Tag Archives: Google Play

What’s new for Android game developers: August update

Posted by Greg Hartrell, Head of Product Management, Games on Android & Google Play

Welcome to our latest Android games update and the start of our #11WeeksOfAndroid week focused on games, media and 5G. With all of your interest and feedback in our developer previews, tools and services, we have lots to share in our ongoing efforts to help you better understand your game’s performance, expand your reach to more devices and new audiences, and support your go-to-market with Google Play.

Get the latest updates below and follow us at @AndroidDev for additional games resources and more.

Android tools for mobile game development

Android Studio 4.1: We've enhanced the CPU Profiler to expose more data with an improved UI, and we've added memory visualization, startup profiling capabilities, and sampling rate configuration to our Native Memory Profiler. Additionally, you can now open the Android Studio Profilers in a standalone UI. Checkout the System Trace and Native Memory blog posts for more details, and update Android Studio today for better profiling.
Android Game Development Extension: For developers building games on multiple platforms with C/C++, we continue to invest in our extension for Visual Studio, including adding support for Visual Studio 2019 and launching standalone Android Studio Profilers. Sign up for the developer preview to integrate with your Visual Studio workflow.
Android GPU Inspector: Look into the GPU of Android devices to better understand the bottlenecks and utilize the insights to optimize the graphical performance of your game experiences. Sign up for the developer preview and stay tuned for our upcoming open beta.

Reach more devices and users

Android Performance Tuner: Deliver higher quality game experiences to more Android users with less effort. Measure your frame rate performance and graphical fidelity and optimise between them to achieve stable frame rates at scale across the whole Android device ecosystem. Integrate the Unity plug-in or do a custom integration. Learn more in our new session.
Android Game SDK: Achievieving smoother frame rates and managing input latency on Android has become even easier! Now that the Game SDK is part of Jetpack, it’s simple to integrate our gaming libraries, such as the Frame Pacing API or the Android Performance Tuner, into your game. Grab the SDK or integrate it now through Jetpack.
Play Asset Delivery: Improve your user experience while reducing delivery costs and the size of your game with Play Asset Delivery’s flexible delivery modes, auto-updates and delta patching. Gameloft used PAD to improve user retention, resulting in 10% more new players than with their previous asset delivery system. App bundle format will be required for all new apps starting August 2021. As part of this, we will deprecate legacy APK expansion files (OBBs), making Play Asset Delivery the standard option for publishing games over 150MB.
Protect game integrity and fairness with Google Play tools: Protect your game, players, and business by reducing costs fighting monetization and distribution abuse. Some partners have seen up to a 40% decrease in potential hacks and up to a 30% decrease in fraudulent purchase attempts using our integrity and commerce APIs. Express interest in the automatic integrity protection EAP.

Boost your go-to-market

Play Games Services - Friends: Now in open beta, help players easily find and play with friends across Android games. Millions of players have a new platform-level friends list that you can access to bootstrap and enhance your in-game friend networks and have your games surfaced in new clusters in the Play Games app. Start using Google Play Games Services - Friends in your game today.
Pre-registration: Boost early installs with pre-registration and day 1 auto install. Early experiments show a +20% increase in day 1 installs when using this new feature. We have also optimized our day 1 notifications to pre-registered users. Try out the new pre-registration menu in the Play Developer Console to access this feature.
Play store updates: We’re updating games home with a much greater visual experience, showcasing rich game graphics and engaging videos. This provides a more arcade-like browse experience helping users discover new games that match what they like to play. Learn how to optimize your store listing page with the best quality assets.
In-app reviews: Give users the ability to leave a review from within your game, without heading back to the app details page, using our new in-app review API, part of the Play Core Library. Learn more in our recent blog post.

Check out d.android.com/games to learn about these tools and more, and stay up to date by signing up for the games quarterly newsletter.

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Source: Android Developers Blog

Leverage the In-App Review API for your Google Play reviews

Posted by Scott Lin, Product Manager, Google Play

For many developers, ratings and reviews are an important touchpoint with users. Millions of reviews are left on Google Play every day, offering developers valuable insight on what users love and what they want improved. Users also rely on ratings and reviews to help them decide which apps and games are right for them.

