A New Way to Promote Your App on Google Play

Posted by Michael Siliski, Product Management Director, Google Play

Google Play now reaches more than 1 billion people on Android devices in more than 190 countries, helping a growing number of developers like you build successful global businesses. In fact, in the past year, we paid more than $7 billion to developers distributing apps and games on Google Play. We remain as committed as ever to making Google Play the best place to find great apps, games and other entertainment.

App discovery plays a critical role in driving your continued success, and over the past year Google has provided best practices to enhance app discovery and engagement, as well as app promotion tools to get the most out of search and display advertising for developers. We are always looking for new ways to help you get your apps in front of potential new users. That’s why, in the next few weeks, we will begin piloting sponsored search results on Google Play, bringing our unique expertise in search ads to the store.

With more than 100 billion searches every month on Google.com, we’ve seen how search ads shown next to organic search results on Google.com can significantly improve content discovery for users and advertisers, both large and small. Search ads on Google Play will enable developers to drive more awareness of their apps and provide consumers new ways to discover apps that they otherwise might have missed.

In the coming weeks, a limited set of users will begin to see ads from a pilot group of advertisers who are already running Google search ads for their apps. We’ll have more to share in the coming months about the expansion of this program as we look at the results and feedback. We believe search ads will be a useful addition to Google Play for users and developers alike, and we hope this will bring even more success to our developer community.

Bringing apps to the workplace with Google Play for Work

Posted by Matt Goodridge, Google Play team

Work doesn’t just happen in an office from 9 to 5 anymore. Today’s workers are mobile workers, and they need to be able to get things done as efficiently and collaboratively as possible, at any time. That’s why the Android for Work initiative is bringing together partners across the ecosystem, from device and app makers to networking and management solutions, to provide businesses with a secure, flexible and reliable mobility platform that users already know and love.

Google Play for Work allows businesses to securely deploy and manage enterprise-grade apps, across all of their users running Android for Work. Google Play for Work simplifies the process of distributing apps to employees and ensures that IT approves every deployed app. For developers, this is an opportunity to reach a new audience at scale through bulk installs or purchasing, which enables easy installation of your app across enterprises.

How to join Google Play for Work

Free apps will be available on Google Play for Work at launch with no action needed on your part. If you have a paid app, you’ll soon be able to opt-in to make your app available for bulk purchase on Google Play for Work in the Developer Console during the app publishing process. Find out more about publishing in the Google Play Developer Help Center.

Designing great apps for Android for Work

Apps that are installed from Google Play for Work will function without code changes. However, please note that some of the controls that Android for Work offers IT admins could affect how your app works. To ensure the best possible experience for your users, watch the first in our series of Android for Work DevBytes below to understand the best practices you should be following in developing your app.

More DevBytes will be posted to our YouTube channel soon. Find out more about Android for Work.

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We'll see you at GDC 2015!

Posted by Greg Hartrell, Senior Product Manager of Google Play Games

The Game Developers Conference (GDC) is less than one week away in San Francisco. This year we will host our annual Developer Day at West Hall and be on the Expo floor in booth #502. We’re excited to give you a glimpse into how we are helping mobile game developers build successful businesses and improve user experiences.

Our Developer Day will take place in Room 2006 of the West Hall of Moscone Center on Monday, March 2. We're keeping the content action-oriented with a few presentations and lightning talks, followed by a full afternoon of hands on hacking with Google engineers. Here’s a look at the schedule:

Opening Keynote || 10AM: We’ll kick off the day by sharing to make your games more successful with Google. You’ll hear about new platforms, new tools to make development easier, and ways to measure your mobile games and monetize them.

Running A Successful Games Business with Google || 10:30AM: Next we’ll hear from Bob Meese, the Global Head of Games Business Development from Google Play, who’ll offer some key pointers on how to make sure you're best taking advantage of unique tools on Google Play to grow your business effectively.

Lightning Talks || 11:15AM: Ready to absorb all the opportunities Google has to offer your game business? These quick, 5-minute talks will cover everything from FlatBuffers to Google Cast to data interpolation. To keep us on track, a gong may be involved.

Code Labs || 1:30PM: After lunch, we’ll turn the room into a classroom setting where you can participate in a number of self-guided code labs focused on leveraging Analytics, Google Play game services, Firebase and VR with Cardboard. These Code Labs are completely self-paced and will be available throughout the afternoon. If you want admission to the code labs earlier, sign up for Priority Access here!

