Originally posted on Android Developers blog
Posted by Morgan Dollard, Product Manager of Google Play Games
With mobile gamers across 190 countries, Google Play Games is made up of a vibrant and diverse gaming community. And these players are more engaged than ever. Over the past year, the number of games reaching over 1 million installs grew by 50 percent.
Today, at our annual Developer Day at the Game Developers Conference, we announced new platform and ads tools for developers, of all sizes reach, to reach this global audience and accelerate the growth of their games business. Check out below the full range of features that will help game developers build their apps, grow their users base, and earn more revenue.
In February, we introduced Gamer IDs so that anyone could create a gaming persona. We also simplified the sign-in process for Google Play Games so players could pick up playing their game more quickly. We’re also working on product enhancements to make Play Games a little more social and fun, which will mean more engaged players who’re playing your game for longer. One example is the launch of Gamer friends (coming soon!), where your players can add and interact with their friends from within the Google Play Games app (without needing a Google+ account).
We’re also launching the Indie Corner, a new collection on Google Play, that will highlight amazing games built by indie developers. You can nominate your awesome indie game for inclusion at g.co/indiecornersubmission. We’ll pick the best games to showcase based on the quality of the experience and exemplary use of Google Play game services.
In January, we added features to Player Analytics, the free reporting tool of Google Play game services, which helps you understand how players are progressing, spending and churning. Today, we previewed some upcoming new tools that would be available in the coming months, including:
Promoting your game and growing your audience is important, but it’s just as important to reach the right audience for your game, the players who want to open the game again and again. That’s why today we’ve unveiled new features that make it simpler to reach the right audience at scale.
AdMob helps game developers around the world maximize revenue through in-app advertising. At GDC, we also announced a new way to help you earn more through AdMob Mediation. Rewarded advertising is a popular form of game monetization -- users are given the choice to engage with ads in exchange for an in-app reward. AdMob Mediation will enable you to easily monetize your apps with rewarded video ads from a number of ad providers. Supported networks and platforms include AdColony, AppLovin, Chartboost, Fyber, Upsight and Vungle, with more being added all the time.
You can learn more about this, and all our ads announcements on the Inside AdWords blog.
This is just the start of what we’ve got planned for 2016. We hope you can make use of these tools to improve your game, engage your audience, and grow your business and revenue.
Originally posted on Google Apps Developers blog
Posted by Henry Wang, Associate Product Marketing Manager
Originally posted on DoubleClick Publisher Blog
At this point, you’ve read our recommendations for growing your app’s audience and keeping users engaged. But there are technical aspects, too, that can make or break your app’s success. Speed, for example, is crucial -- users expect apps to respond in under one second.
Yesterday, we gave recommendations for attracting, engaging, and retaining your users. Continue reading today to learn tips from Dev Gogate, Mobile Solutions Consulting Manager at Google, on providing your users with a high quality app.
Creating a high quality app is essential for building and maintaining a loyal user base. Follow Dev’s recommendations to optimize your app quality and stay posted for our post tomorrow on ways to effectively monetize.
Posted by Jason Titus, Senior Director of Engineering
This morning, we kicked off our 8th annual Google I/O conference, joined by 5,600 developers at Moscone Center, 530 I/O Extended communities around the world, and millions via the I/O Live stream. This year’s event is focused on delivering incredible experiences on mobile and helping developers build successful businesses through these key themes: Develop, Engage, and Earn.
During the keynote, we had a number of announcements that covered the evolution of the mobile platform, tools for Android, iOS, and Web developers, and the push towards more immersive mobile experiences with VR. Here’s a closer look at the news:
By: Purnima Kochikar, Director, Google Play Apps & Games
With over 1 billion active Android users, an increasing number of developers like you are building successful global businesses on Google Play. Since the last Google I/O, we’ve also paid out more than $5 billion to developers.
This week at Google I/O, we announced new ways to help you build a successful business. These solutions work together at scale to help you find more users, understand and engage them, and effectively convert your active users into buyers.
Last year, Google Play became an even better place to try new ideas. Since May 2013, Google Play offers Alpha and Beta Testing so that you can engage users early to get feedback on your new app. Feedback provided by users is private, allowing you to fix issues before publicly launching the app, and without impacting your public ratings and reviews. Over 80,000 apps on Google Play are actively using beta testing. You can also ensure new versions get a positive response by updating through staged rollouts.
As your app business grows, you dedicate more time to release management. Today we announced the Google Play Developer Publishing API to help you scale your release operations. The new API will let you upload APKs, manage your in-app products and localized store listings. You will be able to integrate publishing operations with your release processes and toolchain through a RESTful API. With the Google Play Developer Publishing API you’ll spend less time managing your releases and more time managing your business. This API is currently in closed beta and we look forward to making it available to all developers.
The Google Play Developer Console now offers more actionable insights into your app’s performance by sending you email notifications for Alerts and providing Optimization Tips. We’re also offering new revenue metrics including number of buyers and average revenue per paying user. You’ll also be able to export user reviews for further analysis. Click on Announcements in the Developer Console for a list of new features.
