- October 16, 2015

Google gives its Play Store a new look

The upcoming Nexus 5X smartphone.

Image: Karissa Bell/Mashable

Google's app store is getting a makeover.
The company began to roll out a redesigned version of its Play Store Thursday. The update adds a redesigned homepage with horizontal scrolling and better search and discovery features.

The most noticeable difference is the Play Store's homepage, which divides offerings into two sections: Apps and Games and Entertainment. The entertainment section will house Google Play's collection of music, movies, books, TV shows and other content offerings while apps and games is where you'll find smartphone and tablet apps.
The updated Play Store also uses horizontal scrolling to make it easier to browse (rather than scrolling down, you can swipe left and right to navigate between sections of the app.) It also adds a new row at the top that showcases the new and updated content in the store.

Behind the scenes, Google has also been working on other features to improve search and discovery within the Play Store, like better recommendations and more relevant search results. The company has also emphasized its family appeal in recent months. Google added a new age-based rating system for developers and a family-friendly experience within Google Play earlier this year.
As with other updates to the Play Store, this one will roll out gradually to Android users over the next few weeks.
The latest look is hardly the most dramatic makeover Android's app store has gotten over the years. Here's a look back at how the store has changed from the 50+ app Android Market to the Play Store of today with more than a billion active users.

2008: Android Market

Android Market was first introduced in August of 2008 and became available to everyone in October of the same year. At the time, there was only one Android handset on the market: the T-Mobile HTC G-1. The store had fewer than 100 apps on day one, all of which were free (support fir paid apps was added a few months later in 2009.) Among the first batch of apps were "multimedia, location-based tools, barcode scanners, travel guides and games," Google said at the time.

Image: Google
- 2011: Android Market
  
  In 2011, the Android Market reached 10 billion downloads, thanks to Photbucket Mobile, which, it turns out, is still around. The app store had evolved as well; you can see the beginnings of the design elements we've seen in more recent years, like dedicated sections for books, movies and games.
  
  Image: Google
- 2012: Android Market becomes Google Play
  
  With the addition of the Nexus 7, Google's first Android tablet, it was increasingly important for Google to make its mobile offerings available across all its platforms and the cloud-backed Play Store helped enable this. So, in 2012, the Android Market was replaced by the Google Play, which combined the app store, Google Music and the Google eBookstore into a single app.
  
  By then, devices' hardware had also improved dramatically with faster processors and better resources. Google updated its guidelines for developers to reflect this by increasing the maximum app size from 50 MB to 4 GB, opening up new possibilities for developers who had by then created more than 500,000 apps .
  
  Image: Google
- 2013: Google Play
  
  The Play Store was given its first big makeover a year later in 2013. The update brought a cleaner design that emphasized photos, added new recommendations and made it easier to buy paid apps.
  
  Image: Google
- 2014: Google Play
  
  Google introduced Material, its new design guidelines, and Google Play, along with the company's other apps, was refreshed with the new look. Though not a huge departure from its last update, the 2014 update added more bright colors and redesigned the app's menus and animations.
  
  Image: Google