New tools for ratings & reviews on Google Play to engage and understand your users

Posted by Fergus Hurley, Product Manager, Google Play



Millions of users rate and review your apps every day on Google Play. From feature requests to technical issues, ratings and reviews offer a wealth of information about what people like and dislike. Since 2013, you’ve been able to reply to reviews on Google Play, giving you a direct communication channel with your most engaged users. You've told us you value having this channel because it helps you iterate on user feedback faster on Android than other platforms. In the last few months, we’ve made a number of improvements in the Google Play Developer Console to help you better analyze and manage ratings and reviews so that you can improve your app experience and boost its rating.


Improvements to ratings and reviews


We recently revamped ratings and reviews with features you can now find on dedicated pages in the Developer Console:






The new ratings page in the Google Play Developer Console

• See ratings over time: See how your rating changes daily, weekly, and monthly and easily spot any changes when you release a new version of your app.


• Ratings breakdown: Break down your rating by country, language, device, app version, or Android version.

The new reviews page in the Google Play Developer Console

• Review highlights: See common themes from what users say in reviews of your app – these are the same highlights that users see on the Play Store. Review highlights are shown when you have a high enough volume of reviews and are updated regularly to reflect the latest user experiences with your app.


• Device metadata: See certain device data such as RAM, CPU, and screen size so you can more easily identify problems users are mentioning in user reviews and debug such issues.


• Search review text: Search inside reviews to see what people are saying about a particular topic or keyword.


• Replies & updates to reviews: When you reply to reviews, the user receives an email. Now, you can also opt-in to be emailed if the user updates their review or rating.

Learn from other developers on how to make the most of ratings and reviews


Photo Editor by Aviary is a photo editing app with a strong focus on simplicity and intuitive use. Ratings and reviews and other Android features allow Aviary to iterate on builds two to three times faster compared to other platforms while being in a regular dialogue with their users.





Glu Mobile is a mobile gaming company known for Racing Rivals, Cooking Dash 2016 and its upcoming Taylor Swift game. Ratings and reviews features help Glu engage their audience, gather feedback, and manage user satisfaction. “Google’s review highlights allow us to see a snapshot of game features users like or dislike at a glance. We monitor review trends, watch out for notifications, and respond to reviews for our games,” says Niccolo de Masi, Glu Mobile CEO. Here are some tips Glu is using to master ratings and reviews in the Developer Console:

1. Reply to reviews: Reply to user reviews of your game in the Google Play Developer Console. Help them with their issues or let them know that you're considering their feature suggestions. A positive experience could result in the user increasing their rating.
2. Use search: You can now search within all reviews and apply search filters for rating, language, app version, device and more. Use this feature to find specific user feedback, for example, on new content you’ve added.
3. Take action: Now, you can be notified when a user answers you or updates their review. You can immediately start working on improvements if you learned about an issue. If the feedback is positive, engage with your community and turn satisfied users into fans.
4. Analyze over time: Analyze ratings over time to learn more about how user satisfaction improves as you update your game. This allows you to understand if your latest feature update or bug fix results in higher user satisfaction.
5. Identify key themes: Google Play automatically surfaces review highlights that users are mentioning about your game. This makes it quick for you to analyze reviews and understand user feedback.

We hope these tools help you better engage with your audience and improve your app. Visit the Developer Console Help Center to find out more about seeing and managing ratings and reviews. For more tools and best practices to help you grow a successful business, download The Secrets to App Success on Google Play.

Android Support Library 23.2

Posted by Ian Lake, Developer Advocate

Android Support Library 23.2

When talking about the Android Support Library, it is important to realize this isn’t one monolithic library, but a whole collection of libraries that seek to provide backward-compatible versions of APIs, as well as offer unique features without requiring the latest platform version. Version 23.2 adds a few new support libraries as well as new features to many of the existing libraries.

Support Vector Drawables and Animated Vector Drawables

Vector drawables allow you to replace multiple png assets with a single vector graphic, defined in XML. While previously limited to Lollipop and higher devices, both VectorDrawable and AnimatedVectorDrawable are now available through two new Support Libraries support-vector-drawable and animated-vector-drawable, respectively.