Over the past two years, Google Play has launched various features to make it easier for users to leave reviews, as well as for developers to interact and respond to them. For example, users are now able to leave reviews from the Google Play homepage. We also launched the Reviews page under My Apps & Games, which gives users a centralized place to leave and manage reviews.

But one of the most requested features from developers has been to give users the ability to leave a review from within the app, without heading back to the App Details page. So today, we’re pleased to launch the new in-app review API to address that need.

Ask for a review at just the right time

The API lets developers choose when to prompt users to write reviews within the app experience. We believe the best time to prompt your users is when they have used the app enough to be able to provide thorough and useful feedback. However, be sure not to interrupt them in the middle of a task or when their attention is needed, as the review flow will take over the action on the screen.

Users can now give ratings and reviews within your app.

The in-app review API supports both public and private reviews for when your app is in beta.

The review API is part of the Play Core Library, which is distributed for Java/Kotlin, C++, and Unity. It offers a lightweight API that allows apps to request a review and launch the review flow without users leaving the app.

The integration consists of four main steps:

Define the conditions and best place to ask for a review
Request the review flow to the API
Launch the review at an appropriate moment
Continue the flow after the review is completed

Whether the user leaves a review or not, the app must continue without altering the user flow. The in-app review API is designed to be seamless for users.

You can see the in-app review API in action in our newly published sample, which showcases calling the API through the Play Core Kotlin extensions (KTX) library, alongside other Play Core APIs such as in-app updates and on-demand feature modules installation.

Gathering the best feedback

The API will make it much easier for users to share valuable insights about your app.

Here’s what some of our partners said during the early-access program:

“It was quick and easy to integrate with the new In-App Review API changes, and we saw an almost immediate increase in positive ratings and reviews after releasing those changes.”
- Chris Scoville, Engineering Manager at Calm

“The in-app review API allows our customers to rate without leaving the application. Our 5-star ratings since implementing the API has increased by 4x.”
- Nathaniel Khuana, Technical Architect, Tokopedia

"We saw our all-time highest rating just a week after we implemented in-app reviews."

- Welly Chandra, Associate Product Manager at Traveloka

Because the best feedback is honest and unbiased, we designed the API to be self-contained and not require additional prompting other than to invoke the API. We’ve also placed cap limits to ensure that users won’t be prompted excessively should they choose not to leave a review.

We encourage developers to explore integrating the in-app review API as it will unlock the type of feedback that only your dedicated users can provide. And remember, once you receive those reviews, there are a multitude of ratings and reviews tools available to you on the Google Play Console to help you analyze the reviews and respond to users' concerns directly.

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Source: Android Developers Blog

Leverage the In-App Review API for your Google Play reviews

Posted by Scott Lin, Product Manager, Google Play

Ask for a review at just the right time

Users can now give ratings and reviews within your app.

The in-app review API supports both public and private reviews for when your app is in beta.

The integration consists of four main steps:

Define the conditions and best place to ask for a review
Request the review flow to the API
Launch the review at an appropriate moment
Continue the flow after the review is completed

Whether the user leaves a review or not, the app must continue without altering the user flow. The in-app review API is designed to be seamless for users.

Gathering the best feedback

The API will make it much easier for users to share valuable insights about your app.

Here’s what some of our partners said during the early-access program:

“It was quick and easy to integrate with the new In-App Review API changes, and we saw an almost immediate increase in positive ratings and reviews after releasing those changes.”
- Chris Scoville, Engineering Manager at Calm

“The in-app review API allows our customers to rate without leaving the application. Our 5-star ratings since implementing the API has increased by 4x.”
- Nathaniel Khuana, Technical Architect, Tokopedia

"We saw our all-time highest rating just a week after we implemented in-app reviews."

- Welly Chandra, Associate Product Manager at Traveloka

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Source: Android Developers Blog

Recent Android App Bundle improvements and timeline for new apps on Google Play

Posted by Posted by Dom Elliott and Yafit Becher, Product Managers at Google Play

In a little over two years, the Android App Bundle has become the gold standard for publishing on Google Play. Over 600,000 apps and games currently use the app bundle in production, representing over 40% of all releases on Google Play. App bundles are used by 50% of the top developers on Google Play — such as Adobe, which used app bundles to reduce the size of Adobe Acrobat Reader by 20%.

