By Jenny Gove, Senior Staff UX Researcher, Google Play



We know you work hard to acquire users and grow your customer base, which can be
challenging in a crowded market. That's why we've heard from many of you that
you find tools like store
listing experiments and universal
app campaigns are valuable. It's equally important to keep customers engaged
from the beginning. Great design and delightful user experiences are fundamental
to doing just that.




We partnered with AnswerLab to conduct comprehensive user experience research
across a variety of verticals; including e-commerce, insurance, travel, food
ordering, ticket sales and services, and financial management. The resulting
insights may help you increase engagement and conversion by providing guidance
on useful and usable functionality.




The best app experiences seamlessly guide users through their tasks with
efficient navigation, search, forms, registration and purchasing. They provide
great e-commerce facilities and integrate effective ordering and payment
systems. Ultimately, an engaging app begins with attention to usability in all
of these areas. Learn tips on:

• Navigation & Exploration
  


• In-App Search
  


• Commerce & Conversions
  


• Registration
  


• Form Entry
  


• Usability and Comprehension

You can read the full article, design
your app to drive conversions, on the Android Developers website, complete
with links to developer resources. Also get
the Playbook for Developers app to stay up-to-date with features and best
practices that will help you grow a successful business on Google Play.

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By Mohammad El-Saadi, Business Development, Google Play



The Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region is a fast growing market for app and game developers on Google Play, and localizing is crucial to making the most of the opportunity. For example, the main grossing apps & games in Saudi Arabia have localized their store listings and their actual app and game on Google Play.



The British team behind the Skyscanner travel app had already localised it into more than 15 languages, yet the launch in Arabic was a huge milestone for them. Arabic speaking users really appreciated the localization and the app's average user rating increased from 4.62☆ to 4.77☆ after localization. Users engaged with the app longer, with an increase of 30% in their average session duration. Additionally 50% more travellers have been redirected to Skyscanner partners to book flight, hotel and car hire deals.

Skyscanner opening screen in English and in Arabic

But how difficult is it to correctly localize your app or game to Arabic?



The team at Skyscanner managed to develop Right-To-Left (RTL) Arabic language support within the app in two weeks: "Our initial fear was that we would need lots of manual coding for the layouts. However, the Android layout system handled all of the cases really well. We were already using *Start and *End margin and padding in line with guidelines, but there's also Android Studio support and Lint check to fix any issues automatically." says Mate Herber, Software Engineer.



Many other top apps and games developers are successfully investing in localizing for MENA users. For example, when game developer Pocket Gems localized War Dragons, the installs by Arabic speaking users tripled. Their percentage of revenue from Arabic language players also went from effectively 0% to ~1.5%.



We just refreshed the Now in Arabic collection (MENA only) with 16 newly localized apps and games, including titles like Netflix, Periscope and Transformers. It will be live until May 11 on Google Play in the following countries: Algeria, Bahrain, Egypt, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Morocco, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia and United Arab Emirates.

Check our Localization Checklist for best practices when localizing for any language, and our Going Global Playbook. When your app or game in Arabic is ready, you can self-nominate to be part of future refreshes of the Now in Arabic collection by filling in this form.

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By: Mary Liz McCurdy, Health & Fitness Lead, Google Play

(Originally published on Android Central)

It's an exciting time to be a health & fitness app developer. With people
shelling out on fitness more than ever before, we're seeing record high levels
of gym memberships and attendance, the rise of boutique fitness, and an emphasis
on connected devices.

Paramount to this growth is the integration of smart technology. Whether it be
through streaming video, wearables, or mobile apps, technology empowers us with
instant access to high quality workouts, sensor biofeedback, and endless
on-demand inspiration. At Google Play, we've seen this growth reflected by the
incredible popularity of health & fitness apps. In fact, this is one of href="https://play.google.com/store/apps/category/HEALTH_AND_FITNESS">Google
Play's fastest growing app categories, boasting the most engaged 30d active
users.

As the resident health & fitness expert on Google Play, I had the opportunity to
speak about what's driving the category's growth at the recent href="http://www.wtsusa.show/">Wearables Technology Show. Here are the top
three recommendations I shared with the audience to help coach developers
towards building more valuable app experiences:

Lose it!

#1: Be invisible

We all know how painful manually logging activity and biometrics is- be
it calorie tracking, workouts, moods, or hormone cycles. Manual logging is
actually the number one reason users drop off.

