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Hi. I'm Daniel White,
engineering lead for the new Google Play Console.
Our teams have been hard at work
rebuilding the Console from the ground up.
And it's hugely rewarding to finally see it
in the hands of our users and to hear your thoughts
on what we have built.
In this session, I'll be covering how the new Play Console is easier to use,
better at getting you the information you need,
more insightful about your performance,
and better suited to managing large teams.
Play Console is the center of the Google Play Developer community.
Over time, it has grown to serve over 900,000 individuals each month,
from hobbyists to large companies with hundreds of Console users.
That growth gave us an opportunity to not just expand Play Console
but to step back and redesign it
for the problems faced by you,
the modern Android developer.
Let's dive in and explore the new Console.
The most striking change is how the new Console looks and feels.
We've given it a modern interface in the Google Material Design language,
which makes the experience much cleaner and more similar to other Google products.
It also gives you more space on large screens,
as well as more flexibility in how your data is displayed.
When we tested this new design with hundreds of Play developers,
they told us they liked it for its clarity, cleanliness,
and the ease of finding the right information on the page,
and we hope you do too.
Because Google Material is a design language
that was designed to adapt to a variety of devices,
the new Play Console will now work well,
whether you load it on a phone or a 4K dashboard screen.
And it's been designed to be accessible from the start,
because we want Play Console to be ready to use,
no matter your individual needs.
Along with the new visual design,
we also redesigned the menu structure.
After years of new features,
the menus were ready for a reorganization,
one that not only streamlined the list
but also took into account the changing ways you use those features.
The new menu structure groups pages more naturally
by their function.
The
for uploading and distributing your apps,
reviewing your testing and production tracks,
and checking how your latest updates are performing,
designed with release managers in mind.
Grow
from pre-registration to store listing experiments.
It also features acquisition reporting,
which has been completely redeveloped.
More on that in a minute.
The
It contains all of the signals and features
that tell you how your app is performing in the wild,
including both its technical performance with Android vitals
and how people feel about it through ratings and reviews.
Monetize
reporting, and optimization tools to help you grow your business
through in-app purchases and subscriptions.
And
I'll cover this in-depth a little later in this webinar.
We've also built new overviews and dashboards
for many areas within the Console,
starting with the very first page you see:
the app list.
Now you can customize this page
to highlight the apps that you care most about.
You can pin your favorite apps from the list
so that they always appear at the top of the page.
Then simply edit and drag and drop them
into the right order for you.
Once your apps are pinned, you'll be able to see summary KPIs
without having to load each app's individual dashboard.
The new
of your testing and production tracks
so you can quickly see which versions are being tested
by how many users, and in which countries.
You will find other overviews throughout the Console,
such as acquisitions, vitals,
financials, ratings, and reviews.
Publishing your apps is one of the major areas
where we really focused on making Play Console
more usable and easy to understand.
In fact, we've made so many improvements to the publishing experience
that we've recorded a whole other session about them.
Check it out for a deep dive on these changes,
which include more guidance when you create a new app
and the ability to manage a large-scale app
with multiple release tracks.
You can find a link to that session in the video description.
We heard that it can be difficult to keep track of the messages
that Google Play sends
and that many developers wanted help
discovering all of the features available within Play Console.
So we put a lot of thought into collating these messages
in more convenient ways.
Play Console has a new policy area in the menu
containing the
In the
that Google Play needs to classify and review your app,
such as your privacy policy,
information about ads if you have them,
and instructions on how to access restricted features in your app.
On the
you can see any outstanding issues with your app
and get guidance on how to resolve them.
The new Console
Here, you can find information and reminders about policy updates,
new features we've released,
and any issues we've found in your apps or with your account.
To make it easy to review,
the
shows you how many messages you have waiting.
And for those of you who manage multiple apps,
you can easily filter messages.
We'll automatically hide messages that are no longer relevant to you,
so you can focus on the most important information
with each visit.
But don't worry, your messages will always be available in the archive
in case you want to review them.
With all the new features we've added over the years,
we know it can be hard to remember everything
that Play Console has to offer.
To help with this, we've given key pages
new expandable sections with more information
and links to educational pages.
These new pages offer tips
for how to integrate these features into your business
and act as a hub for related information,
including links to the Help Center, the Play Academy,
and developer case studies.
We've also created themed resource guides
to help you see which Play Console features
and best practices can help you achieve your business goals.
You can visit these pages now at
You don't need a Play Console account to access them,
so you can share this with anyone on your team
who might be interested in how Play Console can help you succeed.
Across the top of every page is a new Search box,
which gives you a quick way to jump to any page within Play Console
without having to remember where it lives in the menu
or even exactly what it's called.
Currently, the Search results can link you to pages
or Help Center content, with new results added over time
as we better understand how you use this new feature.
The new Console offers a consistent experience,
wherever you analyze and report your data.
Charts, tables, filters, and selectors
are now handled in the same way on every page.
This might sound like a small change,
but in practice it makes it much easier to move between different pages
and immediately understand the data being shown
and how you can manipulate it.
We've also made some substantial improvements
to acquisition reporting.
This data is only available through Play Console,
and we know that interpreting it
is critical to your success on the Play Store.
So in addition to new dimensions
like language, store listing, and reacquisition,
the new acquisition reports also give you new ways
to understand the relationships between your metrics
and analyze the trends.
For a lot more detail on the changes to acquisition reporting and statistics
in the new Play Console,
check out the Grow Your Audience session.
Play Console also shows you a lot of data on the quality of your apps.
In the new Console, you'll see much better visualizations
of your app ratings and the sentiment of your Play Store reviews.
We have also overhauled the
and released Android Performance Tuner
and native crash symbolication.
Android Performance Tuner is a new tool to help you measure
your frame rate performance and graphical fidelity
and to optimize between them.
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.
You can integrate the Unity plug-in
or do a custom integration to try it out.
Another new feature, native crash symbolication,
lets you upload your symbols files and your crashes and ANRs
to be 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 your current release.
We've also improved
As well as reviewing all pages to make sure the concepts are clear
and easier to understand,
it's been refocused to center on the issues
we think you might want to address first.
Play Console has features to help everyone on your team,
from QAs to marketing managers, engineers to PMs.
But not everyone needs the same access to your account.
Larger developers often told us
that they wanted more powerful and better features in this area,
so we've significantly revamped the team management features
in the new Play Console.
These new features can help you manage increasingly large teams,
making it easy to understand which of your team members can see data
or make changes across your account.
The new
has been redesigned in collaboration with some of our largest accounts.
We heard that it wasn't always easy to understand
the rights granted by certain permissions,
so we used clearer names and descriptions across the board.
The new Play Console also makes a clearer distinction
between permissions that apply to the whole account
and permissions that apply to a specific app within the account.
You also now have the ability to search and filter your user list
so you can see which users have each permission,
whose access has expired,
or who can see a particular app.
These changes will make it much easier
to safely manage access as your team grows
so that the right people can access the right parts of Play Console.
These new team management features are just the beginning.
We hear your requests for more advanced enterprise functionality
and are already working on future improvements.
The Play Console beta is available now at
and I'm so excited for you to give it a try.
Once you do, we would love it if you could share your thoughts
via the in-product feedback tool.
The feedback so far has already been so valuable to guide us
as we further improve the new Play Console.
Believe it or not, I've really only scratched the surface
of the big changes we've made.
So I encourage you to have a look for yourself
and also watch the other sessions about the new Console.
Thank you for watching.
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