We recently launched Play Asset Delivery (PAD), bringing the great benefits of app bundles to games and allowing developers to improve the user experience while cutting delivery costs and reducing the size of their games. Gameloft used PAD to improve user retention, resulting in 10% more new players than with their previous asset delivery system.

For those of you making the switch, we’ve published some FAQs on Play App Signing — required for app bundles — as well as guidance on how to test your app bundle. Read on to find out more about the recent improvements we’ve made to developing, testing, and publishing with app bundles.

Play Feature Delivery

The app bundle enables modular app development using dynamic feature modules with a range of customizable delivery options. It’s now possible to shrink resources in dynamic feature modules as well as your base module when building modular apps. This long-requested feature can result in significantly greater size reduction of your apps. The feature is available from Android Studio 4.2, currently in Canary, under the experimental flag: android.experimental.enableNewResourceShrinker=true.

By default, install time modules are now automatically fused when app bundles are processed into distribution APKs (starting in bundletool 1.0.0). This means you can separate your app into modules during development while reducing the number of APKs distributed to each device, which will speed up your app’s download and installation. You can choose to set a “removable flag” for install-time modules to prevent fusing, which allows you to uninstall a module on the device after it’s been used. It’s a good idea to remove large modules once they’re no longer needed — reducing the size of your app can make it less likely to be uninstalled.

Feature-to-feature dependency is now stable in Android Studio 4.0, so you can specify that a dynamic feature module depends on another feature module. Being able to define this relationship ensures that your app has the required modules to unlock additional functionality, resulting in fewer requests and easier modularization of your app.

We know that it is critical for you to test your app delivery and get the same experience as your users would in the wild. Internal app sharing lets you upload test builds to Play and get a sharable link to download your app. When downloading your app from this link, you get an identical binary as would be served to users once your app is released to Play.

Play Asset Delivery

Play Asset Delivery extends the app bundle format, allowing you to package up to 2GB of game assets alongside the binary in a single artifact published on Google Play. PAD lets games larger than 150MB replace the legacy expansion files (OBBs) and rely on Play to keep assets up to date, just like you do with your game binary. It also takes care of compression and delta patching, minimizing the size of the download and getting your game to update faster.

The contents of an Android App Bundle with one base module, two dynamic feature modules, and two asset packs.

You can then choose one of three delivery modes, depending on when you want those assets to be served to users: upfront, as part of the initial game installation; on-demand, so assets will be delivered only upon request; or fast-follow, which will trigger an additional download immediately after the game installation completes, independently of the user opening the app. Fast-follow lets you minimize time to first interaction while getting assets to users as quickly as possible.

In the coming months, we’ll release texture compression format targeting, which will allow you to include multiple texture compression format assets and rely on us to deliver them to the most advanced format supported by the requesting device.

Learn more in this session from our Game Developer Summit and check out the documentation to see integration options for Unity, Unreal Engine, Gradle, Native, and Java support.

Google Play’s best-in-class distribution

Google Play delivers billions of apps, games, updates, and dynamic feature modules every month to Android users on thousands of device types around the world. We invest a lot of time and energy into making sure your content is delivered to users as seamlessly and efficiently as possible while hiding the complexity from the user experience.

For example, we recently upgraded the download service Google Play uses. This change alone has sped up the installation of app bundle apps by an average of 6% and increased install success globally by 1%, resulting in millions more new installs for developers every week.

We’re also rolling out multiple improvements to dynamic feature module distribution, such as allowing them to be installed when your app is VISIBLE or higher, lowering the free storage threshold that triggers insufficient storage errors, and removing user confirmation for large dynamic features over Wi-Fi. This alone has resulted in 12% more successful deferred module downloads. Apps using dynamic features will benefit from these changes automatically.

Requirement for new apps in the second half of 2021

We’re continuing to make app bundles a better publishing format than APKs on Google Play. For example, the new app bundle explorer lets you manage all your app bundles in one place. You can download and attest the exact APKs that Play generates for delivery, as well as a signed, universal APK (a single, installable APK that includes all code and resources needed for supported devices) that you can use on other distribution channels.

We’ve been thrilled to see the app bundle embraced by the app and game ecosystem, and we’re excited to continue to improve it. As we announced in the Android 11 event, to help us invest in future improvements, we intend to require new apps and games to publish with the Android App Bundle on Google Play in the second half of 2021. In the same timeframe, we will deprecate legacy APK expansion files (OBBs), making Play Asset Delivery the standard option for publishing games over 150MB. We will also require instant experiences to be published via instant-enabled app bundles, deprecating the legacy instant app ZIP format.