Android Studio 1.4 introduced limited support for vector drawables by generating pngs at build time. To disable this functionality (and gain the true advantage and space savings of this Support Library), you need to add vectorDrawables.useSupportLibrary = true to your build.gradle file:

 // Gradle Plugin 2.0+  
 android {  
   defaultConfig {  
     vectorDrawables.useSupportLibrary = true  
    }  
 }  

You’ll note this new attribute only exists in the version 2.0 of the Gradle Plugin. If you are using Gradle 1.5 you’ll instead use

 // Gradle Plugin 1.5  
 android {  
   defaultConfig {  
     generatedDensities = []  
  }  

  // This is handled for you by the 2.0+ Gradle Plugin  
  aaptOptions {  
    additionalParameters "--no-version-vectors"  
  }  
 }  

If you are using AppCompat 23.2.0, setting these flags is required. This requirement has been relaxed as of AppCompat 23.2.1 and the flags are only required if you wish to use support vector drawables.

You’ll be able to use VectorDrawableCompat back to API 7 and AnimatedVectorDrawableCompat on all API 11 and higher devices. Due to how drawables are loaded by Android, not every place that accepts a drawable id (such as in an XML file) will support loading vector drawables. Thankfully, AppCompat has added a number of features to make it easy to use your new vector drawables.

Firstly, when using AppCompat with ImageView (or subclasses such as ImageButton and FloatingActionButton), you’ll be able to use the new app:srcCompat attribute to reference vector drawables (as well as any other drawable available to android:src):

 <ImageView  
  android:layout_width="wrap_content"  
  android:layout_height="wrap_content"  
  app:srcCompat="@drawable/ic_add" />  

And if you’re changing drawables at runtime, you’ll be able to use the same setImageResource() method as before - no changes there. Using AppCompat and app:srcCompat is the most foolproof method of integrating vector drawables into your app.

You’ll find directly referencing vector drawables outside of app:srcCompat will fail prior to Lollipop. However, AppCompat does support loading vector drawables when they are referenced in another drawable container such as a StateListDrawable, InsetDrawable, LayerDrawable, LevelListDrawable, and RotateDrawable. By using this indirection, you can use vector drawables in cases such as TextView’s android:drawableLeft attribute, which wouldn’t normally be able to support vector drawables.

As of Android Support Library 23.3.0, support vector drawables can only be loaded via app:srcCompat or setImageResource()..

AppCompat DayNight theme

While enabling the use of vector graphics throughout your app is already a large change to AppCompat, there’s a new theme added to AppCompat in this release: Theme.AppCompat.DayNight.



Prior to API 14, The DayNight theme and its descendents DayNight.NoActionBar, DayNight.DarkActionBar, DayNight.Dialog, etc. become their Light equivalents. But on API 14 and higher devices, this theme allows apps to easily support both a Light and Dark theme, effectively switching from a Light theme to a Dark theme based on whether it is ‘night’.

By default, whether it is ‘night’ will match the system value (from UiModeManager.getNightMode()), but you can override that value with methods in AppCompatDelegate. You’ll be able to set the default across your entire app (until process restart) with the static AppCompatDelegate.setDefaultNightMode() method or retrieve an AppCompatDelegate via getDelegate() and use setLocalNightMode() to change only the current Activity or Dialog.

When using AppCompatDelegate.MODE_NIGHT_AUTO, the time of day and your last known location (if your app has the location permissions) are used to automatically switch between day and night, while MODE_NIGHT_NO and MODE_NIGHT_YES forces the theme to never or always use a dark theme, respectively.

It is critical that you test your app thoroughly when using the DayNight themes as hardcoded colors can easily make for unreadable text or icons. If you are using the standard TextAppearance.AppCompat styles for your text or colors pulled from your theme such as android:textColorPrimary, you’ll find these automatically update for you.