What you should do: Minimize distraction with automation
wherever possible while maximizing value at the appropriate moments. Remember
that you are in all likelihood a companion experience to the main event.

Lose
It! makes food tracking easier by using your phone's camera and image
recognition technology to identify foods and their nutritional information.
Goodbye manual calorie counting!

Strava
uses auto pause detection, recognizing when you are resting during exercise so
you don't need to fiddle with your device and can stay safe and in the zone.

Freeletics

#2: Be personal

Investing in robust personalization has been the driving factor in
improving app engagement and buyer conversion among many of our top developers.

What you should do: Personalize the experience for each user or
distinct user cohorts by leveraging technology like the href="https://developers.google.com/awareness/">Awareness API, href="https://developers.google.com/fit/rest/">Fit API, href="https://developers.google.com/identity/sign-in/android/start-integrating">Google
Sign In, and href="https://developers.facebook.com/docs/facebook-login/android">Facebook
Login to intelligently pull in relevant user data. Think about your
first-time users, power users, high value users, etc. and treat them uniquely.

href="https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.freeletics.lite">Freeletics
personalizes onboarding and the overall app experience based on gender and
fitness level leading to a 58% increase in weekly active
sessions.

href="https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.skimble.workouts">Workout
Trainer by Skimble increased user engagement by 30% through
personalizing training programs based on user fitness assessments, goals, and
workout patterns.

Glow

#3: Be assistive

The rise of smartphones, wearables and IoT have left us swimming in data
and dashboards and left many consumers wondering, so what?

What you should do: Offer insights and suggestions, not just
raw data. Users are not engineers and generally do not want to process complex
data or dashboards. In most cases, they want you to tell them what to do in the
moment or provide digestible summaries after the fact. Keep it simple.

href="https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.glow.android">Glow
provides personalized insights that leverage user-inputted data and third party
data from Google Fit to
help couples achieve their fertility goals.

href="https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.beddit.beddit">Beddit
gives personalized daily tips to improve your sleep and wellness by analyzing
sleep cycles, resting heart rate, respiration, room temperature, and more.

At the end of the day, changing health and fitness habits is hard. Make it
easier for your users by seamlessly guiding them on what they
personally need to do to achieve their goal. It's that simple
;) We encourage you to experiment with these exercises to get your app fit for
the millions of Android users looking to live a healthier, happier life.

Posted by Lily Sheringham, Google Play team

Today we have released a new video ‘10 tips to stay on the right side of Google Play policy’. The video provides 10 best practices to help you develop and launch apps and games which follow Google Play’s Developer Program Policies.

It accompanies the recently published News video series and is part of our 10 tips for success on Google Play video series.

Watch the video to learn how to review your app, to ensure you have appropriate content and the rights to use it, how to handle user data, and more. Also, find out how to stay up to date with policy updates and get support from our policy team.

You can also find more resources on Google Play policies in the Developer Policy Center, and also get the new Playbook for Developers app to learn more best practices to find success on Google Play.

Posted by Jamil Moledina, Google Play, Games Strategic Lead

Last Saturday, we hosted the first href="https://events.withgoogle.com/google-play-indie-game-festival/exhibiting-games/">Google
Play Indie Games Festival in North America, where we showcased 30 amazing
games that celebrate the passion, innovation, and art of indies. After a
competitive round of voting from fans and on-stage presentations to a jury of
industry experts, we recognized seven finalists nominees and three winners.

Winners:

	bit bit blocks Presented by Greg Batha Bit Bit Blocks is a cute and action-packed competitive puzzle game. Play with your friends on a single screen, or challenge yourself in single player mode. Head-to-head puzzle play anytime, anywhere.
	Numbo Jumbo Presented by Kaveh Daryabeygi, Wombo Combo Numbo Jumbo is a casual mobile puzzle number game for iOS and Android. Players group numbers that add together: for example, [3, 5, 8] works because 3+5=8.
	Orbit - Playing with Gravity Presented by Chetan Surpur & Eric Rahman, Highkey Games ORBIT puts a gravity simulator at the heart of a puzzle game. Launch planets with a flick of your finger, and try to get them into orbit around black holes. ORBIT also features a sandbox where you can create your own universes, control time, and paint with gravity.

