visit our Play Academy for specific courses like monitoring KPIs.)

We’ve spent the last couple of years perfecting our guidance, and testing the dashboard with selected partners. Feedback on our strategic guidance has been positive — and we hope you’ll find it useful, too.

“This is extremely useful! These type of insights are actually what we expect from Google, because this is something that really can help us to scale our business.”

- Product Manager at Gameloft


Understand key monetization drivers and their relationships with the metric hierarchy

Strategic guidance can be found in Financial reports within Play Console. In partnership with experts in mobile games growth, we’ve included primary monetization metrics (including new metrics) and their relationships to help you easily assess your performance and measure against your peers. You can see all the metrics in this Help Center article.

The metric hierarchy is a tool to help you understand how you and your teams can directly influence the lower-level metrics of your games performance, like buyer conversions, which contribute to your overall top-line business performance. Using peerset comparisons and per-country breakdowns, you can quickly identify your biggest growth opportunities: what markets are underperforming and where you are a market leader.


Explore metric analysis to turn insights into action

Select a metric and explore it in detail to track your performance over time. Strategic guidance shows you a breakdown of your chosen metric by location to help you spot opportunities to expand your game globally. The detailed metric analysis also helps you identify where a small investment has an outsized return.

Strategic guidance metric recommendation example for returning daily buyer ratio.

Strategic guidance metric recommendation example for returning daily buyer ratio.

Whether you’ve created a casual game or an RPG, the metric-specific recommendations are designed to be insightful and relevant to a variety of game developers. They can be used to help you diversify your promotional content, refine your game mechanics, or test new price points that enable purchasing power parity.


Get IAP monetization guidance today, with more insights to come

With an increasing number of developers shifting focus from an ads-only monetization business model to include in-app purchases (IAP), we’ve developed strategic guidance to be most relevant for developers that include IAP-monetization as part of their overall strategy. With this launch, we’re excited to bring growth consulting opportunities to these game developers at scale. Stay tuned for more launches this year to help you successfully drive your revenue growth.

Offers on Google Play: a new destination to find great deals

Since 2012, Google Play has been a one-stop shop for discovering and enjoying your favorite apps, games and digital content. This week we’re launching “Offers” — a new tab in the Google Play Store app to help you discover deals in games and apps across travel, shopping, media & entertainment, fitness, and more. The rollout is underway and it will be available to more people in the United States, India and Indonesia over the coming weeks, and more countries later in 2022.

Sections like “Offers for apps you might like” help you easily find deals that are relevant to you. We’re partnering with developers of some of the top apps and games on Google Play to add new, fresh deals every day. As Allison Boyd of Strava explains, “Offers is a win-win. We get an additional touchpoint with people to share information about a valuable promotion or update, and people can easily redeem the offer by opening the Strava app from the Offers tab.”

Find limited time deals, in-app rewards and more

Here are a few of the deal types that you can expect to find over time:

  • Sales on games and in-game items: find limited-time deals on magic orbs, tokens, and more.
  • Rewards and bundled offers: see what apps are offering you free delivery, free rides, and other rewards.
  • Discounts on movies and books: find the latest sales on movies and books to rent or buy.
  • Try something new: browse apps that are offering 30 days free, and other extended trials at no cost.

When you see Offers in the bottom bar of the Google Play Store app on your Android mobile device, be sure to check it out.

Google Play Games beta launches on PC in Korea, Taiwan, and Hong Kong

Posted by Arjun Dayal, Group Product Manager, Google Play Games

Image of Google Play Games logo

In December, we announced that Google Play Games will be coming to PCs. As part of our broader goal to make our products and services work better together, this product strives to meet players where they are and give them access to their games on as many devices as possible. Today we're excited to announce that we’re opening sign-ups for Google Play Games as a beta in Korea, Taiwan, and Hong Kong.