Thank you to everyone who has already made the switch to the Android App Bundle, and a special thanks to those of you who’ve shared your feedback. Your comments help us shape the future of app bundles and improve the technology for everyone, so please continue to let us know what you think.

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Source: Android Developers Blog

Protecting your Google Play Console account with 2-Step Verification

Posted by Tom Grinsted, Product Manager, Google Play Console

Google Play Console has something for everyone, from QAs and PMs to engineers and marketing managers. The new Google Play Console beta, available now at play.google.com/console, offers customized, secure access to everyone on your team. For a closer look at some of its new features and workflows, tune in to this week’s series of live webinars, which will also be available on demand.

Granting your team members safe access to specific features in your developer account is one of the best ways to increase the value of our tools for your organization. We want to make sure that your developer account is as safe as possible so you feel confident when granting access. A key way to do that is to make sure that every person who has access to your account signs in using secure methods that follow best practices. That’s why, towards the end of this year, we’re going to start requiring users of Google Play Console to sign in using Google's 2-Step Verification.

2-Step Verification uses both your password and a second way to identify you for added security. This could be a text message to a registered phone, an authenticator app, alerts on supported devices, or a hardware security key. Normally, you only have to do this when you sign in for the first time on a new computer. It’s one of the easiest ways to increase the level of security for you and your team members’ accounts.

Learn more about 2-Step Verification here, and how to set it up for your own account.

If you have any comments or concerns about using 2-Step Verification to sign in to Google Play Console, or if you think it will impact you or your teams’ use of Google Play Console, use this form to let us know. All responses will be read by our product team and will help us shape our future plans.

Your team won’t be required to use 2-Step Verification immediately, although we recommend that you set it up now. We will start mandating 2-Step Verification with new users to Google Play Console towards the end of Q3, followed by existing users with high-risk permissions like app publishing or changing the prices in in-app products, later in the year. We’ll also remind every impacted user in Google Play Console at least 30 days before the change takes effect. We may also start to re-verify when you’re undertaking a sensitive action like changing your developer name or transferring ownership of an app.

Hundreds of thousands of Google Play Console users already use 2-Step Verification to keep their accounts safe, and it's been the default for G Suite customers for years. But we understand that requiring this may impact some of your existing workflows, which is why we’re giving advance notice of this change and asking for your feedback.

We can all take steps to keep our accounts and the developer community safe. Thanks for publishing your apps on Google Play.

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Source: Android Developers Blog

The winners of the Google Play Indie Games Festival are…

Posted by Leticia Lago, Head of Developer Marketing, EMEA

We wrapped up the Indie Games Festivals in Europe, Japan, and South Korea. You can now check out the three winners and Top 10 finalists from each of the contests.

The Google Play Indie Games Festival celebrates the creativity and innovation that small games developers bring to the Play Store.

We shortlisted 20 finalists for each contest after receiving hundreds of submissions. The finalists were to showcase their art at events in Warsaw, Tokyo, and Seoul. However, this year’s unprecedented events saw the finalists presenting to jury members online. The juries then deliberated to select the winners.

Winning developers receive prize packages designed to help them grow their business on Android and Google Play. Each package offers promotions on the Google Play Store, consultations with members of the Google Play team, Google hardware, promotion campaigns, and more.

Join us in congratulating the developers and try out their games.

Europe

(In alphabetical order)

Cookies Must Die by Rebel Twins (Poland)

inbento by Afterburn (Poland)

The White Door by Rusty Lake (Netherlands)

The other finalist to make the Top 10 as selected by the jury members are, in alphabetical order:

60 Parsecs! by Robot Gentleman (Poland)

Alien Escape by KORION Interactive (Germany)

Alt-Frequencies by Accidental Queens (France)

Doors: Awakening by Big Loop Studios (Bulgaria)

My Diggy Dog 2 by King Bird Games (Russia)

Traffix by WebAvenue Unipessoal Lda (Portugal)

Void Tyrant by Quite Fresh Ltd. (United Kingdom)

Japan

(In alphabetical order)

GIGAFALL by Shiki Game Studio

METBOY! by REBUILD GAMES

Wasurenaide, otona ni natte mo by GAGEX Co.,Ltd.

