This week, Google finally launched the new version of Google Play on the web which they showed off back at Google I/O in May. Right away I found out that it was crazy fast and looked much better than the older version. But as I began to use the new Play Store a bit more, there were quite a few changes which I didn’t like. One of the main ones was banners for apps had disappeared. Now here at Android Headlines, we used those banners in our stories about the app. So now we have to go elsewhere to find nice pictures for those stories. So it’s not the end of the world. What’s even worse is that now Google Play uses webp images. Which is Google’s new picture format. Of course, it only works in Chrome. So if you were to open the Play Store in Firefox or Internet Explorer, you’d get jpg images like we’ve always had.
That’s really just the tip of the iceberg. We ran an article earlier this week were we talked about what really changed in the new version of Google Play on the Web. One other thing that was changed included searching. Now when you search the Google Play Store, at least on the web, you are greeted with 48 results. And that’s it. Prior, we could search for something like “Twitter” and get pages and pages of results. For us, here at Android Headlines, that gets really annoying when we are trying to find new apps to write about.
Don’t get me wrong, I do love the design of the Google Play Store. I’ve always been a big fan of the cards UI. I’m just not a big fan of ripping out functionality for the cards UI.
There are many other things that we don’t like about the Google Play Store, but what do you like or dislike about it? Let us know in the comments below.