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

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.

Android Studio 2.0 - Beta

Android Studio 2.0 is latest release of the official Android IDE focused on build performance and emulator speed to improve the app development experience. With brand new features like Instant Run which enables you to quickly edit and view code changes, or the new & faster Android emulator, Android Studio 2.0 is the upgrade you do not want to miss. In preparation for the final release, you can download Android Studio 2.0 Beta in the Beta release channel. Overall, the Android Studio 2.0 release has a host of new features which include:

• *Updated for Beta* Instant Run - Enables a faster code edit & app deployment cycle.
• *Updated for Beta* Android Emulator - Brand new emulator that is faster than most real devices, and includes a brand new user interface.
• *Updated for Beta* Google App Indexing Integration & Testing - Adding App Indexing into your app helps you re-engage your users. In the first preview of Android Studio 2.0 you could add indexing code stubs into your code. With the beta release you can now test and validate your URL links in your app all within the IDE.
• Fast ADB - Installing and pushing files is now up to 5x faster using Android Studio 2.0 with an updated Android Debug Bridge (ADB) offered in platform-tools 23.1.0.
• GPU Profiler Preview - For graphics intensive applications, you can now visually step through your OpenGL ES code to optimize your app or game
• Integration of IntelliJ 15 - Android Studio is based on the efficient coding platform of Intellij. Check out the new features from IntelliJ here.

Check out the latest installment of Android Studio Tool Time video below to watch the highlights of the features.

New Features in Android Studio 2.0 Beta

Instant Run

We first previewed Instant Run in November; this latest beta release introduces a new capability called Cold Swap

Instant Run in Android Studio 2.0 allows you to quickly make changes to your app code while your app is running on an Android device or Android Emulator. Instead of waiting for your entire app to rebuild and redeploy after each code change, Android Studio 2.0 will try to incrementally build and push only the incremental code or resource change. Depending on the code changes you make, you can see the results of your change in under a second. By simply updating your app to use the latest Gradle plugin ( 'com.android.tools.build:gradle:2.0.0-beta2’ ), you can take advantage of this time saving features with no other modifications to your code. If your project is setup correctly with Instant Run, you will see a lightning bolt next to your Run button on the toolbar:

Instant Run Button

Behind the scenes, Android Studio 2.0 instruments your code during the first compilation and deployment of your app to your device in order to determine where to swap out code and resources. The Instant Run features updates your app on a best-effort basis and automatically uses one of the following swap methods to update your app:

• Hot Swap - When only method implementations (including constructors) are changed, the changes are hot swapped. Your application keeps running and the new implementation is used the next time the method is called.
• Warm Swap - When app resources are changed, the changes are warm swapped. This is similar to a hot swap, except that the current Activity is restarted. You will notice a slight flicker on the screen as the Activity restarts.
• *New for Beta* Cold Swap - This will quickly restart the whole application. Typically for structural code change, including changes to the class hierarchy, method signatures, static initializers, or fields. Cold Swap is available when you deploy to targets with API level 21 or above.

We made major changes to Instant Run since the first preview of Android Studio 2.0, and now the feature works with more code and resources cases. We will continue to add more code change cases to Instant Run in future releases of Android Studio. If you have any suggestions, please feel free to send us a feature request and learn more about Instant Run here.

App Indexing

Supporting app indexing is now even easier with Android Studio 2.0. App Indexing puts your app in front of users who use Google Search. It works by indexing the URL patterns you provide in your app manifest and using API calls from your app to make content within your app available to both existing and new users. Specifically, when you support URLs for your app content, your users can go directly to those links from Google Search results on their device.

• Code Generation Introduced in Android Studio 2.0 Preview, you can right click on AndroidManifest.xml or Activity method (or go to Code → Generate…→ App Indexing API Code) to insert HTTP URL stub codes into your manifest and app code.

• *New for Beta* URL Testing & Validation What is new in Android Studio 2.0 Beta is that you can now validate and check the results of your URLs with the built-in validation tool (Tools → Android → Google App Indexing Test). To learn more about app indexing, click here.

Insert App Indexing API Code into your app

App Indexing Testing

App Indexing Test Results Android Emulator

*Updated for Beta* The new and faster Android emulator also includes fixes and small enhancements for this beta release. Notably, we updated the rotation controls on the emulator toolbar and added multi-touch support to help test apps that use pinch & zoom gestures. To use the multi-touch feature, hold down the Alt key on your keyboard and right-click your mouse to center the point of reference or click & drag the left mouse button to zoom.

Pinch & Zoom Gesture with Multi-Touch What's Next

Android Studio 2.0 is a big release, and now is good time to check out the beta release to incorporate the new features into your workflow. The beta release is near stable release quality, and should be relatively bug free. But as with any beta release, bugs may still exist, so, if you do find an issue, let us know so we can work to fix it. If you’re already using Android Studio, you can check for updates on the Beta channel from the navigation menu (Help → Check for Update [Windows/Linux] , Android Studio → Check for Updates [OS X]). When you update to beta, you will get access to the new version of Android Studio and Android Emulator.

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!