As Apps Partnerships lead for Google Play, I have the wonderful opportunity to meet with many companies who share great ideas and feedback on how we can support you in creating and growing successful businesses.
In this latest issue of Notes from Google Play, I want to share some of your work that inspired us, along with what’s most important to me and our team. What it sums up for me is our focus on making Google Play work for everyone. It’s about making Play work better for all of you – the people behind apps and games – to make it easier for you to grow apps and games business, and to help you serve everyone better, everywhere.
I will kick us off by sharing the story of OLIO, one of the many applications that inspired me this year. OLIO is a community-driven application that fights to reduce food waste. The application provides a way for people to easily give food away to neighbors. Founders, Tessa Clarke and Saasha Celestial-One, have had a goal of creating local food sharing networks around the world and ensuring that nothing of value goes to waste. Tessa and Saasha’s belief in their core mission helped them expand the application to 62 countries and work with global stores to help them reach no waste.
The success of the OLIO application is a story of two women from different backgrounds, with the same dream, made for the benefit of everyone and our planet. For me, this is what it’s about: ensure that everyone is empowered to build a successful business that can benefit people around the world.
So let me share more about some of my favorite tools and programs that we recently launched with this goal in mind.
applications and games everyone
Regardless of the size of your company, we want to make sure you have the insights and tools that enable you to make more informed decisions, and ultimately make it easy for you to build and improve your app or game business. Let’s look at privacy and security as an example, as this is a critical topic.
We are also excited to continue investing in programs designed to help grow businesses large and small. It includes the Google Play Partner Program, launched in March and designed to help larger gaming businesses reach their growth and performance goals. We have also just opened presentations for the Indie Games Accelerator and Indie Games Festival programs. We’ve been particularly inspired by the alumni of the 2021 edition, and you can hear directly from Jimjum Studios in Israel, creating games that encourage kindness, community building and generosity, in the first episode of Google Play Coffee Breaks:
In addition to the size of the company, applications and games are built and managed by people. We are therefore constantly investing in diversity programs in the ecosystem and empowers the next generations of app and game makers. Programs like Change the Game and our investment in organizations that drive positive change in the gaming industry are just a few of the programs I’m particularly proud of.
Applications and games for everyone
To help with this, we’ve made some updates that make it easier for everyone to access applications and games at a price that is right for them, which in turn helps you to better monetize your programs or games. For example, you asked for more flexibility and less complexity in how you sell your subscriptions, which is why we introduced new subscription capabilities. You can now create multiple base plans and offers for each subscription, while significantly reducing the cost and complexity of managing an ever-increasing number of SKUs. Whether your goal is to make better contact with people who are new to your business, or to retain your loyal users, you have the ability to create offers for everyone.
We’ve also invested in new tools that help people pay for your apps and games using the methods that work best for them, and help improve your monetization. Google Play Commerce offers buyer support in more than 170 countries, and we’ve further improved access by adding to our payment method library, which now includes more than 300 local payment methods in 70 countries. We’ve also made changes to help you better adapt to local purchasing power by adding the option to lower prices, starting at the equivalent of 5 US cents in any market.
celebrating you
I started by highlighting OLIO as a business created by newcomers in the application space, and yet managed to have a positive impact around the world. This is just one of so many inspiring examples out there. We have just launched #WeArePlay, a new campaign that celebrates you, the world community of people behind programs and games, and your unique stories. It represents teams of all sizes – some formed by long-time coders and others by technology newcomers, some based in big cities and others in smaller towns. These are short stories that tell personal journeys of making applications or games that solve a problem or bring joy to people everywhere.
Sarah Karam
Director, Global Apps Partnerships, Google Play