Watch I/O together | Google Play update list

Author / Alex Musil, Product Management at Google Play

At this year's Google I/O , we highlighted three main ways to help you sustain your business on Google Play :

• Privacy and security measures to keep the ecosystem safe for users and developers, such as the new Google Play SDK indexing ;
• Tools to help you improve app quality throughout the app lifecycle;
• New ways to acquire new users and engage with existing users through features like LiveOps , as well as offering new subscription features drive revenue growth.

Watch the video of the I/O conference talk for an overview of all updates, or read on to get a quick overview of the new features that can help your business take the next step.

Privacy and security measures to protect developers and users

Over the past few years, we've been hard at work developing tools to make the SDK more usable and secure for everyone, including SDK vendors, app developers, and our end users.

• In 2020, we launched the Google Play SDK Console, which provides usage statistics, crash reports, and allows SDK vendors to communicate with app developers through the Play Console and Android Studio. Now, we're launching the Google Play SDK Index , a new public site that lists the most widely used commercial SDKs, along with data and insights about each SDK.

This index includes over 100 SDKs and their specific information, including which app permissions those SDKs use, statistics on apps that use them, and whether SDK vendors commit their SDK code to Google Play policies. You can use this index to decide which SDKs to use in your application and their specific versions.

△ The Google Play SDK index provides reliability and security metrics for you to judge whether an SDK is right for your business

• We also protect the hard work you put into your app with Play's App Integrity Tool. Play App Signing securely signs millions of apps on Google Play and ensures app updates can be trusted. From now on, Play App Signing will use Google Cloud Key Management to protect signing keys. This means you can view public documents such as the storage specifications and security measures Google uses to protect your keys. We will soon be using Cloud Key Management for all newly generated keys, and will also securely migrate eligible existing keys later.
• Another new feature of Play App Signing is also coming: any app can perform app signing key rotation . In the event of an accident, or just as a security best practice, you'll be able to initiate an annual key rotation in the Play Console. For maximum security, Google Play Protect will also use the rotated key to authenticate your app updates for older versions of Android that do not support rotation. The aforementioned changes will go all the way back to Android Nougat.
• We also provide an API to protect your applications, intellectual property, and users from abuse and attacks. The new Play Integrity API is now available for all apps and games to detect fraudulent and dangerous operations, such as traffic from modified or pirated app versions, as well as rooted or hacked devices.
• In addition to further protecting users, we also want users to feel safe downloading apps and games from Google Play. The new Data safety section lets you show users privacy and security practices so they can download your app with confidence. Please submit the Data Security Form (if you haven't already) by July 20th . Also check out our Help Center article for details.
• As mentioned in other data privacy updates, we released the first developer preview of the Privacy Sandbox for Android, a move we hope will provide new technologies that improve user privacy At the same time, it still achieves effective advertising push. Check out the release blog post for details, and you can subscribe to our email newsletter for the latest news.

More features to help you improve app quality throughout your app lifecycle

The quality of your app matters, affecting your ability to attract and retain users, your app's visibility and recommendations on the Play Store, and more.

• Android vitals is your definitive source of technical quality metrics on Play. With the new Developer Reporting API , you can now view Android vitals metrics and issue data, including crash and ANR rates, counts, clusters, and stack traces, outside of the Play Console, and integrate them into your own tools and workflows .
• You can now also view Android vitals data by country to troubleshoot and prioritize by location.
• We've also unified issue names so that when you connect the Play app with the Crashlytics app, you'll be able to see Play Track information in Crashlytics, making it easier to use Android vitals with Firebase Crashlytics .