However, if you’d like to customize any resources specifically for night mode, AppCompat reuses the night resource qualifier folder, making it possible customize every resource you may need. Please consider using the standard colors or taking advantage of the tinting support in AppCompat to make supporting this mode much easier.

Design Support Library: Bottom Sheets

The Design Support Library provides implementations of many patterns of material design. This release allows developers to easily add bottom sheets to their app.

By attaching a BottomSheetBehavior to a child View of a CoordinatorLayout (i.e., adding app:layout_behavior="android.support.design.widget.BottomSheetBehavior"), you’ll automatically get the appropriate touch detection to transition between five state:

• STATE_COLLAPSED: this collapsed state is the default and shows just a portion of the layout along the bottom. The height can be controlled with the app:behavior_peekHeight attribute (defaults to 0)


• STATE_DRAGGING: the intermediate state while the user is directly dragging the bottom sheet up or down


• STATE_SETTLING: that brief time between when the View is released and settling into its final position


• STATE_EXPANDED: the fully expanded state of the bottom sheet, where either the whole bottom sheet is visible (if its height is less than the containing CoordinatorLayout) or the entire CoordinatorLayout is filled


• STATE_HIDDEN: disabled by default (and enabled with the app:behavior_hideable attribute), enabling this allows users to swipe down on the bottom sheet to completely hide the bottom sheet

Keep in mind that scrolling containers in your bottom sheet must support nested scrolling (for example, NestedScrollView, RecyclerView, or ListView/ScrollView on API 21+).

If you’d like to receive callbacks of state changes, you can add a BottomSheetCallback:

 // The View with the BottomSheetBehavior  
 View bottomSheet = coordinatorLayout.findViewById(R.id.bottom_sheet);  
 BottomSheetBehavior behavior = BottomSheetBehavior.from(bottomSheet);  
 behavior.setBottomSheetCallback(new BottomSheetCallback() {  
    @Override  
    public void onStateChanged(@NonNull View bottomSheet, int newState) {  
      // React to state change  
    }  
      @Override  
      public void onSlide(@NonNull View bottomSheet, float slideOffset) {  
       // React to dragging events  
   }  
 });  

While BottomSheetBehavior captures the persistent bottom sheet case, this release also provides a BottomSheetDialog and BottomSheetDialogFragment to fill the modal bottom sheets use case. Simply replace AppCompatDialog or AppCompatDialogFragment with their bottom sheet equivalents to have your dialog styled as a bottom sheet.

Support v4: MediaBrowserServiceCompat

The Support v4 library serves as the foundation for much of the support libraries and includes backports of many framework features introduced in newer versions of the platform (as well a number of unique features).

Adding onto the previously released MediaSessionCompat class to provide a solid foundation for media playback, this release adds MediaBrowserServiceCompat and MediaBrowserCompat providing a compatible solution that brings the latest APIs (even those added in Marshmallow) back to all API 4 and higher devices. This makes it much easier to support audio playback on Android Auto and browsing through media on Android Wear along with providing a standard interface you can use to connect your media playback service and your UI.

RecyclerView

The RecyclerView widget provides an advanced and flexible base for creating lists and grids as well as supporting animations. This release brings an exciting new feature to the LayoutManager API: auto-measurement! This allows a RecyclerView to size itself based on the size of its contents. This means that previously unavailable scenarios, such as using WRAP_CONTENT for a dimension of the RecyclerView, are now possible. You’ll find all built in LayoutManagers now support auto-measurement.

Due to this change, make sure to double check the layout parameters of your item views: previously ignored layout parameters (such as MATCH_PARENT in the scroll direction) will now be fully respected.

If you have a custom LayoutManager that does not extend one of the built in LayoutManagers, this is an opt-in API - you’ll be required to call setAutoMeasureEnabled(true) as well as make some minor changes as detailed in the Javadoc of the method.

Note that although RecyclerView animates its children, it does not animate its own bounds changes. If you would like to animate the RecyclerView bounds as they change, you can use the Transition APIs.

Custom Tabs

Custom Tabs makes it possible to seamlessly transition to web content while keeping the look and feel of your app. With this release, you’ll now be able to add actions to a bottom bar for display alongside the web content.