For game developers, we recently launched enhanced Play Games statistics on the Google Play Developer Console. You get a daily dashboard that visualizes player and engagement statistics for signed in users, including daily active users, retention analysis, and achievement and leaderboard performance.
With AdWords, we're building a robust platform to help you promote your app and drive re-engagement. This week we are launching Installed App Category Targeting, a new way to promote your app to new users. It helps you reach potential customers across the AdMob network who have already installed apps from related categories on Google Play and other app stores. For example, an action-oriented game developer may wish to reach users who have previously installed apps from the category Action & Adventure Games.
Ads can also remind users about the apps they already have. Through Google mobile display and search ads deep linking, you can re-engage users who have already installed your Android app by taking them directly to specific pages in the app. Let’s say someone has the Hotel Tonight app installed on their phone. If they search Google for “hotels in San Francisco," they'll see an ad that will open Hotel Tonight app and take them directly to a list of San Francisco hotels.
This deep-linking is also available through search for all apps that implement app indexing. If a user with the Walmart Android app searches for “Chromecast where to buy”, they’ll go directly to the Chromecast page in the Walmart app. The new App Indexing API is now open to all Android developers, globally. Get started now.
For game developers using Play Games, we announced a new Game Profile that is automatically customized based on the gameplay and achievements earned in those games. Since its launch last year, users have loved saving their game progress in the cloud. We’re now evolving this feature to Saved Games, where users can save up to 3 “bookmarks” of their progress in the Play Games app, complete with images and descriptions. Finally, we announced a new service called Quests — it you run online, time-based goals in your game; for example, players can collect bunch of in-game items on a specific day, and the quests services coordinates with your game to know who completed the goal. These APIs run events for your players, and reward them, without the need to update your game.
Today, we announced that users who have set up Direct Carrier Billing on their smartphone can also make purchases on Google Play from their tablet, charging to the same mobile phone bill. In addition to our recent launch of payments through PayPal, these new user payment options expand monetization opportunities for your apps.
As announced earlier this year, Google Analytics is now directly available in the AdMob interface, giving you powerful segmentation tools to determine the best monetization strategy for each user. For example, you might want to display in-app purchase ads to users most interested in buying, while showing regular ads to those less likely to buy right now. Once you’ve segmented your audience in this way, you can use AdMob to build interstitial ads that promote in-app purchase items to users at a point in your app that’s useful to them. This creates a more customized experience for users, can help prolong engagement and grow in-app purchase revenue. Learn more.
If you're at Google I/O 2014, please join us at our breakout sessions today and tomorrow, where we'll be talking about these features in much more detail. (Add us to your calendar!) And if you can't make I/O, you can always join us on the livestream or watch the videos online later.
Cross-posted from the Android Developers Blog
Today we're launching a new release of Google Play services. Version 4.0 includes the Google Mobile Ads SDK, and offers improvements to geofencing, Google+, and Google Wallet Instant Buy APIs.
With over 97% of devices now running Android 2.3 (Gingerbread) or newer platform versions, we’re dropping support for Froyo from this release of the Google Play services SDK in order to make it possible to offer more powerful APIs in the future. That means you will not be able to utilize these new APIs on devices running Android 2.2 (Froyo).
We’re still in the process of rolling out to Android devices across the world, but you can already download the latest Google Play services SDK and start developing against the new APIs using the new Android 4.4 (KitKat) emulator.
If you’re using AdMob to monetize your apps, the new Google Mobile Ads SDK in Google Play services helps provide seamless improvements to your users. For example, bug fixes get pushed automatically to users without you having to do anything. Check out the post on the Google Ads Developer Blog for more details.
The Maps and Geofencing APIs that launched in Google Play services 3.1 have been updated to improve overall battery efficiency and responsiveness.
You can save power by requesting larger latency values for notifications alerting your app to users entering or exiting geofences, or request that entry alerts are sent only after a user stays within a geofence for a specified period of time. Setting generous dwell times helps to eliminate unwanted notifications when a user passes near a geofence or their location is seen to move across a boundary.
The Maps API enhances map customization features, letting you specify marker opacity, fade-in effects, and visibility of 3D buildings. It’s also now possible to change ground overlay images.
Apps that are enabled with Google+ Sign-In will be updated with a simplified sign-in consent dialog. Google Wallet Instant Buy APIs are now available to everyone to try out within a sandbox, with a simplified API that streamlines the buy-flow and reduces integration time.
Google Wallet Instant Buy also includes new Wallet Objects, which means you can award loyalty points to a user's saved rewards program ID for each applicable Google Wallet Instant Buy purchase.
To give users better controls and to provide you with a simple, standard system to continue to monetize your apps, this update contains a new, anonymous identifier for advertising purposes (to be used in place of Android ID). Google Settings now includes user controls that enable users to reset this identifier, or opt out of interest-based ads for Google Play apps.
To learn more about Google Play services and the APIs available to you through it, visit the Google Services area of the Android Developers site.