Finalist nominees:

	Antihero [coming later in 2016] Presented by Tim Conkling Antihero is a "fast-paced strategy game with an (Oliver) Twist." Run a thieves' guild in a gas-lit, corrupt city. Recruit urchins, hire thugs, steal everything – and bribe, blackmail, and assassinate your opposition. Single-player and cross-platform multiplayer for desktops, tablets, and phones.
	Armajet [coming later in 2016] Presented by Nicola Geretti & Alexander Krivicich, Super Bit Machine Armajet is a free-to-play multiplayer shooter that pits teams of players against each other in fast-paced jetpack combat. Armajet is a best in class mobile game designed for spectator-friendly competitive gaming for tablets and smartphones. Players compete in a modern arena shooter that’s easy to learn, but hard to master.
	Norman's Night In: The Cave [coming later in 2016] Presented by Nick Iorfino & Alex Reed, Bactrian Games Norman's Night In is a 2D puzzle-platformer that tells the tale of Norman and his fateful fall into the world of cave. While test driving the latest model 3c Bowling Ball, Norman finds himself lost with nothing but his loaned bball and a weird feeling that somehow he was meant to be there.
	Parallyzed Presented by David Fox, Double Coconut Parallyzed is an atmospheric adventure platformer with unique gameplay, set in a dark and enchanting dreamscape. You play twin sisters who have been cast into separate dimensions. Red and Blue have different attributes and talents, are deeply connected, and have the ability to swap bodies at any time.

Finalists nominees and winners also received a range of prizes, including Google
I/O 2017 tickets, a Tango Development kit, Google Cloud credits, an NVIDIA
Android TV & K1 tablet, and a Razer Forge TV bundle.

Indie Games Contest coming to Europe

We’re continuing our effort to help indie game developers thrive by highlighting
innovative and fun games for fans around the world. Today, we are announcing the
Indie Games Contest for developers based in European countries (specific list of
countries coming soon!). This is a great opportunity for indie games developers
to win prizes that will help you showcase your art to industry experts and grow
your business and your community of players worldwide. Make sure you don’t miss
out on hearing the details by shref="https://events.withgoogle.com/indie-games-contest-europe/">igning up
here for updates.

As we shared at the festival, it’s rewarding to see how Google Play has evolved
over the years. We’re now reaching over 1 billion users every month and there’s
literally something for everyone. From virtual reality to family indie games,
developers like you continue to inspire, provoke, and innovate through
beautiful, artistic games.

Posted by Dave Burke, VP of Engineering

Android 7.0 Nougat

Today, Android 7.0 Nougat will begin rolling out to users, starting with Nexus
devices. At the same time, we’re pushing the Android 7.0 source code to the
Android Open Source Project (AOSP), extending public availability of this new
version of Android to the broader ecosystem.

We’ve been working together with
you over the past several months to get your feedback on this release, and also
to make sure your apps are ready for the users who will run them on Nougat
devices.

What’s inside Nougat

Android Nougat reflects input from thousands of fans and developers like you,
all around the world. There are over 250 major features in Android Nougat,
including VR Mode in
Android. We’ve worked at all levels of the Android stack in
Nougat — from how the operating system reads sensor data to how it sends pixels to
the display — to make it especially built to provide high quality mobile VR
experiences.

Plus, Nougat brings a number of new features to help make Android
more powerful, more productive and more secure. It introduces a brand new
href="https://developer.android.com/about/versions/nougat/android-7.0.html?utm_campaign=android_launch_android7.0nougat_082216&utm_source=anddev&utm_medium=blog#jit_aot?utm_source=anddev&utm_medium=blog">JIT/AOT
compiler to improve software performance, make app installs faster,
and take up less storage. It also adds platform support for href="https://developer.android.com/ndk/guides/graphics/index.html?utm_campaign=android_launch_android7.0nougat_082216&utm_source=anddev&utm_medium=blog">Vulkan,
a low-overhead, cross-platform API for high-performance, 3D graphics. href="http://developer.android.com/guide/topics/ui/multi-window.html?utm_source=anddev&utm_medium=blog">Multi-Window
support lets users run two apps at the same time, and href="http://developer.android.com/guide/topics/ui/notifiers/notifications.html?utm_campaign=android_launch_android7.0nougat_082216&utm_source=anddev&utm_medium=blog#direct?utm_source=anddev&utm_medium=blog">Direct
Reply so users can reply directly to notifications without having
to open the app. As always, Android is built with powerful layers of security
and encryption to keep your private data private, so Nougat brings new features
like File-based encryption, seamless updates, and href="https://developer.android.com/training/articles/direct-boot.html?utm_source=anddev&utm_medium=blog">Direct
Boot.

