Google Is Turning The Play Store Into A Content Machine

Google is making quite a few changes to Play at I/O this week. Google is focused on helping developers succeed. While the Play Store does house hundreds of thousands of apps from hundreds of thousands of developers, Google does play a vital role in developers success. And there’s a boatload of updates Google is announcing today to make that happen.

One of the bigger features that most of you will see is, the new Topic Browse Pages. These will present relevant and engaging content that will allow users to explore a specific table. There are also new audio samples, allowing users to try out developers’ audio content, and YouTube playlists carousels will also be coming soon.

So why is Google adding these new Topic Browse Pages to Play? Essentially, to get users to download more apps and spend more money. Google says that its efforts to make Play more content-rich have already resulted in a 25% increase in average monthly visitors, a 10% growth in acquisitions, and a double-digit growth in spend activity through developers’ apps year-over-year. Adding these new Topic Browse Pages should increase that even more.

Google is also looking to make subscriptions better

Next up on Play, Google is going to make subscriptions more flexible and profitable. With new multi-product checkouts for subscriptions. This is going to allow developers to sell add-ons and a new option for grace periods. This will offer more flexibility to users and also help reduce involuntary churn.

The Play Console is getting redesigned dashboards, objective-focused overview pages, new Android vitals metric, and the ability to halt fully-rolled-out releases. Developers will also get a new asset library for visual assets and open metrics for listing performance insights.

Google has made some improvements to the Play Integrity API for stronger abuse detection and device security.

These are just some of the very many updates that Google is making to Play at I/O 2025 this week. Google will be holding its “What’s New in Play” session later today at 4:30PM PT, which should be live streamed on the Android Developers YouTube channel.