Hi.
I'm Ricardo.
I work on the Google Play team.
I'm going to tell you about all the tools
available in the Developer Console
to help you build high quality apps for Google Play,
from tips in the publishing process,
to how to make the best of the data reporting
available to you.
Let's start from the basics-- targeting the right audience.
First, it's a good idea to do a bit of market research
and assess your target audience.
Understand and what and what versions and screen sizes
you want to target.
If you go to developer.android.com
and search for dashboards, you can get relevant graphs
to show you which versions you would want to support.
You're likely to get the best result, if you design your app
to work on tablets from the start.
The increased screen area on tablets
gives you more possibilities and allows
for more engagement with the user, which
can mean increased usage as well as more monetization
opportunities.
If you're building a game, make sure you
choose the right category among the 18 new game
categories recently added in Google Play.
After sorting out the general outline and placement
of your app, it's time to start building it.
But don't wait until your app is 100%
finished before showing it to people.
We have designed beta testing to help
you get user feedback as early as possible.
Before your app is ready to be seen by the world,
you can distribute it to a group of users you select.
We call this alpha and beta test groups.
If you don't yet have a production version of your app,
your app will be invisible in Google Play,
except to the testers you choose.
If you're using Google Play Games Services,
you can use the alpha and beta testing
to test your game services as well.
You can use Google groups or Google+ communities to indicate
which users you want to be able to access the test versions
of your apps.
You can set a what's new field for each version of your app,
including the ones for testers.
And this is really useful to tell your testers what's
new in the alpha and beta versions they
are about to receive.
Each user will need to opt in to be a tester for each app
and unload the app of course.
To aid users in doing so, many developers create a little web
page with a set of instructions that they send out
to their testers, or mention it in their group or Google+
community.
Now that your alpha and beta test is in progress.
It's good to know that users who are alpha or beta testers
cannot leave reviews for your app.
In this way, you can protect against leaks
about your secret app or harm to your ratings
if you're beta version still has some bugs.
However, you can still see crash reports, optimization tapes,
and statistics in the Developer Console.
And we explicitly mark out results
that pertain to your alpha or beta test.
So for example, you can quickly isolate all application crashes
that your beta testers are experiencing.
Your beta testers are great for identifying
bugs and the usability problems.
But keep in mind, they are not a representative sample
of your target user population.
Once your app is looking good to your beta testers,
and it has been through a full round of testing on your side,
it's time to publish.
Once your app is published to all users,
you will have some options when you roll out your next updates.
Here at Google.
We want to be sure that everything goes well when we
roll out new version of our apps.
And we know that you do as well.
For this, we design staged rollouts.
You can rollout updates of your app
to just a percentage of your users, like 5%,
and then crank it up to 100% when
you can see that the reviews are still good,
and there are no problems on the horizon.
Don't panic, if you realize that you rolled out a bad version
while a staged rollout is still in progress.
Spin up a bug fix and publish a new version.
Your fix will go out to the users who have the bad one,
and you can resume the rollout.
Now that I covered the publishing process, let's focus
on monitoring how your app is doing.
Here at Google we think that the developers do best
when they have lots of insights into their users and app
performance.
Most successful developers tell us
that they log into the Developer Console
every day to check on their statistics, reviews,
and optimization tips.
Here's an overview of some of the types of data
that is offered in the Developer Console
that we think more developers should be looking at.
Starting from the basics, most of you
know that you can see installs and the uninstalls
over time in the Developer Console.
In addition to that, if you just go to the statistics page,
you can see how your app ratings have changed over time, crash
trends and if you link your Developer Console
account with Google Analytics, data about your active users,
and their engagement with your app.
Be sure to click on app version to make
sure you compare your new versions against the older
ones.
Also use the CSV exports to download the full data set
beyond the first top 10 values.
If you're a game developer and you use Google Play Games
Services in your app, you can monitor your game performance
and key player metrics using the new game stats module
that we just launched a few weeks ago.
Crashes can be a major problem.
They make users unhappy and dissatisfied.
They can result in bad reviews and users
uninstalling your app in frustration.
So we have spent time making the crash reporting feature
in the Developer Console even better.
You can check on your beta test and your stage rollout
by filtering your crashes by version.
You can also see how these crashes break
down across different devices and Android versions
to make it easier to track down what's going wrong
or why users on a certain device are complaining.
If you develop a native code, we have improved the reporting
and presentation, specifically for native crashes,
with better clustering of similar crashes
and summarizing of relevant information.
Also, remember that we collect crashes in real time,
so you can monitor your staged rollout or beta version
minutes after publishing it.
Finally, optimization tapes show you new ways
that you can improve, tailored to your own apps and users.
From adding translations, making sure your app works well
on tablets and ensuring your app is using the latest
versions of the Google services you integrate with.
We also help you out with alerts,
letting you know if there's been a big change in your installs,
uninstalls, ratings, or crashes.
With alerts, you can trust Google to alert you
whenever a relevant event occurs.
So you can focus on building your app.
We just added the ability to get these alerts over e-mail.
So make sure you subscribe to this new service
from the setting section of the Developer Console.
To summarize, let me remind you the core aspects in building
a quality app-- research and identify your target audience,
collect early feedback by your beta testers
while development is still in progress,
do risk-free releases with stage rollouts,
and keep optimizing your app with the data
that Google Play makes available to you.
Now get cracking.