Google Play wants to be “more than a store” by surfacing music, movies, TV shows, and non-media content through a new Collections widget on your Android homescreen. The goal is to surface specific recommendations from the apps already on your device in one feed, but there’s the potential for so much more.
Now we’re taking Play from a destination people visit for apps — to an end-to-end experience that’s more than a store.
You’ll primarily interact with Collections through a widget — offered by the Play Store — that can be as small as a 1-line bar or take up your entire display with a mini navigation rail and feed of content recommendations.
There are seven automatically grouped categories that show service-specific recommendations that you’re already familiar with. Collections is meant to save you from opening apps one at a time to find content.
- Watch: You’ll see “For you” video recommendations from YouTube, TikTok, and streaming services (Disney+, Hulu, Prime Video, Max, etc.), as well as a cross-service “Continue watching” section that’s not too different from Google TV. Tapping can immediately start playback or take you to an info screen.
- Listen: Besides music, there’s audiobooks, podcasts, and live radio. You will be seeing “Today’s top hits” from Spotify and YouTube Music’s “New releases” section.
- Read: Ebooks and audiobooks
- Game: Titles from the Play Store and recommendations from YouTube:
- Food: Google Maps
- Shop: Shows active shopping carts inside apps, like the Shop app, as well as deals that you might be interested in.
- Social: Carousels of posts from Reddit, TikTok, Pinterest, NextDoor, etc.
The widget gives you one combined feed, but there’s the ability to dive into individual feeds for each category that feature a pseudo-dock to quickly launch the apps. This opens a fullscreen UI for each of the seven categories, while at the end of the top carousel you’ll find the “App Library” that’s basically a topics-organized application launcher.
Google plans to add more categories — Health & Fitness, Sports, Travel & Events, and Dating — in the future, and is looking into custom ones.
Behind the scenes, Collections requires developers integrate the Engage SDK announced at I/O 2024 wherein these apps offer existing content recommendations to Google Play. It’s very much an extension of Google’s work on Entertainment Space and Android TV.
Google wants to make it “easier to pick up right where you left off — like jump back into a show or continue shopping —or even discover something new.”
It remains to be seen whether having too many desperate feeds across various entertainment, social, and shopping apps is a problem that people want solved by Google Play becoming a curator.
However, this shouldn’t diminish from the very interesting thing the Play Store has managed to do. Google has gotten many third-party apps to un-silo their content so it’s not only available inside their apps. There’s now a near system-level feed that shows media and other content in a consistent manner without cruft.
The last time Google did this was in 2012 with Google Now. As we previously wrote, Google Now offered a remarkably different way to use your phone:
You didn’t have to jump into different apps to see upcoming flight details, check email to see when a package was arriving, or open a multitude of first and third-party apps to see your information. In those applications, you’re subjected to different layouts and have to learn different behaviors to access what is fundamentally your information.
Google Now broke apart the siloing of data and put it in a consistent and familiar interface.
Collections is doing the exact same thing for media and content instead of more personal information. This is profoundly interesting even if Google’s intention is just content recommendations.
Google Play is rolling out Collections starting today in the US.
Other Google Play announcements today include:
- Google Play is introducing “curated spaces,” like cricket in India and comics in Japan. The latter includes “free first chapter previews, live events and trailers, editor picks and fan reviews even from apps you haven’t installed.”
- The Play Store is adding “multi-select interest filters,” like when searching for a game.
- A new “Personalization in Play” menu lets you tell Google “not to use data associated with a particular app for personalization” in the store.
- Google is leveraging AI to help users compare apps in similar categories.
- Play Games on PC: Is getting the ability to play multiple games side-by-side.
- Google Play Points: Super Weekly Prizes lets Diamond, Platinum and Gold members win “Pixel devices, Razer gaming products and merchandise.” (US, UK, Japan, Korea and Taiwan.)
- Google Play Pass is adding Asphalt Legends Unite (July 24), Kingdom Rush 5: Alliance (July), Call of Duty: Mobile + Candy Crush Saga (August 1)
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