Hi, I'm Milena Nikolic, Engineering Director at Google Play.
Today, I'm excited to share more about the latest features and developments
in Google Play to help you make the most of our platform.
Our team's mission is to help users connect
with your amazing digital experiences.
In the last 12 months, we've seen 116 billion downloads
of the apps and games that you created,
enjoyed by over 2.5 billion people in more that 190 countries
around the world.
That's a tremendous achievement, but we're not going to stop there.
So today, I'm going to talk about all the ways we're working
to power that success even further.
I'm going to start by talking about our investment
in helping you reach and engage your users.
Then, I'll talk about the Android App Bundle
including a quick look at adoptions so far and where we're headed next.
I'll talk about improvements we've made to help you test and distribute your games
on Google Play
and then finally, I'm going to unveil something our teams
have been hard at work on, a new Play Console
that I think you're really going to like.
I'm saving the best for last but if you really can't wait,
feel free to jump ahead.
Time stamps for all the sections are listed in the video description below.
Before we jump in, I wanted to take a moment
to put these improvements in context.
Developers can only be successful on Google Play
as long as users trust the platform.
That's why we build tools like Google Play Protect
which scans over 100 billion apps everyday
and last year, prevented more than 1.9 billion malware installs
from non-Play sources.
It's also why we've developed Privacy First policies
with strict permission controls and why we review every app and game
for compliance.
But we know that simply providing a trustworthy platform
for your apps and games is not enough.
That's why we're also creating new programs and features
to help users discover and stay engaged with your apps and games.
In the last few months, we've made more progress
to help you capture an even wider audience.
Google Play Points, our user rewards program
recently launched in Hong Kong and Taiwan.
We're continuing to invest in Play Pass, our curated subscription service
with plans to expand globally later this year.
And we just launched Teacher Approved to help parents find
kid-friendly apps and games for their families.
A major part of reaching users is the ability to transact with them.
With Google Play Billing, we want to help you
convert users into buyers.
Our Commerce platform reaches over 2 billion people
in 150 plus countries with over 180 carriers worldwide.
And in the past year, we added 60 new local forms of payments
in 15 countries.
In addition to providing options for different ways to monetize and sell,
Google Play Billing also gives you the tools to optimize
your selling experience and make it effortless
so that you can focus on building a great user experience.
If you want to learn more about recent improvements
we've made to our Commerce platform, be sure to check out what's new
in Google Play Billing Session as well.
The link to this session is in the video description below.
And speaking of scale, our other major focus area this year
was the Android App Bundle.
The App Bundle is our vision for modern app distribution.
And we've been so excited to see so many of you using it already.
By decreasing your app size, the App Bundle has helped
thousands of developers increase their install rate,
especially in countries where device storage is at a premium.
In fact, one in three apps in production on Google Play right now
is published with the Android App Bundle.
That's about an 800% increase from this time last year
and adoption is growing daily.
Recently, we've seen adoption from major developers
like Adobe, eBay, and UC Browser, and there are more new partners everyday.
In the last few months, we've rolled out lots of improvements
in next generation features based on your feedback.
For example, the new App Bundle explorer in the Play Console helps you understand
how Play optimizes your app and lets you download relevant files
and assets.
You can get an installing for any version you've ever published on Play
for testing purposes, and you can also download
Play signed APKs for pre-installing on real devices.
We've also expanded the App Bundle for games
by introducing the Google Play Asset Delivery
which offers free dynamic delivery of game assets.
It allows you to package all your assets alongside your game binary
and let Play handle the asset delivery for you.
It also offers customizable delivery modes,
auto-updates and smart targeting options.
It replaces the need to use expansion files
which will be deprecated soon.
Our early adopters like Gameloft are reporting
great download performance worldwide as well as substantial increase
in the number of users retained.
As we continue to improve the App Bundle, we expect it to become a requirement
for all new apps, some time in 2021.
So if you haven't made the switch yet, now is a great time to do so.
Play Asset Delivery is only one of the many updates we've made
to help you improve your games.
We've also introduced a new Day-1 auto install feature
to preregistration to help you build excitement
before your launch and accelerate early downloads.
Android Performance Tuner is a new tool to help you measure
your frame rate performance and graphical fidelity
and to optimize between the two.
This will help you achieve stable frame rates at scale
across the whole Android device ecosystem
so you can deliver higher quality game experiences
to more Android users with less effort.
It's available for integration for everyone from today
and there is also a new Unity plug-in to make it even easier
to integrate into Unity games.
Another new feature, native crash symbolication
lets you upload your symbol files so your crashes and ANRs
are symbolicated in both Android vitals and pre-launch report.
This lets you debug your game stability issues more easily.
This feature is available now so you can start uploading
with your next release or even with your current release.
But that's not all we've been working on this year.
What I'm most excited to talk about today is a huge update we've made
to Google Play Console.
This is a very exciting update for me, personally.
