The only viable path forward for applications for Android is to scale to enormous proportions, as Google has made quite obvious.
- Google released four significant updates that are coming to the Play Store for devices with large screens.
- The corporation is going to give preference to applications that scale properly, do not support letterboxing, and are capable of supporting both portraits as well as landscape orientations.
- There is also an updated split-screen option available in the Play Store search that makes it easier to compare apps when using a device with a wide display.
Play Store is getting a facelift in preparation for large-screen devices such as Android tablets, foldable phones, and Chromebooks, according to Google. These alterations were initially brought up at the company’s presentation at Google I/O in 2017.
It is currently delivering four key enhancements to help customers locate good large-screen applications and improve the general user interface of the Google Play Store on big displays. These updates are being rolled out simultaneously.
Google will now give more weight to games that have videos of high quality. Users will be able to get a feel for the gameplay before installing a gaming app by watching video ads that appear at the top of the listing page for the app in question.
Additionally, Google has reorganized the information pages for applications and games into a multi-column structure, which brings the material to a higher position on the application listing page.
Google is implementing a number of modifications to the app ranking system used on tablets and foldable as part of its Play Store in order to give preference to apps that display well on these devices.
Apps that allow both landscape and portrait orientations, scale themselves appropriately across a variety of devices, and don’t use letterboxing will have a higher ranking overall. In the future, Editors’ Selection and other specially selected collections and articles will, like all other collections and articles, take into consideration these criteria.
This could be interpreted as Google’s method of encouraging developers of apps to make their software more suitable for use on devices with larger screens.
Google is also working to improve the navigation of the Play Store on smartphones with large screens. Tablets, foldable, and Chromebook computers should now have a navigation rail on the left side of the screen.
This brings menu items nearer to your thumbs which makes them easier to access, particularly when you are holding a device with a large screen and the orientation is landscape.
An improved split-screen search interface has also been added to the Play Store, which makes it much simpler to find and evaluate different applications directly from the search results page. Users’ views will simultaneously incorporate both the search results and the app detail pages.
This keeps them from having to repeatedly move between the two when looking for new applications.
These modifications will begin to trickle out over the course of the following weeks, and by introducing them, Google has made it very obvious that becoming big remains the only path ahead for Android apps.