The other final list to make the Top 10 as selected by the jury members are, in alphabetical order:

Boku to hakubutsukan by oridio Inc.

GummyShooter by simatten

Home Fighter by hap Inc.

MonsterTrader by Mitsuhiro Okada

Snowman Story by Odencat

World for Two by Seventh rank

Zelle by Odencat

South Korea

(In alphabetical order)

Heroes Restaurant by Team Tapas

Magic Survival by LEME

Project Mars by Moontm

The other finalist to make the Top 10 as selected by the online audience and the jury are, in alphabetical order:

CAT THE DJ by CATSBY STUDIO

Dust by I-eye studio

Extreme Football by 9M Interactive

Great Sword by olivecrow

QV by izzle

Sand Shark: The Boy and The Sea by GABANGMAN STUDIO

Sword Master Story by CodeCAT

Congratulations to all the winners! And thanks to everyone who entered.

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Source: Android Developers Blog

The Indie Game Festival announces its nine winners

The talent of independent and small game developers shines this year at Google Play’s Indie Games Festival,a celebration of the creativity of game developers. We received hundreds of submissions for the three competitions in Europe, Japan and South Korea. This year’s winning games have something for everyone, from a food-themed puzzle game with cats to a Mars Survival Project. Join us in congratulating the developers and trying out their games!

Europe

Cookies Must Die by Rebel Twins, Poland: This husband and wife duo knocked it out of the park with this fun, frenzied and humorous game. It has lovely animations and engaging mechanics that will entertain whether you want to play for five minutes or five hours.

inbento by Afterburn, Poland: Eating lunch at the office inspired the concept for this family-friendly game, which is available in 17 languages. Preparing a bento lunch is serious business, and these adorable cats are here to teach you the ropes with charming yet challenging puzzles.

The White Door by Rusty Lake, Netherlands: The latest game from this two-man team is inspired by a real-life story. They impressed the jury with this unique comic strip point-and-click adventure, set in the world of the phenomenal Cube Escape and Rusty Lake series.

Japan

GIGAFALL by Shiki Game Studio: Great game for lovers of b-bit graphics and retro style where you can control the satellite lasers that orbit the Earth and destroy meteorites,

METBOY! by REBUILD GAMES: This action game has a retro style with a catchy soundtrack for those who miss old game consoles.

Wasurenaide, otona ni natte mo by GAGEX Co.,Ltd: This cinematic adventure game in Minecraft style follows a boy who is looking for his father.

Korea

Heroes Restaurant by Team Tapas: If you ever dreamed of running a restaurant and fighting with a big squid at the same time, then this game is for you. It’s an interesting mix of catchy RPG mechanics and anime style art.

Magic Survival by LEME: A casual game where you can survive by defeating spirits in a 21st century magical civilization.

Project Mars by Moontm: An unusual game for those who aspire to colonize Mars, become a part of the space expedition and help to make the red planet a place where people can live.

Check out the remaining Top 10 for Europe, Japan and South Korea. Winning developers receive prize packages designed to help them grow their business on Android and Google Play. Prizes include promotions on the Google Play Store, consultations with members of the Google Play team, Google hardware, and extra promotion campaigns.

Source: The Official Google Blog

Google Play Pass: new apps, games, plans and availability

Google Play Pass helps you connect with awesome digital content—it’s your pass to hundreds of apps and games without ads and in-app purchases. Today we’re sharing new updates that make it a little easier to get started.

Always something new to discover

Over the past few months, we’ve added over 150 new titles—from racing games to drawing apps—to the Play Pass catalog, and are continuing to add new content every month. Subscribers can now enjoy classics like Sonic the Hedgehog, stress-relievers like Golf Peaks, and an extensive roster of award-winning Indies like Teslagrad, Forgotton Anne, and Sally’s Law–all included with your subscription and without ads or in-app purchases.

We’ve also added titles from Sesame Workshop, Learny Land, and many others to our selection of kid-friendly apps and games. Just head over to “Apps and games for kids” and look for the “Teacher approved” badge.

A series of new titles will premiere on Play Pass this year when they launch. You can get started with the newly-released The Almost Gone from Playdigious, and look out for exciting content like The Gardens Between and Kingdom Rush, and brand new releases like Bright Paw from Rogue and Line Weight from The Label coming later this year.

