Google wants to radically transform the Play Store with this update, here are the changes

What if the Play Store was more than just an app store? This is Google’s ambition to radically change the Play Store experience with many changes.

Google announced a series of major updates to its Play Store on Wednesday with the goal of transforming it into “a destination people visit for apps with an end-to-end experience that’s more than a store.”

It’s ambitious, but Google is giving itself the means by improving the way you discover and compare applications and even offering new spaces to keep you on its Play Store.

Here’s a quick look at some of the new features that will be rolled out over the course of the year. Some of them are currently only available in certain countries.

Priority on the discovery of new apps and content

Google did not fail to recall the features presented during its Google I/O conference last May, namely the arrival of FAQs generated by AI to visualize at a glance the different features of an application before downloading it.

Finally, Google will allow you to refine your game searches on the Play Store with precision. Like Steam, you will be able to select several criteria such as the universe and genre of a game and thus discover titles according to your interests.

The Play Store will be enriched with spaces dedicated to certain categories of applications, offering a more dynamic browsing experience. New example with a comics and manga space for Japanese users, who will be able to see trailers, read the first chapters of certain works and see new reading applications suggested to them. We imagine that other spaces of the kind will emerge in the coming months.

It has been possible to play games from the Play Store on PC since 2022, to offer a unified experience between mobile and your computer. The service now allows you to play multiple PC games on the same screen if you feel like it.

Rediscover your apps with Collections

To make the Play Store a service that its users will return to regularly, Google is launching Collections for the United States. This new space highlights content taken from your already installed applications.

These are placed in several categories (Watch, Listen, Buy, Communicate) and will display, for example, the latest series on Prime Video, current promotions on Amazon or recent albums on Spotify.

Here we find a similar operation to Android TV or tvOS, which displays the latest programs from installed applications on your television without having to launch them.

But if this deep customization is not to your taste, you can tell the Play Store not to use your app data to suggest new content to you.

All of these updates will be gradually rolled out to the Play Store over the next few days, with some of them remaining exclusive to certain countries for now.