Also, be sure to check out the Google booth on the Expo floor to get hands on experiences with Project Tango, Niantic Labs and Cardboard starting on Wednesday, March 4. Our teams from AdMob, AdWords, Analytics, Cloud Platform and Firebase will also be available to answer any of your product questions.

For more information on our presence at GDC, including a full list of our talks and speaker details, please visit g.co/dev/gdc2015. Please note that these events are part of the official Game Developer's Conference, so you will need a pass to attend. If you can't attend GDC in person, you can still check out our morning talks on our livestream at g.co/dev/gdc-livestream.

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Android Developer Story: GinLemon - Breaking through with Google Play

Posted by Letitia Lago, Google Play team

It’s not often that a developer is born from a summer holiday joke and a parent’s love of furniture making. But this is exactly how Vincenzo Colucci started GinLemon, a successful app business on Google Play.

The choice of Android was an obvious one to Vincenzo, although he didn’t have experience with Android development at the start — he learned it by downloading the tools and playing with the examples.

From his original scratch card app, to the global success of Smart Launcher, Vincenzo is proof that great apps can come from personal passion and the willingness to do something a little different.

Find out more about Vincenzo’s journey in this video.

Vincenzo and the team he has built around Smart Launcher are working on a major update, which will be free and they hope to release in March. They also have Smart Locker, a series of lock screens with some unique features, in development and other projects in the pipeline.

To learn about creating apps for Google Play and building your own app business, check out The Secrets to App Success on Google Play [ebook], a detailed playbook on the best practices and tools you can use to maximize the reach, retention, and revenue of your new app.

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Building for Android Wear: Depth and Flexibility

Posted by Timothy Jordan, Developer Advocate

With so many recent updates and improvements to Android Wear, it's high time to share an updated overview of the platform. We're certainly not done—there's a lot more to come—but this is the picture today as you start or continue developing your groundbreaking Android Wear user experiences.

Guns'n'Glory Heros and Strava

The Android Wear platform emphasizes depth and flexibility. Built on Android, it allows developers to use familiar APIs to create useful, performant, and imaginative apps that run directly on the watch. In the spirit of Android, you have the freedom to make substantial changes to the user experience, including the creation of custom watch faces. There are three main categories of experiences you can build: apps, custom watch faces, and notifications.

Apps

Apps that are built for Android Wear run directly on the watch and can do nearly anything a phone can, from tracking your run to giving you a little entertainment while waiting for the bus. Some even work without a connection to the phone, such as fitness and music apps. There are libraries to help you move data between the phone and the wearable, as well as create stunning and adaptable UIs. Here's a list of some of the great features you have access to:

Feature	Documentation
Full screen activities with touch events	Creating Custom UIs for Wear Devices
Notifications and custom actions	UI Patterns for Android Wear
Custom Watch faces	Creating Watch Faces
Layouts for round and square devices	Creating Custom UIs for Wear Devices
OpenGL	Displaying Graphics with OpenGL ES
Sensors Accelerometer Gyroscope Compass Barometer Heart rate sensor	SensorManager
Haptics	Vibrator
Microphone	AudioRecord
Voice actions	Adding Voice Capabilities
GPS	Detecting Location on Android Wear
Offline storing of data / music	Transferring Assets
Media playback controls	MediaSession, MediaController
Framework based on Android 5.0 API 21	Android 5.0 APIs
Standalone or synchronized apps	Sending and Syncing Data

Selected watch faces

Watch Faces

The ability to create custom watch faces gives you direct access to the most prominent UI element on a user's most personal device. The API is simple enough to build watch faces quickly and flexible enough to allow personalization. Again, given the depth and flexibility of the Android platform, you can create something for the user that's both beautiful and packed with unique features.

The development journey starts with the simplicity of bringing your design to the wrist. At the core of the watch face API is the onDraw method that allows you to draw whatever design you can think of to the canvas at a high enough frame rate to deliver fluid animation. This will come through at full fidelity while the watch is in interactive mode.

At other times, when the watch is in ambient mode, you're able to draw a more discreet version of the watch face. Additional preferences can be set to arrange the system UI elements appropriately for your design. Once those basics are covered, the limits are your imagination! You can go further with additions like the moon phase, current weather, or fitness stats. Watchmakers call these items "complications" -- but with Android they're hardly complicated. Once you have the data, just draw it on the canvas as you did the time.

