Summary: Google has pushed out a redesign of the Google Play Console with a new app dashboard, making it easier for developers to pinpoint the most important information about their app. The most important metrics have been lumped into four main categories to streamline finding relevant information.
Google today has announced a redesign for the app dashboard in Google Play Console, effectively simplifying things for app developers by letting them streamline a few key interactions. As a user, when you think about Android apps, your thought process probably doesn’t go far beyond what the app does for you and how it looks, whether or not there are bugs impacting your experience, or what sorts of features you think it’s missing.
Quite likely, you aren’t thinking about the process of developing said application. Understandably so. If you’re not a developer, why would you need to worry at all about the development process? And you shouldn’t, not really. There’s no reason for how things all work and come together to be on your mind. That being said, developers are why we have apps in the first place.
So it’s always a good thing when Google does stuff to make things easier for developers. Because when things are easier for developers, there’s a good chance their apps get better. To that end, that’s what the redesign for the Google Play Console is doing. It’s improving things for developers, so those developers can focus more on improving their apps. Instead of mucking about in menus.
Google’s redesign of the Play Console app dashboard puts the most important metrics front and center
Google’s redesign of the Play Console is doing quite a few things following these changes, but the main thing it seeks is to put the most important metrics front and center. So developers can see them as quickly and as effortlessly as possible. For example, what Google deems as “essential metrics” has now been put front and center. It has also grouped things into four distinct categories. These are Test and Release, Monitor and Improve, Grow Users, and Monetize with Play.
That last category, Monetize with Play, is obviously about helping developers monetize their apps and games. The main Dashboard page also shows snapshots of the metrics in these categories. However, you can click on each individual category if you want to dive deeper into the data of that category specifically.
Notifications are being streamlined as well
Google says it’s also going to be improving notifications. Specifically, it’s enhancing notifications by ensuring that developers will always see notifications for issues that demand their attention. It will also expire notifications that are no longer relevant. Basically, say a developer fixes an issue within an app, thus making a notification about the bug irrelevant. This notification will be expired by Google in the new console app dashboard, so developers aren’t tied up with something that will be wasting their time.
Notifications are also displayed on the new app dashboard with relevant objectives. So developers can tackle things faster that appear higher priority. Google is also adding a new “pre-review checks” feature. This should allow developers to avoid issues with devices that have larger screens. Specifically with regard to the layout. These changes, including the new Google Play Console design, should be live for developers as of today. Developers can also keep an on what’s changed with the Google Play Console via the “what’s new” page.
