Google Play Now Helps You Discover More Of What You Love

Google Play Store is home to millions of Android apps and offers users a safe and reliable space to get their favorite apps and games quickly. However, the vast library of apps in the Google Play Store also poses a huge challenge for the Mountain View tech giant to help users spot what apps and games they might be interested in the most. Discoverability is one of the areas where Apple’s App Store feels slightly better.

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However, that’s not to say that Google hasn’t put effort into making the Play Store experience better in recent years. In fact, one of the visible efforts came in the form of curated spaces, a feature launched last year, which brings content from various apps in one place to help you explore specific interests in the Google Play Store. Now, Google wants to take this experience to a whole new level and introduce more features to further improve the discovery and engagement of apps.

Google’s plans to improve the discovery and engagement of Play Store apps

Google is working towards improving the Play Store in a few ways. First, it plans to expand curated spaces to more locations and categories this year, which means you’ll see more seasonal and evergreen interests in the curated spaces, though there is no information about what those new categories will be and what new locations they’ll be launched at what specific time of the year.

Image: Google

There is something Google plans to launch sooner than that. It has plans to introduce what it calls “new topic browse pages,” enabling users to access ‘timely, relevant, and visually engaging content on specific topics.’ They can be accessed from multiple places within the Play Store, including Apps Home, store listing pages, and search. The company hasn’t provided what topics it’ll cover, but it’s announced that these pages will launch with Media & Entertainment this month for users in the US.

If you are based in the US, this will show you topic pages on over 100,000 different shows and movies, and select sports, with more topic browse pages covering locally specific interests rolling out in other parts of the world later this year. Additionally, Google has also announced that it’s expanding “Where to Watch” to new markets, including the UK, Korea, Indonesia, and Mexico.

Image: Google

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More freedom for developers to better showcase what their apps can do

The above-mentioned changes are what Google will manage, but it doesn’t solely rely on them to improve the Play Store experience. It also wants developers to join by providing them with tools to better showcase what their apps can do.

If you are a developer, you’ll be able to add a “hero content carousel” and a “YouTube playlist carousel” to your app listing, showcasing key features, app demo, feature tutorials, and pretty much anything that you feel has the potential to increase the install rates of your apps. These new tools will be available to developers from July.

Another important feature is the ability to add audio samples, which will appear in the Apps Home section, allowing users to tap to hear a preview of what the app is about. This feature is now available for all Health & Wellness app developers in the US, with support for more categories and markets coming soon.

While all these changes sound exciting to both developers and users, it’d be interesting to see if Google shows us any data regarding how much these changes improve discoverability and their role in installation rates at some point in time in the future. Meanwhile, if you’re a developer, these features might be worth trying to push your apps to the list of Google Play Store’s 10 billion download club.

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