You can find all of the href="https://developer.android.com/about/versions/nougat/index.html?utm_source=anddev&utm_medium=blog">Nougat
developer resources here, including details on behavior changes and new
features you can use in your apps. An overview of what's new for developers is
available href="https://developer.android.com/about/versions/nougat/android-7.0.html?utm_source=anddev&utm_medium=blog">here, and
you can explore all of the new user features in Nougat href="https://www.android.com/versions/nougat-7-0/">here.

Multi-window mode in Android Nougat

The next wave of users

Starting today and rolling out over the next several weeks, the Nexus 6, Nexus 5X, Nexus 6P, Nexus 9, Nexus Player,
Pixel C, and General Mobile 4G (Android One) will get an over-the-air software
update to Android 7.0 Nougat. Devices enrolled in the href="https://www.google.com/android/beta">Android Beta Program will also
receive this final version.

And there are many tasty devices coming from our partners running Android Nougat, including the upcoming href="http://www.lgnewsroom.com/2016/08/new-lg-v20-to-be-worlds-first-phone-to-launch-with-android-7-0-nougat/">LG
V20, which will be the first new smartphone that ships with Android Nougat, right out of the box.

With all of these new devices beginning to run Nougat, now is the time to
publish your app updates to Google Play. We recommend compiling against, and
ideally targeting, API 24. If you’re still testing some last minute changes, a
great strategy to do this is using href="https://developer.android.com/distribute/engage/beta.html?utm_campaign=android_launch_npreview_061516&utm_source=anddev&utm_medium=blog">Google
Play’s beta testing feature to get early feedback from a small group of
users — including those using Android 7.0 Nougat — and then doing a staged
rollout as you release the updated app to all users.

What’s next for Nougat?

We’re moving Nougat into a new regular maintenance schedule over the coming
quarters. In fact, we’ve already started work on the first Nougat maintenance
release, that will bring continued refinements and polish, and we’re planning to
bring that to you this fall as a developer preview. Stay tuned!

We’ll be closing open bugs logged against Developer Preview builds soon, but
please keep the feedback coming! If you still see an issue that you filed in the
preview tracker, just href="https://source.android.com/source/report-bugs.html">file a new issue
against Android 7.0 in the AOSP issue tracker.

Thanks for being part of the preview, which we shared earlier this year with href="https://medium.com/google-developers/n-as-in-so-early-it-s-not-named-yet-f06bbde8c390#.uqdm4w8hi">an
eye towards giving everyone the opportunity to make the next release of
Android stronger. Your continued feedback has been extremely beneficial in
shaping this final release, not just for users, but for the entire Android
ecosystem.

Posted by By Sarah Karam, Google Play Apps Business Development

With more than 1 billion active users in 190 countries around the world, Google
Play continues to be an important distribution platform for you to build a
global audience. To help you get your apps in front of more users, it’s
important to make them more quickly and easily discoverable in Google Play.
That’s why we rolled out major features, such as href="https://adwords.googleblog.com/2015/07/launching-search-ads-on-play.html">Search
Ads, href="https://play.google.com/store/apps/collection/promotion_3001ed4_indie_corner?hl=en&e=-EnableAppDetailsPageRedesign">Indie
Corner, href="https://developer.android.com/distribute/users/experiments.html">store
listing experiments, and more, over the past year.

To improve the overall search experience, we’re introducing new app categories
and renaming a few existing ones, making them more comprehensive and relevant to
what users are looking for today.

The new categories include:

• Art & Design
  
• Auto & Vehicles
  
• Beauty
  
• Dating
  
• Events
  
• Food & Drink
  
• House & Home
  
• Parenting

In addition, the “Transportation” category will be renamed “Maps & Navigation,”
and the “Media & Video” category will be renamed “Video Players & Editors.”

To select a new category for your app or game

1. Sign in to your Google Play
   Developer Console.
   
2. Select an app.
   
3. On the left menu, click Store Listing.
   
4. Under "Categorization," select an application type and category.
   
5. Near the top of the page, click Save draft (new apps) or Submit update
   (existing apps).

Newly added categories will be available on Google Play within 60 days. If you
choose a newly added category for an app before the category is available for
users, your current app category may change. See additional details and view our
full list of categories in the href="https://support.google.com/googleplay/android-developer/answer/113475">Help
Center.

