The Android development team is making several changes aimed at helping Android developers and their development.
New capabilities are being added for creating and managing lists in Google Play, including the ability to save lists as drafts, schedule lists for publishing at specific times, and test lists with a portion of the relevant audience.
This follows changes from earlier this year, such as the ability to create custom store lists for different audiences.
The team is also adding several updates to price experiments, a feature that allows developers to test different price points and optimize prices for local buying power. Starting next month, developers will be able to save price experiments as drafts, remove variations from experiments if the results aren’t good, see warning notifications for price configuration issues, and apply the “winning” price to all products.
Developers can also now more effectively display their available products based on regional availability. This is accomplished by using the getBillingConfigAsync API, which provides the user’s state.
Another upcoming feature is the expansion of real-time developer notifications to include one-time purchases and canceled purchases.
The Android development team is actively enhancing billing flexibility by introducing alternative billing APIs in more than 35 markets. This initiative aims to offer developers a smoother billing experience when delivering apps to users in markets where alternative payment methods are preferred over Google’s payment service. With this update, developers will no longer be required to construct and uphold choice screens. They can efficiently handle alternative billing settings, and transactions processed through the API will be integrated into the Top Charts and developer reports. This reporting includes details such as exchange rates, associated app package ID, and service fee rates.
To improve overall app quality, developers will also get access to more metrics to help them monitor their apps for bad behaviors. New features include hourly vitals data during release rollouts, access to three years of vitals data to analyze long-term trends, per-device metrics, alerts when per-device bad behavior thresholds reach 8%, recommended fixes for errors in Android Studio, and the ability to grant team members limited access to app quality data.
Lastly, the Play Integrity API, designed to mitigate app tampering, has undergone enhancements, including a new signal verifying that Play Protect remains active, an additional Play Integrity API report, and the capability to oversee Play Integrity API integration through the Google Play SDK Console. Moreover, low-latency Play Integrity API standard requests are now widely accessible, promising integrity verdicts with a speed boost—reportedly 10 times faster, as per Google.