In addition to Android vitals, we've also introduced other new features to help you throughout the app development lifecycle:

• Reach and devices make it easier for you to make better quality planning by providing insights into your user and problem distribution. It now includes revenue and revenue growth metrics for monetized apps on Play, so you can build a business case based on revenue to improve your app's quality and reach.
• We've also overhauled the Device catalog to make it easier to understand and use. The Overview page now includes installation data that you can filter by new device properties such as shared libraries. You can also view and quickly identify the most common device variants by RAM and Android version.
• It is now much easier than ever to test apps on different types of devices . You can run internal and open tests independently on a variety of devices, including Android Automotive , and support for Wear OS is coming soon.
• To help your users keep up with the latest version of your app, the In-app Updates API lets app users know within 15 minutes (rather than up to 24 hours) if an update is available, and the update interface also shows Your "Update Overview" copy.

To learn more about the release, watch the video of the " Improving App Quality in Google Play " talk.

Marketing and monetization functions for business expansion

Google Play helps your business grow by providing new ways to acquire new users, engage with existing users, and drive revenue growth.

• When your potential users enter the app store, the first thing they often see is your product detail page. To make a great first impression of your products on users, you can now create up to 50 custom product detail pages, each configured with analytics and individual deep links , so you can The source presents them with different pages.

△ Developers can now create up to 50 custom product detail pages, each configured with data analytics and individual deep links

• We've also made some major improvements to Store Listing Experiments . You can now see the results of most experiments faster. We also provide greater transparency and control to help you predict how long each experiment may take.
• Deep linking is an important tool when trying to increase engagement with your in-app content, so we're working to simplify the setup of deep linking to make it easier for you to ensure completeness and immediacy of your setup. We'll soon be launching a new deep linking-specific Play Console page to bring all the information and tools related to deep linking of apps in one place for your convenience.
• Another useful tool is LiveOps , through which you can submit candidates for Play Store promoted content. Developers who use LiveOps, which showcase limited-time offers, events, and major updates for your app or game, have 5% more 28-day active users and earn 4% more than those who don't. If you want to join our beta test, you can learn more on the official website and apply to join.
• Since last year, we've made some significant changes to Play Commerce to help you do business with users who have regional payment method preferences such as cash and prepaid. We expanded our payment method library to include more than 300 localized payment methods in 70 countries, and added e-wallet payment methods such as MerPay in Japan, KCP in Korea, and Mercado Pago in Mexico.
• We've also added pricing options that allow you to set ultra-low price points to help you increase conversions and increase revenue. You can now set a product for as little as 5 cents in any market. This allows you to set appropriate pricing based on local purchasing power, run localized promotions and promotions, and offer microtransactions (such as tips).
• We've introduced new subscription features and redesigned the developer experience to make it easier for you to sell subscription content on Google Play. You can now configure multiple base plans and offers per subscription to sell subscriptions in multiple ways, reducing operational costs by eliminating the need to continually create and manage more and more SKUs as before.

Each base plan of a subscription defines a different billing period and renewal type: such as monthly auto-renew, yearly auto-renew, and 1-month advance payment. In the basic plan, multiple offers can be set for different stages of the subscription cycle: such as offering a limited-time free trial to attract new subscribers, or offering an upgrade offer to motivate users to switch from a prepaid plan to an auto-renewing plan. Offering deals is a great way to acquire new users, incentivize upgrades, and retain existing users.

△ You can now configure multiple base plans and offers per subscription

• The new prepaid plan allows you to provide users with access for a given period of time. Users can easily extend their usage period at any time before the plan expires. Users can extend their usage period in your app, or directly through the subscriptions interface in the Play Store. This payment plan is ideal for pay-as-you-go areas.
• In-App Messaging is a new feature that prevents you from losing users due to declined payments. When a user opens your app, you can use the in-app messaging API to verify payment with Play, and if the user's payment is declined, a message is displayed to remind them to update their payment information.

△ In-app messaging API can prevent user churn due to declined payments

All of the above features are available in the latest Play Billing Library 5.0 . If you want to learn more about features and tools that can help grow your business,
Watch the presentation on " Powering Business Success with New Acquisition, Engagement and Monetization Tools ".

Thank you for continuing to contribute to the vibrant Google Play ecosystem. We're really looking forward to seeing the next great thing you guys build.