This Tuesday not only marked the beginning of a new month, but also the arrival of a brand new Google Play Policy Center which was just updated overnight. As Google itself claims, the Google Play Developer Program Policies are of crucial importance in making its Android software distribution platform “safe and enjoyable” for the Android community. The American tech giant aims to achieve that by educating and clearly communicating to its developers what’s appropriate for distribution on Google Play and what isn’t; what kind of activities are encouraged, what’s frowned upon, and what’s explicitly prohibited. Naturally, the Google Play Policy Center is the basis for all of these endeavors, so Google is putting in maximum effort to make it as approachable, informative, and generally good as it can be.
Here’s where the latest update to the Developer Program Policy Center comes into play. The said website got a complete overhaul which went live earlier today and is a result of months of careful analyzation of developer and user feedback by Google. The areas of focus of the latest Policy Center redesign were “transparency and clarity”, i.e. improving the degree of transparency and clarity by which Google Play policies are communicated to the Android community. First of all, that means the new Center now offers the ability to thematically sort out its policies, so topics like monetization, privacy, spam, intellectual property, and restricted content finally aren’t bundled together anymore. This not only makes finding specific topics easier but also facilitates research on broader principles of the Developer Program Policy Center. Many articles also got updated with visual examples and more detailed guidelines and rewrites were made based on developer feedback regarding confusing topics. In addition to that, Google expanded the amount of information on its policy enforcement practices which will hopefully lead to a smaller number of apps being removed from Google Play for violations developers weren’t even aware they were committing. From a more aesthetic standpoint, the Developer Center also received a new visual redesign which Google hopes will make navigation through its numerous pages easier, especially in conjunction with the aforementioned thematical organization. The changes apply to both mobile and desktop users.
You can check out the brand new Policy Center by following the link below where you’ll also find a neat little visual presentation of its latest features in the form of a GIF. This is the first major update to the Developer Program since last June when Google also focused on general user experience and clarifications of its numerous policies. It remains to be seen whether any more specific changes will be coming to it in the near future though considering Google’s Developer Policy Center update pattern, that probably won’t happen before late 2016 or early 2017.