An all-new yearly subscription

In addition to our monthly pricing, we’re offering a new subscription option for Play Pass, available at $29.99 per year in the U.S., coming this week. For those already subscribed, upgrading is easy—just open the Play Store app, go to the Play Pass tab, and scroll down to find “Upgrade to a yearly subscription.”

Now available in new markets

Play Pass, including these new content additions and the yearly subscription, is coming to Android devices in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, New Zealand, Spain and the United Kingdom this week.

As always, you can start your one-month trial by simply opening the Play Store app, tapping the menu at the top left, and looking for “Play Pass.” You can learn more here, and stay tuned for details on additional international availability.

Source: The Official Google Blog

New features to acquire and retain subscribers

Posted by Angela Ying, Product Manager, Google Play

Subscription continues to be one of the fastest growing business models for apps in Google Play. As your subscription business evolves and becomes more sophisticated, our platform continues to evolve to better support your needs. Today we’re excited to tell you more about the new subscription capabilities we announced at the Android 11 Beta Launch, including promotional codes to help you access new subscribers, new opportunities to remind users of your value and win back churned users. Many of these capabilities are built on top of the Play Billing Library version 3.

In addition to the new capabilities, we are also making improvements to our existing platform. Over the past few years, we have launched many features, such as account hold, restore, and pause, which have been highly effective in reducing your voluntary and involuntary churn. We want to ensure that everyone can take advantage of them, which is why we are planning on changing the default settings for these features from optional to either mandatory or on by default starting on November 1, 2020. Additional details on these features and implementation requirements can be found at the end of this post.

Here’s everything that is changing about the subscriptions platform:

More targeted promotions

Promotions and deals are an important way to grow your business to acquire new customers. That’s why over the last year, we have invested in new promotional code capabilities for subscriptions that you can use to send promotions to a more targeted set of users.

Last year at I/O 2019, we launched subscription one-time promotion codes, unique alphanumeric codes that can be distributed to individual users for redemption. Now, we have launched a new frictionless redemption flow which allows users to easily redeem the code, purchase the subscription, and install the app in the Play store in a few simple steps. This greatly simplifies the user experience by reducing the friction users go through to use your code. Since this subscription is started outside of your app, it is only available to developers who are using Billing Library 2.0 or higher.

In addition to one-time codes, we are excited to officially announce the launch of custom codes (also known as vanity codes), which can be redeemed by multiple users and can be used for marketing campaigns to drive acquisitions. For example, you can post custom codes in advertisements or in social promotions to creatively engage with potential new users. Users can redeem a custom code in your app by entering it in their payment methods when purchasing a subscription.

Remind users of the value of your subscription

Retaining your subscribers is crucial for the long-term health of your subscriptions business. The reason why users stay subscribed is because they perceive ongoing value from your subscription service. To help you communicate this value, we recently launched a module that will remind users of the benefits gained from a subscription when they go to cancel. To take advantage of this module, add a short list of up to 4 subscriber benefits in the Google Play Console.

Win back churned subscribers

If users do churn from their subscription, we want to make it easy for them to restart it whenever they want. To help you do this, we have launched the ability for users to resubscribe to recently expired subscriptions directly from the Google Play subscriptions center. You can enable your SKUs for resubscribe in the Google Play Console. Since this subscription is started outside of your app, it is only available to developers who are using Billing Library version 2 or higher.

Price decreases without opt-ins

Finally, we’ve heard your feedback that requiring users to opt in to subscription price decreases was too restrictive. We are happy to announce that subscription price decreases will no longer require users to take action to opt in to keep their subscription. Users will be notified of an upcoming price decrease and be able to see the upcoming change in the Google Play subscriptions center.

Updated platform retention settings

Over the past few years, our platform has made strides in helping you keep your subscribers, through features aimed at decreasing both voluntary churn and involuntary churn (churn due to payment failure). For example, account hold has helped developers achieve 8% lower involuntary churn and 35% higher payment decline recovery rate compared to developers without account hold. Although these features are effective, retention may not be something that you are thinking about when starting out for the first time.

That’s why we are announcing updated defaults for several subscriptions features that have been up until now optional, which will take effect on November 1, 2020.

