Play Store enables ‘pre-registration’ feature for all, plus larger app bundles

Google added some welcome new features to its Play Store ahead of its appearance at GDC this week.

The first is not strictly an addition but more of an expansion. ‘Pre-registration’ is now available for all developers, allowing hype for a game or app to be generated prior to release.

Next up is a new store page A/B test allowing multiple versions to be trialled with a subset of users. Performance stats will be provided for each to decide the optimal version before a full rollout.

To account for increased download speeds, and improved compression, Google will now class a ‘large download’ as over 150MB and will not prompt the user for anything under. This is up from 100MB previously.

App Bundles allow developers to benefit from compression improvements. Thankfully, they’re now supported in game engines such as Unity. Google is also upping App Bundles’ maximum size to 150MB.