With the new addToolbarItem() method, you’ll be able to add up to currently 5 (MAX_TOOLBAR_ITEMS) actions to the bottom bar and update them with setToolbarItem() once the session has begun. Similar to the previous setToolbarColor() method, you’ll also find a setSecondaryToolbarColor() method for customizing the background color of the bottom bar.

Leanback for Android TV

The Leanback Library gives you the tools you need to easily bring your app to Android TV with many standard components optimized for the TV experience. The GuidedStepFragment received a significant set of improvements with this release.

The most visible change may be the introduce of a second column used for action buttons (added by overriding onCreateButtonActions() or calling setButtonActions()). This makes it much easier to reach completion actions without having to scroll through the list of available GuidedActions.

Speaking of GuidedActions, there’s a number of new features to allow richer input including editable descriptions (via descriptionEditable()), sub actions in the form of a dropdown (with subActions()), and a GuidedDatePickerAction.

These components should make it much easier for you to get information from the user when absolutely required.

Available Now

Version 23.2 of the Android Support Library is available via your SDK Manager and Android Studio. Take advantage of all of the new features as well as additional bug fixes starting now! As always, file bug reports at b.android.com and connect with other developers on the Android Development Google+ community.

Get the guide to family app success on Google Play and see how BabyFirst increased installs by 50%

Posted by Lily Sheringham, The Google Play Apps & Games team

We recently released the second edition of The Secrets to App Success on Google Play with more best practices for finding success growing an app or game business on Google Play. Today we’re sharing our first companion guide for developers, The Family Playbook, which includes information on developing high-quality apps and games for kids and families, along with advice from other developers.

The guide includes advice to help you optimize your user interface design for children, build interactive features that both educate and entertain, develop a business model, understand legal considerations, and plan age-appropriate marketing.

If you create family apps, opt-in to the Designed for Families developer program to designate your apps and games as family-friendly. Apps that meet the program requirements will be featured through Google Play’s family-friendly search and browse experiences and help parents discover great, age-appropriate content and make more informed choices.

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

Android Developer Story: BabyFirst increases installs by 50% with Google Play

BabyFirst was founded to create good educational content for babies, toddlers and their parents. Their apps now have over 30 million downloads, with 40% more downloads on Google Play than other platforms.

Watch this Android Developer Story to learn how opting-in to Designed for Families on Google Play, implementing Store Listing Experiments, and localizing the store listing into 10 languages helped them increase installs by 50% across their portfolio of apps.

Find out more about the Designed for Families program and download our new Family Playbook to help you find success on Google Play.

Project Tango workshops help bring indoor location apps to life

GPS helps us find our way outside whether it is turn by turn navigation to the nearest grocery or just getting us oriented in a new city. But once we get indoors, it is not quite as easy - GPS doesn't work, with accuracy dropping and navigation becoming all but impossible. This is one of the reasons why we started Project Tango, which has centimeter-scale accuracy of a device’s location, allowing better navigation and experiences in indoor spaces.



Over the past few weeks, we’ve been collecting amazing ideas from around the world for great apps for Lenovo’s Project Tango-powered phone. (Have an idea? If you can dream it, you can submit it!) As part of this program we're hosting workshops, focused on specific Tango features. And we just wrapped up a session that we hosted with Westfield Labs devoted to indoor location. Here are some of the highlights:






As you can see, everyone from retail brands to robot startups joined in on the fun—using Project Tango's motion tracking, depth perception, and area learning capabilities to build some amazing location-based apps. Some of our favorites included:

• Wayfair made it possible to look through your phone and visualize how a piece of furniture would look in your home.


• Lowe’s Innovation Labs improved in-store navigation by overlaying directions to individual items


• And Aisle411 created a shop-along experience with some of your favorite celebrities

The next stop in our series is a utilities workshop, where we'll be going deep on getting things done with Project Tango—like taking 3D measurements, or mapping your home or building. In the meantime, keep submitting your ideas to the App Incubator (the deadline is February 15!), and we'll see you soon!