Account hold and restore will both be mandatory for all developers.
- Account hold is a state the user enters after a renewal fails due to a payment issue. During account hold, the user loses access to the subscription while Google notifies the user and retries the payment method. Learn how to integrate account hold
- Restore enables users to resume auto-renewals after they have cancelled the subscription but before the subscription expires. Learn how to integrate restore
Pause and resubscribe will be turned on by default for all developers with subscriptions enabled. You can opt-out of either feature in Google Play Console at any time, in case you are unable to implement the changes by November.
- Pause enables users to pause their subscription for up to 3 months. At the end of the pause period, the subscription will auto-resume. Pause requires Account Hold to be enabled. You can disable the feature by selecting “Disabled” next to Pause in the subscription settings of the Play console. Learn how to integrate pause
- Resubscribe enables users to resubscribe to a churned subscription within 12 months of subscription expiry. This feature is only available to apps that support Billing Library versions 2.0 and above. You can disable the feature by changing the setting to “Disabled” for each subscription product in the Play console. Learn how to integrate resubscribe

You may have to make modifications to your app or your server to handle these new features. Specifically, your app should:

Recognize when a user loses access to the subscription and when the user regains it later
- If your app relies on the Billing Library and not the Google Play Developer API Purchases.subscriptions to maintain the latest state of your subscriber, then your app should automatically be able to handle this.
- However, if you rely on the Google Play Developer API, which is common for developers whose subscription is accessible across multiple platforms such as web, it is important that you always have the latest status of the subscriber in your server.
- To ensure you always have the latest subscriber status, we strongly recommend implementing Real-Time Developer Notifications. Learn more.
Gracefully handle out of app purchases (Billing Library 2.0+ only)
- When a user opens the app after resubscribing, make sure you acknowledge the purchase and show an in-app message recognizing the new purchase. Check out our best practices for handling out of app purchases.

Although not every feature will require you to make engineering changes, we highly recommend that you test each feature before November 1. To make the transition easier, Google has enabled Account Hold, Pause, Restore, and Resubscribe for all license test accounts. Learn more about testing for subscriptions.

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Source: Android Developers Blog

New features to acquire and retain subscribers

Posted by Angela Ying, Product Manager, Google Play

Here’s everything that is changing about the subscriptions platform:

More targeted promotions

Remind users of the value of your subscription

Win back churned subscribers

Price decreases without opt-ins

Updated platform retention settings

That’s why we are announcing updated defaults for several subscriptions features that have been up until now optional, which will take effect on November 1, 2020.

Account hold and restore will both be mandatory for all developers.
- Account hold is a state the user enters after a renewal fails due to a payment issue. During account hold, the user loses access to the subscription while Google notifies the user and retries the payment method. Learn how to integrate account hold
- Restore enables users to resume auto-renewals after they have cancelled the subscription but before the subscription expires. Learn how to integrate restore
Pause and resubscribe will be turned on by default for all developers with subscriptions enabled. You can opt-out of either feature in Google Play Console at any time, in case you are unable to implement the changes by November.
- Pause enables users to pause their subscription for up to 3 months. At the end of the pause period, the subscription will auto-resume. Pause requires Account Hold to be enabled. You can disable the feature by selecting “Disabled” next to Pause in the subscription settings of the Play console. Learn how to integrate pause
- Resubscribe enables users to resubscribe to a churned subscription within 12 months of subscription expiry. This feature is only available to apps that support Billing Library versions 2.0 and above. You can disable the feature by changing the setting to “Disabled” for each subscription product in the Play console. Learn how to integrate resubscribe

You may have to make modifications to your app or your server to handle these new features. Specifically, your app should:

Recognize when a user loses access to the subscription and when the user regains it later
- If your app relies on the Billing Library and not the Google Play Developer API Purchases.subscriptions to maintain the latest state of your subscriber, then your app should automatically be able to handle this.
- However, if you rely on the Google Play Developer API, which is common for developers whose subscription is accessible across multiple platforms such as web, it is important that you always have the latest status of the subscriber in your server.
- To ensure you always have the latest subscriber status, we strongly recommend implementing Real-Time Developer Notifications. Learn more.
Gracefully handle out of app purchases (Billing Library 2.0+ only)
- When a user opens the app after resubscribing, make sure you acknowledge the purchase and show an in-app message recognizing the new purchase. Check out our best practices for handling out of app purchases.

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