Glympse and WhatsApp

Notifications

Of course, Android Wear Notifications are the easiest way to get started in the world of wearables. If you've got an Android app with notifications -- they already work on a Wear watch. If you've already enhanced your notification with actions, this is even better and also automatically already works. You can take things further with Wear-specific functionality like Stacks, Pages, and Voice Replies that make your notifications richer experiences on the wrist.

The user experiences you build for Wear get to take advantage of the power and flexibility of the Android platform. It's easy to get started and possible to create truly groundbreaking UI for your users. Together, we can create an ecosystem of user experiences as diverse as the watches they run on and the people who wear them.

Check out the developer videos and documentation for more, and share your thoughts on the Android Wear Developers community. We can’t wait to see the innovative user experiences you will build on Android Wear.

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Beta Channel for the Android WebView

Posted by Richard Coles, Software Engineer, Google London

Many Android apps use a WebView for displaying HTML content. In Android 5.0 Lollipop, Google has the ability to update WebView independently of the Android platform. Beginning today, developers can use a new beta channel to test the latest version of WebView and provide feedback.

WebView updates bring numerous bug fixes, new web platform APIs and updates from Chromium. If you’re making use of the WebView in your app, becoming a beta channel tester will give you an early start with new APIs as well as the chance to test your app before the WebView rolls out to your users.

The first version offered in the beta channel will be based on Chrome 40 and you can find a full list of changes on the chromium blog entry.

To become a beta tester, join the community which will enable you to sign up for the Beta program; you’ll then be able to install the beta version of the WebView via the Play Store. If you find any bugs, please file them on the Chromium issue tracker.

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The Guardian — Understanding and engaging mobile users

Posted by Leticia Lago, Google Play team

The Guardian is a global news organization with one of the world's largest quality English-speaking news websites, theguardian.com. It has more than 100 million monthly unique browsers and app users, two thirds of which come from outside the UK. With a longstanding reputation for agenda-setting journalism, the publication is most recently renowned for its Pulitzer Prize and Emmy-winning coverage of the disclosures made by whistleblower Edward Snowden. The Guardian’s early adoption of a digital-first policy and continued digital innovation means it has also become a respected name among developers and tech audiences. In the last year, it has launched a redesigned app and new website and been among a handful of publishers to develop its own Glassware.

The Guardian app is taking advantage of unique Google Play and Android features to drive user engagement. Their mobile app readers are now 10 to 20 times more engaged than their average web users. Improving engagement has also helped them lift the rating for their app from 4.0 to 4.4 on Google Play.

Anthony Sullivan, Director of Product, and Tom Grinsted, Product Manager, share some best practices for increasing app engagement in this video.

To learn more, be sure to check out these resources to better engage your users:

• Convert installs to active users [video] — hear from Matteo Vallone, Partner Development Manager for Google Play, about the best practices for engaging and retaining users through intents, identity, context, and rich notifications as well as delivering a cross-platform user experience.


• Adding Wearable Features to Notifications [tutorial] — learn how to add notifications to Android Wear devices, including how to make use of the Wear notification features: voice commands, stacks, and pages.


• Beta testing [help] — discover how to make use of the alpha and beta testing features offered by Google Play, and get feedback from real users.


• Build your community (of testers) [guide] — get advice on how to build communities on G+ or other social networks, then tap into their skills and enthusiasm to help with testing your app.

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Trulia sees 30% more engagement using notifications and further innovates with Android Wear

Posted by Laura Della Torre, Google Play team

Trulia’s mission is to make it as easy as possible for home buyers, sellers, owners and renters to navigate the real estate market. Originally a website-based company, Trulia is keenly aware that its users are migrating to mobile. Today, more than 50 percent of Trulia’s business comes from mobile and growth shows no sign of slowing, so they know that’s where they need to innovate.

In the following video, Jonathan McNulty, VP of Consumer Product, and Lauren Hirashima, Mobile Product Manager, at Trulia, talked about how the company successfully leveraged notifications on Android to increase app engagement by 30 percent and has seen 2x the amount of engagement on Android relative to other platforms:

Trulia continues to focus on improving their mobile experience, using Google’s geo-fencing technology to create Nearby Home Alerts, which lets users know when they walk near a new listing. Combined with Android Wear, Trulia now makes it possible for users to see details and photos about a property and call or email the agent, all directly from their watch.

Find out more about using rich notifications on Android and developing for Android Wear. And check out The Secrets to App Success on Google Play (ebook) which contains a chapter dedicated to the best practices and tools you can use to increase user engagement and retention in your app.

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