Introduction video of Google Play Games beta

Users participating in the beta can play a catalog of Google Play games on their Windows PC via a standalone application built by Google. We’re excited to announce that some of the most popular mobile games in the world will be available at launch, including Mobile Legends: Bang Bang, Summoners War, State of Survival: The Joker Collaboration, and Three Kingdoms Tactics, which delight hundreds of millions of players globally each month.

Google Play Games beta PC application

This product brings the best of Google Play to more laptops and desktops, enabling immersive and seamless gameplay sessions between a phone, tablet, Chromebook, and Windows PC. Players can easily browse, download, and play their favorite mobile games on their PCs, while taking advantage of larger screens with mouse and keyboard inputs. No more losing your progress or achievements when switching between devices, it just works with your Google Play Games profile! Play Points can also be earned for Google Play Games activity on PCs.

Google Play Games gameplay on multiple devices including a phone, PC, and tablet

We’re thrilled to expand our platform for players to enjoy their favorite Android games even more. To sign up for future announcements, or to access the beta in Korea, Taiwan, and Hong Kong, please go to g.co/googleplaygames. If you’re an Android developer looking to learn more about Google Play Games, please express interest on our developer site. We’ll have more to share on future beta releases and regional availability soon.

Windows is a trademark of the Microsoft group of companies.
Game titles may vary by region.

Empowering the next generation of Android Application Security Researchers

Posted by Jon Bottarini, Security Program Manager & Lena Katib, Strategic Partnerships Manager

The external security researcher community plays an integral role in making the Google Play ecosystem safe and secure. Through this partnership with the community, Google has been able to collaborate with third-party developers to fix thousands of security issues in Android applications before they are exploited and reward security researchers for their hard work and dedication.

In order to empower the next generation of Android security researchers, Google has collaborated with industry partners including HackerOne and PayPal to host a number of Android App Hacking Workshops. These workshops are an effort designed to educate security researchers and cybersecurity students of all skill levels on how to find Android application vulnerabilities through a series of hands-on working sessions, both in-person and virtual.

Through these workshops, we’ve seen attendees from groups such as Merritt College's cybersecurity program and alumni of Hack the Hood go on to report real-world security vulnerabilities to the Google Play Security Rewards program. This reward program is designed to identify and mitigate vulnerabilities in apps on Google Play, and keep Android users, developers and the Google Play ecosystem safe.

Today, we are releasing our slide deck and workshop materials, including source code for a custom-built Android application that allows you to test your Android application security skills in a variety of capture the flag style challenges.

These materials cover a wide range of techniques for finding vulnerabilities in Android applications. Whether you’re just getting started or have already found many bugs - chances are you’ll learn something new from these challenges! If you get stuck and need a hint on solving a challenge, the solutions for each are available in the Android App Hacking Workshop here.

As you work through the challenges and learn more about the techniques and tips described in our workshop materials, we’d love to hear your feedback.

Additional Resources:

  • If you want to learn more about how to prepare, launch, and run a Vulnerability Disclosure Program (VDP) or discover how to work with external security researchers, check out our VDP course here.
  • If you’re a developer looking to build more secure applications, check out Android app security best practices here.

How to sustain a safe, thriving app and game ecosystem

There have been a lot of discussions globally about how mobile ecosystems and app stores operate, and the role good policy plays in ensuring that these platforms provide ample choice and flexibility for developers and users. We have been following these discussions closely and agree that policies in this space should be guided by foundational principles that spur innovation, maintain security and expand user choice across the ecosystem, whether on mobile desktop or gaming consoles.

It’s our belief that operating systems and app stores should:

  • Let consumers download apps and games from anywhere — operating systems should support multiple app stores and allow consumers to get apps and games directly from developers.
  • Keep consumers safe by building protections into the core operating system and requiring app stores and developers to follow high safety standards.
  • Avoid using non-public data about developers to build competing products and services.
  • Be upfront with developers about the rules of the road, enforce policies in a predictable way, work with developers to address problems and offer clear means of appeal and redress when issues arise.
  • Permit developers to build direct customer relationships, with reasonable safeguards to protect consumer safety.

