Updates to power your growth on Google Play

Posted by Paul Feng – Vice President of Engineering, Product and UX, Google Play

Our annual Playtime event series kicks off this week and we’re excited to share the latest product updates to help your business thrive. We’re sharing new ways to grow your audience, optimize revenue, and protect your business in an ever-evolving digital landscape.

Make sure to also check out news from #TheAndroidShow to learn more about the biggest update to Gemini in Android Studio since launch that will help boost your team’s developer productivity.

Growing your audience with enhanced discovery features

To help people discover apps and games they’ll love, we’re continuously improving our tools and personalizing app discovery so you can reach and engage your ideal audience.

Enhanced content formats: To make your video content more impactful, we’re making enhancements to how it’s displayed on the Play Store. Portrait videos on your store listing now have a full-screen experience to immerse users and drive conversions with a prominent “install” button. Simply keep creating amazing portrait videos for your store listing, and we’ll handle the rest.

Our early results are promising: portrait videos drive +7% increase in total watch time, a +9% increase in video completion count, and a +5% increase in conversions.

We’ve also launched new features to create a more engaging and tailored experience for people exploring the Play Store.

• Personalized query recommendations: To help users start their search journeys right, we’ve introduced personalized search query recommendations on Search Home. This feature is currently available in English, with expanded support for more languages coming soon this year.

• Interest pickers: Multi-select interest filters allow people to share their preferences so they can get more helpful recommendations tailored to their interests. Earlier this year, we announced this for games, and now these filters are also available for apps.

Optimizing your revenue with Google Play Commerce

We want to make it effortless for people to buy what you’re selling, so we’re focused on helping our 2.5 billion users in over 190 markets have a seamless and secure purchase experience. Our tools support you and your users during every step of the journey, from payment setup, to the purchase flow, to ensuring transactions are secure and compliant.

Proactive payment setup: To help more buyers be purchase ready, we’ve been proactively encouraging people to set up payment methods in advance, both within the Play Store and during Android device setup, and even during Google account creation. Our efforts have doubled the number of purchase-ready users this year, now reaching over half a billion users. And we’re already seeing results from this approach – In September alone, we’ve seen an almost 3% increase in global conversion rates, which means more people are completing purchases, which translates directly to higher revenue potential for you from your apps and games.

Expanded payment options: Google Play already offers users over 300 local payment methods across 65+ markets, and we’re regularly adding new payment methods. US users can now use Cash App eWallet alongside credit cards, PayPal, direct carrier billing, and gift cards and users in Poland can pay with Blik Banking.

Purchase flow recommendations: Our new algorithmic recommendation engine helps people discover relevant in-app purchases they’re likely to buy. Simply select products to feature in Play Console, and we’ll recommend a popular or related option at different moments in the purchase journey, helping users find what they need. Our early results show an average of 3% increase in spend.

Cart abandonment reminders: If a user is browsing a product in your app or game, but hasn’t yet made a decision to purchase, we’ll remind them about it later when they browse the Play Store. These automatic, opt-out reminders help nudge users to complete their purchase.

Secure bio authentication: Users can now enjoy a faster and more secure checkout experience by choosing on-device biometrics (fingerprint or face recognition) to verify their purchases, eliminating the need to enter their account password. This year, we’ve seen adoption triple, as more users choose bioauth to make their first purchase.

Protecting your business with the Play Integrity API

Everything we do at Google Play has safety and security at its core. That’s why we’re continuing to invest in more ways to reinforce user trust, protect your business, and safeguard the ecosystem. This includes actively combating bad actors who try to deceive users or spread malware, and giving you tools to combat abuse.

The Play Integrity API can help you detect and respond to potential abuse such as fraud, bots, cheating, or data theft, ensuring everyone experiences your apps and games as intended. Apps that use Play Integrity features are seeing 80% less unauthorized usage on average compared to unprotected apps.

Here’s what’s new with the Play Integrity API:

• Hardware-backed security signals: In the coming months, you can opt-in to improved Play Integrity API verdicts backed by hardware security and other signals on Android 13+ devices. This means faster, more reliable, and more privacy-friendly app and device verification, making it significantly harder and more costly for attackers to bypass.
• New app access risk feature: Now out of beta, this feature allows you to detect and respond to apps that can capture the screen or control the device, so you can protect your users from scams or malicious activity.

Those are the latest updates from Google Play! We’re always enhancing our tools to help address the specific challenges and opportunities of different app categories, from games and media to entertainment and social.

We’re excited to see how you leverage both our new and existing features to grow your business. Check out how Spotify and SuperPlay are already taking advantage of features like Play Points and Collections to achieve powerful results: