Playtime 2018: Making Smaller Apps:
At Playtime 2018, Google brought about Android app bundle which is Android’s new publishing format. Basically, with this new feature or tech or whatever you’d like to call it, developers can now give the same app experience but at a smaller size. Smaller apps have high conversion rates and studies conducted by Google show that size is a main factor when it comes to app deletions on devices.
With this new Android App bundle, explained at the Playtime 2018 conference, developers can deliver features on demand instead of all at once at the time of initial download by the user.
The Android app bundle is already in production with a success rate or size reduction rate of 35%.
At Playtime 2018- Google plans on adding further features to the Android app bundle which will make more developers shift onto the platform.
With the newer version of Android App bundle, app sizes will be 8% smaller on download and a further 16% smaller in size on devices with M+ with no additional developer work required. The additional savings coming from uncompressed native libraries, which means that multiple copies of the same files do not have to be stored on device.
Playtime 2018: Building Instant apps:
Google has responded to developer’s feedback to enable better features for making instant apps and so taking that into consideration, Google has increased the size limit to 10MB and removed the URL requirement.
Google has partnered up with Unity on Google play instant plug- in and has built instant apps directly onto Cocos Creator. Google has further been able to use the Android app bundle to further improve the process of making instant apps. Previously, developers were required to publish both the instant app and installable app. Then with Android 3.2 developers were able to publish instant enabled bundles but with a primary app bundle.
Now with Android Studio 3.2, developers won’t require all that much coding. Developers can just publish a single app bundle and classify it as instant enabled rather than having multiple versions of coding for different things.
Try out before you pay out- Playtime 2018
At Playtime 2018, Google has now come out with a new feature whereby users can try out a game before going in to download it or pay for its subscription.
Google Play Instant will now be available on Premium Tiles and pre- registration campaigns where users can try out the game before its initial release and generate more buzz for the actual release of the game.
Umiro by Developer Digital and Looney Tunes World by Scopely are a few of the games to take advantage of Google’s new features launched this time at the Playtime 2018 conference.
Developers will also get a chance to learn more about play and its policies for better app success at Playtime 2018.