Posted by Anthony Morris, SWE Google Play and Andrew Hayden, software engineer

Google Play continues to grow rapidly, as Android users installed over 65
billion apps in the last year from the Google Play Store. We’re also seeing
developers move to update their apps more frequently to push great new content,
patch security vulnerabilities, and iterate quickly on user feedback.

However, many users are sensitive to the amount of data they use, especially if
they are not on Wi-Fi. Google Play is investing in improvements to reduce the
data that needs to be transferred for app installs and updates, while making
data cost more transparent to users.

Read on to understand the updates and learn some tips for ways to optimize the
size of your APK.

New Delta algorithm to reduce the size of app updates

For approximately 98% of app updates from the Play Store, only changes
(deltas) to APK files are downloaded and merged with the existing
files, reducing the size of updates. Google Play has used delta algorithms since 2012, and we recently rolled out an additional delta algorithm, href="http://www.daemonology.net/bsdiff/">bsdiff href="http://www.daemonology.net/bsdiff/">(created by Colin Percivalid="fnref1">1href="http://www.daemonology.net/bsdiff/">), that our experimentation shows
can reduce delta size by up to 50% or more compared to the previous algorithm
for some APKs. Bsdiff is
specifically targeted to produce more efficient deltas of native libraries by
taking advantage of the specific ways in which compiled native code changes
between versions. To be most effective, native libraries should be stored
uncompressed (compression interferes with delta algorithms).

An example from Chrome:

Patch Description	Previous patch size	Bsdiff Size
M46 to M47 major update	22.8 MB	12.9 MB
M47 minor update	15.3 MB	3.6 MB

Apps that don’t have uncompressed native libraries can see a 5% decrease in size
on average, compared to the previous delta algorithm.

Applying the delta algorithm to APK Expansion Files to further
reduce update size

APK Expansion Files allow you to include additional large files up to 2GB in
size (e.g. high resolution graphics or media files) with your app, which is
especially popular with games. We have recently expanded our delta and
compression algorithms to apply to these APK Expansion Files in addition to
APKs, reducing the download size of initial installs by 12%, and updates by 65%
on average. APK Expansion file patches use the href="http://xdelta.org/">xdelta algorithm.

Clearer size information in the Play Store

Alongside the improvements to reduce download size, we also made information
displayed about data used and download sizes in the Play Store clearer. You can
now see actual download sizes, not the APK file size, in the Play Store. If you
already have an app, you will only see the update size. These changes are
rolling out now.

---

1. 
   

   
   Colin Percival, Naive differences of executable code,
   http://www.daemonology.net/bsdiff/, 2003. ↩
   

Example 1: Showing new “Download size” of APK

Example 2: Showing new “Update size” of APK

Tips to reduce your download sizes

1. Optimize for the right size measurements: Users care about download size (i.e. how many bytes are transferred when installing/updating an app), and they care about disk size (i.e. how much space the app takes up on disk). It’s important to note that neither of these are the same as the original APK file size nor necessarily correlated.

Chrome example:

	Compressed Native Library	Uncompressed Native Library
APK Size	39MB	52MB (+25%)
Download size (install)	29MB	29MB (no change)
Download size (update)	29MB	21MB (-29%)
Disk size	71MB	52MB (-26%)

Chrome found that initial download size remained the same by not compressing the native library in their APK, while the APK size increased, because Google Play already performs compression for downloads. They also found that the update size decreased, as deltas are more effective with uncompressed files, and disk size decreased as you no longer need an compressed copy of the native library. However, please note, native libraries should only be uncompressed when the minimum SDK version for an APK is 23 (Marshmallow) or later.

2. Reduce your APK size: Remove unnecessary data from the APK like unused resources and code.

3. Optimize parts of your APK to make them smaller: Using more efficient file formats, for example by using WebP instead of JPEG, or by using Proguard to remove unused code.

href="https://medium.com/google-developers/smallerapk-part-1-anatomy-of-an-apk-da83c25e7003#.jgy8wuni9">Read
more about reducing APK sizes and watch the I/O 2016 session href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xctGIB81D2w">‘Putting Your App on a
Diet’ to learn from
Wojtek Kaliciński, about how to reduce the size of your APK.