This year's Google I/O developer conference brought many interesting announcements, including phones Pixel 6a, Pixel 7 and 7 Pro, watches pixel Watch or tools to remove personal data from searches. In addition, the tech giant introduced a number of major changes to its Google Play store that should benefit both developers and users.
The first new feature in Google Play is the Google Play SDK index portal, which contains more than 100 of the most widely used commercial developer toolkits. The list highlights statistics such as the number of applications using them or important details such as required permissions.
Google is also soon planning to move signing keys to the Cloud Key Management service, where they will be stored even more securely. In addition, developers will be able to switch to new signing keys from the Play Console every year as a precaution in case of a security breach. If apps need more security, the new Play Integrity interface is designed to detect traffic from pirated or modified apps, or from rooted or otherwise compromised devices.
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A major update to the tool was also announced Android vitals, which is used to measure the stability of applications. The update will bring a new Developer Reporting interface that will make available data from Android vitals for custom analysis and tools. Firebase Crashlytics is also adding support for the new interface, so developers will have more options to analyze user experience and crash reports. The new version of the In-app Updates interface now gives developers the ability to respond to updates within 15 minutes of a new version being released (up until now it was up to 24 hours). The interface now includes a "What's New" dialog, through which developers can let users know more about the update they are currently downloading.
Another change is the expansion of custom store listings to 50 per app, each of which can have unique direct links and analytics. Developers can also get more immediate results from Store listing experiments to see how changes perform. To simplify the process of setting up and managing direct links, a new Play Console page will be launched soon, bringing learning resources and tools together in one place.
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In an effort to provide more ways to work with customer budgets, developers can now set ultra-low prices with a base of 5 US cents or the equivalent in any market. Subscriptions have also been improved, where it is now possible to combine multiple plans within a subscription without having to create new SKUs for each combination. Developers will also have the option to update prices for new subscribers and keep prices unchanged for existing ones. Finally, a new In-App Messaging interface will be added to Google Play to notify users that payments have been declined. Through these notifications, users are more likely to resolve their issue or update their payment method to keep their subscription.