These principles have roots in our work in the early days of mobile, when we made an unprecedented bet that a free, open-source operating system like Android, built with safety and choice at its core, would be good for developers and consumers and could support the growth of the entire smartphone ecosystem. At the time, there were many different business model options to support a platform — some charged licensing fees for their operating system, others sold high-margin hardware devices. We chose to do things differently by making our operating system and app store free, with minimal restrictions.

We also believe that operating systems and app stores should have a business model that enables both platforms and developers to succeed financially. Just as it costs money to build an app, it costs money to build a platform, and a platform’s business model should align its success with developers’ success.

Over the years we’ve made a significant investment in Android and Google Play, and like any business, we need a business model that lets us keep investing in our mobile efforts. Today, Android is used on tens of thousands of device models from smartphone companies around the world and more than two million developers use Google Play to reach more than 2.5 billion users in 190 countries.

We’ve been able to sustain Android and Google Play through a fee paid by developers who sell in-app digital content, which is a common model across technology platforms. Ninety-seven percent of developers globally don’t sell digital content and are not subject to a service fee. For developers who do sell digital content, we recognize that one size doesn't fit all, and we’ve evolved our business based on feedback from our developer ecosystem. We've tailored our fee structure with a number of programs to meet different businesses' needs. With the new programs we announced this year, 99% of developers globally qualify for a service fee of 15% or less, and developers have welcomed these changes.

App and game platforms need to balance consumers’ expectations of choice and safety, developers’ desire to innovate and grow, and their own need for a viable business model. We look forward to contributing to the public policy conversation, guided by our steadfast commitment to building thriving, open platforms that empower consumers and help developers succeed.

Google Play’s Best of 2021

Today, we announced the winners of Google Play’s Best of 2021, a celebration of apps and games that made positive contributions to culture this year. And to encourage innovation across Google Play, we’ve expanded this year’s awards to apps and games on tablets, plus apps on Wear OS and Google TV. By challenging the norm, introducing unique gameplay features and giving users never-before-seen experiences, Google Play’s Best of winners represent what’s next in app and game development.

Similar to our Best of 2020 winners, apps focused on personal growth were in high demand in 2021. This year’s winners found creative, and often meditative, ways to help users get to know themselves on a deeper level. Balance, which earned our Best App of 2021 award, encourages people to find their center through personalized meditations; Moonly provides tips and guidance based on the lunar calendar; and Laughscape helps people reach a meditative state through laughter.

"We are deeply honored that Google chose Balance as its Best App of 2021,” says Jesse Pickard, Founder and CEO at Elevate Labs. “We built Balance with the individual in mind. No two people are the same, and we wanted to create a personalized mental wellness program that could reflect and support those special differences. I also want to thank our customers for their help in our journey. Your engagement and feedback has allowed us to build a truly wonderful product together."

Meanwhile, in gaming, Pokémon UNITE won Best Game for its dynamic gameplay and cross-platform experience. We also saw a surge of independent developers creating imaginative and personal gaming experiences. Indie developer George Batchelor brought us Bird Alone, a game that challenges you to become friends with the “loneliest bird in the world.” And in Donut County, developed by Annapurna Interactive, you play as a growing hole in a physics-based puzzle game.

Check out the full list of this year’s U.S. winners below, ranging from large developers to up-and-coming indies. You can also find your specific country’s winners in the Best of 2021 section of the Play Store.

Users’ Choice 2021

Best App

Best Game

Best of app winners

Best Apps for Good

Best Everyday Essentials

Best for Fun

Best Hidden Gems

Best for Personal Growth

Best for Tablets

Best for Wear

Popular on Google TV

Best of game winners

Best Competitive

Best Game Changers

Best Indies

Best Pick Up & Play

Best for Tablets

Congratulations again to all of our Best of winners, and a special thanks to our Google Play community for their participation and support. We look forward to seeing what you build next year.