Google officially announces and details Play Store Material Theme redesign

After months of waiting and temporary appearances, the Play Store Material Theme redesign is now official on Android. Google today announced the revamp after it began widely rolling out last week. The company also detailed the key changes.

This “complete visual redesign” comes as the Play Store now has over two billion monthly active users. The end goal of the Material Theme and “several user-facing updates” is to create a “cleaner, more premium store that improves app discovery and accessibility for our diverse set of users.”

Google highlights four key changes:

• To make browsing faster and easier, we’ve introduced a new navigation bar at the bottom of the Play Store on mobile devices and a new left navigation on tablets and Chrome OS.
• There are now two distinct destinations for games and apps, which helps us better serve users the right kind of content.
• Once users find the right app or game, the updated store listing page layout surfaces richer app information at the top of each page as well as a more prominent call-to-action button. This makes it easier for users to see the important details and make a decision to install your app.
• You’ll also notice our new icon system with a uniform shape, helping content to stand out more over UI.

That last improvement is related to Google requiring new rounded square app icons for Play on Android and Chrome OS.

The Material Theme Play Store began widely rolling out last Friday after a number of users encountered the look from late May to mid-June. We first enabled it in April, and it should be available for all users as of this week.