Wrapping up for 2018 with Google Play and Android

Posted by Patricia Correa, Platforms & Ecosystems

Earlier this year we highlighted some of Google Play's milestones and commitments in supporting the 1M+ developers on the Play Store, as well as those of you working on Android apps and games and looking to launch and grow your business on our platforms. We have been inspired and humbled by the achievements of app and game developers, building experiences that delight and help people everywhere, as some stories highlighted in #IMakeApps.

We continue to focus on helping you grow thriving businesses and building tools and resources to help you reach and engage more users in more places, whilst ensuring a safe and secure ecosystem. Looking to 2019, we are excited about all the things to come and seeing more developers adopt new features and update to Android P.

In the meantime let's share some of the 2018 highlights on Google Play and Android:

Building for the future

Along with Android P we have continued to help the Android developer ecosystem, launching Android Jetpack, the latest Android Studio, and Kotlin support. Developers are also now able to add rich and dynamic UI templates with Slices in places such as Google Search and Assistant, APIs for new screens support, and much more. Discover the latest from Android 9, API Level 28.

Smaller apps have higher conversion rates and our research shows that a large app size is a key driver of uninstalls. At I/O we launched a new publishing format, the Android App Bundle, helping developers to deliver smaller and more efficient apps with a simplified release process, and with features on demand - saving on average 35% in download size! On devices using Android M and above, app bundles can reduce app size even further, by automatically supporting uncompressed native libraries, thereby eliminating duplication on devices.

You can build app bundles in the Android Studio 3.2 stable release and in Unity 2018.3 beta, and upload larger bundles with installed APK sizes of up to 500MB without using expansion files, through an early access feature soon to be available to all developers.

Richer experiences and discovery

Discovery of your apps and games is important, so we launched Google Play Instant and increased the size limit to 10MB to enable TRY NOW on the Play Store, and removed the URL requirement for Instant apps. Android Studio 3.3 beta release, lets you publish a single app bundle and classify it or a particular module to be instant enabled (without maintaining separate code).

For game developers, Unity introduced the Google Play Instant plug-in and instant app support is built into the new Cocos Creator. Our app pre-registration program, has seen nearly 250 million app pre-registrations, helping drive app downloads through richer discovery.

Optimizing for quality and performance

Android vitals are now more actionable, with a dashboard highlighting core vitals, peer benchmarks, start-up time and permission denials vitals, anomaly detection and alerts, and linking pre-launch reports - all so that you can better optimize and prioritize issues for improved quality and performance.

There are more opportunities to get feedback and fix issues before launch. The Google Play Console expanded the functionality of automated device testing with a pre-launch report for games, and the launch of the internal and closed test tracks lets you push your app to up to 100 internal testers, before releasing them to production.

Insights for your business, now and in the long term

Metrics are critical to optimize your business and we've added new customizable tools in the Play Console, with downloadable reports to help you evaluate core metrics. Including cumulative data, 30-day rolling averages, and roll-ups for different time periods to better match the cadence of your business.

You can now configure the statistics report to show how your instant apps are performing, analyze different dimensions and identify how many install the final app on their device. The acquisition report shows users discovery journey through to conversion - with average revenue per user and retention benchmarks against similar apps. You can also find the best performing search terms for your store listing with organic breakdown - helping to optimize efforts to grow and retain a valuable audience.

Increasingly developers are adopting subscriptions as their core monetization model. The dedicated new subscriptions center means you can easily change subscription prices, offer partial refunds for in-app products and subscriptions, and also make plan changes in Play Billing Library version 1.2. Learn how to keep subscribers engaged; users can pause plans, giving you more control with order management and the cancellation survey.

Discover how to use all the new features and best practices on the Academy for App Success, our interactive free e-learning platform, offering bite-sized courses that help you make the most of Play Console and improve your app quality.

Make sure you follow @googleplaydev and sign up to our newsletter to stay ahead of all our updates in 2019! We hope these features and tools will enable us to continue a successful partnership with you in the New Year - follow our countdown for a daily highlight. From all of us at Google Play - happy holidays.

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Streamlining the developer experience for instant games

Posted by Vlad Zavidovych, Software Engineer; Artem Yudin, Software Engineer

Google Play Instant enables people to experience your game or app natively without having to go through a full installation process. Removing the friction of installing is a great way to increase engagement, conversions, and lifetime value of your users.

Today, we've made it easier to build instant games and apps by removing the URL requirement. Previously, in order to publish an instant game you had to create a web destination for it. The website also had to be connected to the instant game through intent filters and digital asset links verification.

Now, it is no longer required to add URL-based intent filters to your instant game. People will be able to access the instant experience through a 'Try Now' button in the Play Store or Play Games apps, via deep link API, and in the future through the app ads.

While being particularly helpful for games which often don't have a corresponding website, the new URL-less functionality is available to both game and app developers.

How to develop and publish an instant game without adding URL support

Game developers using Unity or the latest Cocos Creator can take advantage of URL-less instant games by simply leaving the URL fields blank in the setup process.

However, if you have your own game engine or have built your game from scratch in C++, check the AndroidManifest to make sure it has the following intent filter declaration:

<intent-filter>
   <action android:name="android.intent.action.MAIN" />
   <category android:name="android.intent.category.LAUNCHER" />
</intent-filter>

Starting with Android Studio 3.2, you can create a new instant game, or convert your existing game, without associating a URL with it. In fact, this is now the default behavior. Here is a run through the process:

1. First, make sure you're running Android Studio 3.2 or newer by either updating or downloading it here. Make sure to install Instant Apps Development SDK 1.3.0 or higher from Android SDK Manager.
   
2. Then download a sample instant app from GitHub. In Android Studio, click File → New → Import Project… and import the downloaded "urlless" sample.
   
3. Lastly, after gradle tasks are finished, click the green "Run" button with "instantapp" configuration.

You should see an instant game on your attached device. Instant runtime found and launched the entry point activity in your game with the ACTION_MAIN and CATEGORY_LAUNCHER intent filter.

Once you are ready to publish the sample instant game:

1. Give your sample game a unique applicationId in app/build.gradle file by replacing existing applicationId - we don't want different applications with the same id.
   
2. Generate signed APKs for both installable and instant version of our sample game.
   
   
   • In Android Studio, Build → Generate Signed Bundle / APK…
     
   • Choose APK for both "app" and "instantapp" modules.
   
   
3. In the Play Console, create a new application, upload APK under "App Releases" tab, and then upload "instantapp-release.zip" under "Android Instant Apps" tab.
   
   
   • The installable app must be rolled out before the instant one.
   
   
4. The rollout process may be familiar to most Android developers, but here's a step-by-step guide in case you run into any issues.

Once you publish your instant game, people can access it via a 'Try Now' button in Play Store within 24 hours or sooner. You can also send traffic to your instant game using the deep link API:

market://details?id=MY.PACKAGE.NAME&launch=true&referrer=myreferrer

MY.PACKAGE.NAME refers to applicationId that you have replaced in app/build.gradle file.

What's next?

With the launch of Android App Bundle we are excited to further simplify the developer experience for Google Play Instant. In the coming months we are making it possible to deliver your app's or game's dynamic features instantly from the same bundle as your installable app or game. Stay tuned!

Check out more information on Google Play Instant, or feel free to ask a question on Stack Overflow, or report an issue to our public tracker.

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