Google has announced that its Google Play Console, which is the developer’s main conduit into the world of Android apps, has gotten significantly more helpful. The console, which helps devs all the way from when they first publish a raw version of the app to when they finally take it off the play store, is receiving a boost in its capabilities.
Android is growing a a fast clip. If Google’s announcement that it now had 2 Billion users on-board wasn’t enough to convince you, then dig this: Android users in 190 countries downloaded 82 billion apps, in just the last year! And, the number of devs with hugely popular apps is up by at least 35 percent.
And it is true. Flashback 3 or 4 years and we had what? Maybe 2 games that we liked playing? Maybe 2 good productivity apps? Now though, the number has gone up drastically. There is an app for everything and new ones are being made even as we speak. And Google is now helping its developers keep the pressure up by ensuring that they get all the data they could want from the Play console.
For instance, Google will now provides devs with a lot ore data regarding app performance. There is a new, updates console statistics page for instance, which will let users discover all the important stuff there is to know about their apps.
There is also a new Android Vitals service, that will lets devs see the actual user experience after downloading the app. The vitals service brings home data pertaining to things like crash rates, app not responding rates, battery sage, render time. UI issues and so on and so forth. And if their app has crashed, devs will also be able to see the stack traces, helping them debug the app better.
The new dashboard will also allow devs to study the performance of their apps on different devices based upon the capabilities of a particular device. How will this help you ask? Well, remember how you could not download that app on your old android smartphone? Well, that was because its developer believed it would not work well on a device with specs under a certain line. Now though, devs will be able to test their assumption and if they turn out to be wrong, open app access to older devices as well.
The other big announcement was better support for subscriptions — which, after all is the fastest growing business model on Google Play. The number of active subscribers on Play for instance, doubled last year. There is now a new dashboard to handle them. Finally, the company said that it will handle the process of app signing from now onwards and in the process, receive greater access to the app which could help it optimize it and reduce its size.