I've worked on the Console from its earliest days
starting as an engineer and now leading the whole engineering team.
Over time, I've seen the Console grow organically
from a few pages to hundreds of pages and dozens of features
to help everyone in your organization.
And it's been so gratifying to see our developer community
grow and thrive.
There are now over 900,000 individual monthly Console users,
including developers of all sizes, from one-person shops
to companies with literally hundreds of Console users.
The Console has grown with you and in trying to keep up
with your amazing growth, the Console became a little wild
and disorganized.
So last year, we decided to redesign it from the ground up
so we could continue to suit the needs of modern Android developers.
It's taken years of hard work from our teams
but I'm happy to say that today, we can try the beta
of your new Play Console.
We think of ourselves as partners in your success on Play
and with the beta preview, we really want your feedback.
Because the new Console has been designed for you
to be fundamentally more helpful,
it helps you find, discover and understand features
to thrive and play.
It helps guide you through policy changes, release datas, user feedback
and what you should do next.
It helps your team take advantage of our features while keeping you safe
with the new team member management options,
and it helps you understand your performance
with brand new acquisition insights.
I'm really excited to show you around.
The first thing you'll notice is that the new Console
is clearer and easier to use.
We've updated the navigation.
So it now groups related features in one place,
like all your acquisition setup and reporting tools,
or everything you need for monetization.
Over the next few weeks, beta layouts will also be updated
with a new responsive design, helping you to use the Console
no matter where you are and what device you find yourself on.
Keyflows are now more focused.
For example, the new releases overview gives you a snapshot of all your tracks.
So now you can see information about your internal,
closed and open testing tracks as well as your production tracks
all in one place.
You can also quickly see how many users are testing your app
or the latest countries that you've rolled out to.
You'll find this reorganization in the Nav menu as well,
clearly differentiating between different types of a release.
We've also rewritten a feature formally known as time publishing
into a new expanded flow called managed publishing.
In Play's early days, developer changes were usually published
within a few hours.
But the growth of the developer ecosystem and our focus on user safety
has meant that the publishing turnaround time
has naturally expanded.
As a result, we're overhauling the publishing flows
to make it easier to review a summary of your updates and control
when they're published on Google Play.
So now from your app list and dashboards, you can see the update status
of all your apps at a glance.
But your update status isn't the only place
where the new Console is more helpful and communicative.
The important information is now even easier to find
with more ways to get the answers you need fast.
The new policy status and app content sections
make it easier for you to provide all the information Google Play needs
to confirm your apps are compliant with policies.
And launching soon, we're adding an inbox to make sure
you never miss any important messages, suggestions or milestones
from Google Play.
Many of you have told us that you don't feel like you're using
the full capabilities of the Console because you're not aware
of what's available.
So we've invested in building more onboarding resources for you.
Every feature in the Console now has an education page
that tells you what the feature is, how it can help you
and the best practices for using it.
And these pages are available without signing in
in case you need to share them with colleagues who don't use Console.
We've also heard that sometimes you just want to jump in
right into the feature that you want.
That's why we're soon going to be rolling out
Console-wide unified search which will encompass all features,
help resources and metric definitions.
Okay, so we know that you really value Play Console's role
in helping you understand your performance on Play
for acquisition reporting.
So we used the redesign as an opportunity to super charge this area.
You told us that trends and the story they tell
about the impact of your changes had become a critical resource.
You also told us that you value the unique insights
the Console offers, such as conversion rates
and search terms.
That's why the redesigned acquisition reports
make it easy to monitor your performance trends
so you can easily track the positive impact
of your team's work.
Advanced filters and dimensions let you drill down
by acquisition type and region to really understand your performance.
For instance, did your campaign to increase organic installs
in France pay off?
Now you can find out.
Acquisition reports are only one of the many features inside tools and data
that the new Play Console includes to help every member of your team.
From your engineers to your marketing managers
to your executives.
But we know that granting broad access to everyone in your organization
could be a challenge
with permissions that were sometimes hard to understand
and a UI that's made managing large numbers of team members difficult.
That's why we've really focused on enhancing team member management
with better, more granular controls.
You'll see clear permission names and descriptions
so you can easily understand what you are and aren't allowing
people to do.
There's also a much clearer differentiation
between global and app level permissions.
And we've added full user search in bulk edit capabilities
to make management of your teams easier.
These are just our first few steps towards giving you
more granular controls.
We know you want more and we're just getting started.
I really think you're going to love the new Console
and I'm so excited for you to try it out.
In fact, the beta is available to everyone today.
Just visit
Because this is still a beta, we would love your feedback
to help us make it even better for you.
So try it out and let us know what you think.
We hope you enjoy the new programs, features and updates
we've been working on this year, including the new Play Console.
We can't wait to see how you use them to grow your businesses
and optimize your apps and games.
We'll share even more next month during Play's Week
in the 11 Weeks of Android 11.
Until then, thank you for being part of our community.