Edgar Cervantes / Android Authority
TL;DR
- Google is working on a reminder feature for the Play Store that will remind you to open the app you’ve just downloaded but haven’t opened yet.
- The reminder will be sent within 24 hours of downloading the app (and not opening it), and you will receive no more than two reminders per unopened new app.
- The reminder feature is not currently live and will be rolled out to users in the future.
The Google Play Store is one of the fundamental experience pillars of Android. Even though you can install apps without it, most users exclusively rely on the Play Store for all their app download needs. But thanks to the multitasking prowess of Android, many of us find ourselves in situations where we download and install an app but forget about actually initializing it and running it. Google is working on a feature for these situations, where the Play Store will remind you to open the app that you just downloaded but never opened.
An APK teardown helps predict features that may arrive on a service in the future based on work-in-progress code. However, it is possible that such predicted features may not make it to a public release.
Google Play Store v41.2.21 references a new “Open app reminder” feature. In the future, when you download an app but forget to open it within 24 hours, the Google Play Store will send you a reminder notification that your app has been installed and is ready to run.
If the user dismisses the notification and still doesn’t open the app, the Play Store will remind the user again in some time. However, after two reminders, there will be no further reminders about this installed app based on the code we’ve seen within the app. The reminder feature will continue to send reminders about other newly installed apps up to the maximum limit of two reminders per app.
This feature will be handy for people who like to queue up app downloads and have chosen to install apps over Wi-Fi. The phone usually downloads the apps, but the user may not immediately realize this. There are also people like me who install apps and then switch to different activities, forgetting about the installed app (and the reason for installing that app) entirely. A reminder would serve well in such situations.
The reminder feature is not currently live in the Google Play Store. Google is currently testing it within the app, so it could roll out soon.