Google Play Store

725 'Google Play Store' stories August 2012

Before the unified Play branding, Google had the Android Market, Google Music, and Google eBookstore. Google decided to merge and rebrand its individual digital offerings into the Play Store in March of 2012.

The Play Store is now the default place to purchase apps, movies & television, music, books, and news subscriptions for all Android devices. The latter four offerings having their individual Android and iOS apps to watch, listen, and read purchased content. Most content can also be accessed through the web.

In April of 2016, the suite of icons were redesigned in a similar style to provide a consistent look across all devices and the web.

‘Smart updates’ now live in Google Play Store

The folks at AndroidPolice are on a roll today, as they just discovered, after examining the new Google Play Store APK, that the revamped Android marketplace now takes advantage of “smart updates.”

The 300 KB APK code previously revealed a wishlist and gift cards coming down the pipeline, and now it shows incremental downloads are live in version 3.8.15 of the Play Store. Those who need to keep an eye on their data consumption will revel in the update, because it means they no longer have to re-download an entire APK to get the latest version. Hereafter—Android devices will only download the changes between versions.

That is not all, according to AndroidPolice:

Here’s the good news: it should also work with earlier Play Store releases, like 3.7.15, as the change seems to be retroactive and server-side.