Google Play

Finding the best Android apps can be really hard, so to help its users find the apps they want a bit easier, Google has just added eight new categories to the Play Store along with renaming two others. These new categories include options such as Art, Dating, Events, and much more. The full list follows…

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The Play Books app has a special affinity for comic books with a number of features meant to improve the reading experience on mobile devices. Announced as part of Comic-Con, Bubble Zoom uses machine learning to magnify text bubbles in digital comics. Users can test this out now on select Marvel and DC volumes.

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With new platforms that are especially suited for gaming, Google has recently launched a number of efforts to promote indie developers on the Play Store. Its latest effort is the Google Play Indie Games Festival this September in San Francisco. Developers are encouraged to submit games that will be showcased and awarded prizes at the event.

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With more and more families adopting an increasing variety of devices in the home it only seems logical for big software makers like Apple and Google to work on sharing plans.

While Apple has had a Family Sharing plan for a while now, Google has only offered such option for its Music service; but that may be about to change…

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HP has today launched the latest version of its lower-end Chromebook, the HP Chromebook 11-inch G5. At first glance there might not appear to be anything special about this laptop, but there are a couple of standout features: the laptop offers more than 12 hours of battery life, and there’s also a model that includes a touchscreen (essential for those planning to take advantage of recently-announced Android app support coming to more Chrome OS devices later this year)…

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Among other changes this morning, Apple announced a new 85-15 revenue split with developers of apps that have subscriptions. Recode is now reporting that Google has had the same plan in mind for the Play Store, but with an important advantage.

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If you’re not yet tried Google Play Music, a deal with TripAdvisor lets you get two months of premium subscription free of charge. The offer is to promote a partnership between the two companies which allows you to play music relevant to the city you’re visiting …

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In this week’s top stories we round up all of our coverage from Google I/O, the company’s annual developer conference where it also took the wraps off a number of upcoming hardware and software products. Android N Developer Preview 3, the Play Store comes to Chrome, Google Assistant, the new Daydream VR platform and much, much more.
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At an I/O session this evening, the inaugural winners of the Google Play Awards were announced. With 10 categories, winners were selected by the Google Play team based on launching or having a major update in the past 12 months, app quality, and innovation.

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It looks like there’s a little tidbit of information that might have been originally planned for the keynote (pulled because of time restraints, maybe?). According to a session description now on the Google I/O website, Google “announced” today that the Google Play Store is coming to Chrome…

Today we announced that we’re adding the best mobile app experiences in the world, Android apps and the Google Play store, to the best browser in the world, Chrome! Come to this session and test your Android apps for Chrome OS. You will get hands on help from our friendly engineers on how to optimize your Android app for Chromebooks. Oh, and we will also be giving the first 50 developers to show up a free Chromebook so they can get a head start bringing their apps to Chrome!

This isn’t exactly surprising as we saw evidence that this was in the cards all the way back in April, but it’s cool nonetheless to see it become official. It looks like this session is going to involve Google showing devs how to test their Android apps on the desktop platform. Also worth noting: the first 50 devs to show up will get a free Chromebook.

We’re on the ground at the event now, so stay tuned as we learn more.

For those who are fairly experienced in the app world, joining betas is always exciting and fun — since it allows people to access the latest features and design tweaks — despite the usual presence of bugs.

With the rollout of version 6.7 of the Play Store, Android Police first spotted, Google will now allow you conveniently see if you’re in a beta testing group from within the Store itself, leave and join potential betas, and even give developers some feedback regarding the latest build…

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For both Google and Apple, the operations on their virtual stores are hugely important, as they account for millions of dollars. However, there has historically been a disparity between the number of downloaded applications and the actual money generated by them, a trend that seems to have peaked in the first quarter of this year.

According to App Annie‘s Index Market for Q1 of 2016, in fact, Google’s Play Store saw a number of downloads that roughly doubles that of the iOS App Store, which in turns represents the platform with the highest profitability, with over 90% more revenue generated over its counterpart…

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As leaked by NPR last week, podcasts are now live in Play Music. Google announced the feature last October and podcasters have since been able to upload their shows. Besides just subscribing and listening, Google will apply the same recommendation features for music to podcasts.

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Google Play has seen its share of design refreshes since its launch four years ago, but starting today all Play apps will be getting a new, more consistent look. The bright colors share the same design as this year’s Google I/O teaser page and might possibly hint at what design language the company is moving to.

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