This afternoon, a Google employee by the name of Krill Grouchnikov, posted a teaser of the Google Play Store refresh that looks to be coming soon. With the hashtag “#soon”. So it appears that Google is looking to do yet another redesign on the Google Play Store. It’s still material design, but it does look a bit different. There are a few things that are different, of course the one you’ll probably notice first are the round buttons for Top Charts, Games, Categories, etc. But the other is the fact that Apps and Games are being lumped together and entertainment is separate (ideally consisting of Play Movies & TV, Books, Newsstand and Music). Making it a bit easier to find games, seeing as some developers list their games under apps and vice versa.
Google has also added a top carousel which shows some of the featured content. For example in these screenshots we see Racing Games as well as movies that are now available to rent, with The Avengers: Age of Ultron up there at the top. The carousel there has been missing for quite some time. In fact, the last version of the Play store or App store that I can remember with a carousel was the Android Market. However this carousel looks a whole lot better, with many more materials. And yes, there is a splash screen here. Google had been getting away from splash screens but recently started adding them back. Basically a splash screen serves as a placebo so users don’t think the app is taking a long to load, when it actually takes the same amount of time to load.
Currently there’s no word on when we might see this redesign or refresh of the Google Play Store, it might be quite a while as we don’t know how far along the team is in developing this refresh. But it’s looking good, and we can’t wait to get our hands on the APK and check it out. Things might or might not change between now and the final release as well. That has happened a few times before as well.
