An updated app guide and new video tips to help you find success on Google Play

An updated app guide and new video tips to help you find success on Google Play

Apps Distribute Featured Google Play

Posted by Dom Elliott, The Google Play Apps & Games team

Last year, we introduced our first playbook for developers, “The Secrets to App Success on Google Play”, to help you grow your app or game business, which has been downloaded more than 200,000 times.. Many new features have since been announced on the platform – from Store Listing Experiments and beta testing improvements to App Invites and Smart Lock for Passwords.

Get the second edition of “The Secrets to App Success on Google Play”

Hot off the press, you can now download the second edition to learn about all the new tools and best practices for improving the quality of your app, growing a valuable audience, increasing engagement and retention, and earning more revenue.

Get the book on Google Play in English now or you can sign-up to be notified when the booklet is released in the following languages: Bahasa Indonesia, Deutsch, español (Latinoamérica), le français, português do Brasil, tiếng Việt, русский язы́к, ไทย, 한국어, 中文 (简体), 中文 (繁體), 日本語. Based on your feedback, the guide was updated to work seamlessly in the Google Play Books app. If you prefer, you can also download a PDF version from the Android Developers website.

New videos with tips to find success on Google Play

To accompany the guide, watch the first two episodes in a new ten-part video series of actionable tips you can start using today to achieve your business objectives. Subscribe to the Android Developers channel on YouTube and follow +Android Developers to watch the new videos as they’re released weekly.

Two new videos will be released each week in the ten-part series


on the Android Developer YouTube channel.

Let us know your feedback

Once you’ve checked out the guide and the videos, we’d again love to hear your feedback so we can continue to improve our developer support, please let us know what you think.

Introducing the Tech Entrepreneur Nanodegree

Introducing the Tech Entrepreneur Nanodegree

Android Developer Apps Education Featured Udacity

Originally posted on Google Developers Blog

Posted by Shanea King-Roberson, Program Manager

As a developer, writing your app is important. But even more important is getting it into the hands of users. Ideally millions of users. To that end, you can now learn what it takes to design, validate, prototype, monetize, and market app ideas from the ground up and grow them into a scalable business with the new Tech Entrepreneur Nanodegree.

Designed by Google in partnership with Udacity, the Tech Entrepreneur Nanodegree, takes 4-7 months to complete. We have teamed up with most successful thought leaders in this space to provide students with a unique and battle-tested perspective. You’ll meet Geoffrey Moore, author of “Crossing the Chasm”, Pete Koomen, co-founder of Optimizely; Aaron Harris and Kevin Hale, Partners at Y-Combinator; Nir Eyal, author of the book “Hooked: How to build habit forming products” and co-founder of Product Hunt; Steve Chen, Co-Founder of YouTube, rapid prototyping company InVision and many more.

All of the content that make up this nanodegree is available online for free at udacity.com/google. In addition, Udacity provides paid services, including access to coaches, guidance on your project, help staying on track, career counseling, and a certificate when you complete the nanodegree.

The Tech Entrepreneur offering will consist of the following courses:

• Product Design: Learn Google’s Design Sprint methodology, Ideation & Validation, UI/UX design and gathering the right metrics.


• Prototyping: Experiment with rapid-low and high-fidelity prototyping on mobile and the web using online tools.


• Monetization: Learn how to monetize your app and how to set up an effective payment funnel.


• App Marketing: Understand your market, analyze competition, position your product, prepare for launch, acquire customers and learn growth hacks.


• How to get your startup started: Find out whether you really need venture capital funding, evaluate build vs. buy, and learn simple ways to monitor and maintain your startup business effectively.

Pitch your ideas in front of Venture Capitalists

Upon completion, students will receive a joint certificate from Udacity and Google. The top graduates will also be invited to an exclusive pitch event, where they will have the opportunity to pitch their final product to venture capitalists at Google.

Support for 100MB APKs on Google Play

Support for 100MB APKs on Google Play

apk Apps Develop Distribute Featured Google Play

Posted by Kobi Glick, Google Play team

Smartphones are powerful devices that can support diverse tasks from graphically intensive games to helping people get work done from anywhere. We understand that developers are challenged with delivering a delightful user experience that maximizes the hardware of the device, while also ensuring that their users can download, install, and open the app as quickly as possible. It’s a tough balance to strike, especially when you’re targeting diverse global audiences.

To support the growing number of developers who are building richer apps and games on Google Play, we are increasing the APK file size limit to 100MB from 50MB. This means developers can publish APKs up to 100MB in size, and users will see a warning only when the app exceeds the 100MB quota and makes use of Expansion Files. The default update setting for users will continue to be to auto-updating apps over Wi-Fi only, enabling users to access higher quality apps and games while conserving their data usage.

Even though you can make your app bigger, it doesn’t always mean you should. Remember to keep in mind the following factors:

• Mobile data connectivity: Users around the world have varying mobile data connectivity speeds. Particularly in developing countries, many people are coming online with connections slower than those of users in countries like the U.S. and Japan. Users on a slow connection are less likely to install an app or game that is going to take a long time to download.


• Mobile data caps: Many mobile networks around the world give users a limited number of MB that they can download each month without incurring additional charges. Users are often wary of downloading large files for fear of exceeding their limits.


• App performance: Mobile devices have limited RAM and storage space. The larger your app or game, the slower it may run, particularly on older devices.


• Install time: People want to start using your app or game as quickly as possible after tapping the install button. Longer wait times increase the risk they’ll give up.

We hope that, in certain circumstances, this file size increase is useful and enables you to build higher quality apps and games that users love.