fidzu : pda

Today, we shared how we're taking our "More than a store" vision into its next chapter. From You tab-now a personalized home base for your favorite apps and content-to Play Games Sidekick connecting over 2 billion players, Google Play is meeting users wherever they are. ^[1]

For developers, our goal is to help you connect with your audience and build a sustainable business. Below is a checklist to optimize your apps for our latest discovery features, new tools to deepen player engagement, and updates to our quality programs that reward great user experiences with lower service fees.

Reach the right users on Google Play and in the Gemini app

Earlier this year, we shared how new tools are transforming app and content discovery. Now, we're expanding these features to make it easier for people to find your app.

• App comparisons on Ask Play: Ask Play already helps users find the right app through natural conversation, understanding context and adapting to follow-up questions. Now, it can generate dynamic, side-by-side app comparisons directly in search results. When a user compares details like subscription models or offline capabilities, Ask Play summarizes your store listing and user reviews to help them choose your app with confidence.

• Game finder: Tailored by each player's gameplay habits, favorite mechanics, and community reviews, Game finder explains why a title is recommended and highlights what similar players and profiles you follow are enjoying. It begins rolling out to English-language users in the US today.

• Play in Gemini: People are increasingly discovering apps directly through conversations in Gemini-driving over 6 million app installs in just two months since launch. ^[2] When someone describes a specific need, such as organizing family recipes or finding a collaborative task manager, Gemini matches their request to your store listing and key features, so they can evaluate and install your app with a single tap. And now, with Gemini Live, they can get these same app recommendations through voice conversations.

To make sure your app is represented accurately everywhere users discover content-from Ask Play and Game finder to the Gemini app and Collections on home screens-review the following checklist:

1. Keep store listings and promotional events fresh: Regularly update your descriptions, tags, and events in Play Console to highlight new features, seasons, and timely offers.
2. Upload high-resolution media assets: Use clean images and video previews that look great across different screen sizes and devices.
3. Validate deep links in Play Console: Use the new built-in deep link emulator to preview and test your links without needing a physical device.
4. Integrate Engage SDK: Bring users back to your app by delivering personalized content across surfaces, including Apps Home, You tab, and Android tablets-now supporting 9 categories, including Education and Health & Fitness.

Deepen player engagement with social competitions and rewards

Once players find a game they love, recognizing their progress and connecting them with a community keeps them coming back. We're introducing new ways for players to share their favorite moments, compete with friends, and earn rewards:

• Playbacks in Sidekick: With Sidekick-our in-game overlay now reached over 285M users-we bring Quests, Leagues, Sprints, and community features just a tap away.^[3]

• Sprints: Building on Leagues, which turn in-game leaderboards into month-long competitive seasons, Sprints are fast-paced, 48-hour challenges that match 2 to 5 players of similar skills. It gives players an exciting reason to jump back into your game throughout the week.

• Quests: Beyond competing on leaderboards, players want their time and progress rewarded. We're expanding Quests beyond Play Points to include in-game rewards like character skins, performance boosters, and valuable currencies.

You can turn on these competitive and social features by integrating Game Stats and Play Games Rewards:

• Game Stats: By sharing basic gameplay event signals-such as match completions, score thresholds, or key milestones-your games can show daily Streaks and become eligible for platform-wide competitions like Leagues and Sprints. Game Stats connects seamlessly with your backend data , giving you access to our engagement mechanics without rebuilding matchmaking or leaderboard systems.
• Play Games Rewards: Now generally available, you can set up ongoing in-game rewards that celebrate achievements and sync with Play Points. This helps you grow loyal players and keep them coming back.

Accelerate business growth with the Apps Experience and Level Up program

These new discovery and engagement tools help you deliver a better user experience while growing your business. For developers looking to go even further, our quality programs - Apps Experience and Level Up reward standout apps and games with lower service fees.

Titles integrating Level Up guidelines, like Summoners War, PUBG MOBILE, and Fruit Ninja are already seeing strong results by polishing graphics performance, integrating Game Stats, and launching Leagues and Quests. For example, PUBG MOBILE drove 22% uplift in new installs from high-value players, and achieved a 62% uplift in spend per buyer among engaged players.^[4]

Both programs are now available in Australia, Japan, the EEA, UK, and US, and will roll out to Korea by the end of the year. We've also made it easier to submit and manage your program enrollment directly in Play Console.

Explore these new tools in Play Console today-where you'll also start seeing a visual refresh rolling out this month to streamline your everyday workflow. Please keep sharing your feedback with us as we build the future of Google Play together.

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1. Google internal data as of September 30, 2026. ↩
2. Google internal data, May 19, 2026 - July 31, 2026. ↩
3. Google internal data as of September 30, 2026. ↩
4. External partner data, May 12, 2026 - June 7, 2026. Spend per buyer uplift compares League participants vs. non-participants of the game. ↩

13 Oct 2026 5:00pm GMT

As agentic development accelerates, Android engineering is reaching an exciting new frontier: moving from assistive code completion to agents executing end-to-end under your direction. You have total choice and flexibility in the models and agents you use.

Gemini 4 Argon excels at deep work in complex, real-world tasks across domains including coding, finance, legal, cybersecurity, and science.

Starting today, Android developers can access Gemini 4 Argon across their development surfaces, including Google Antigravity (standalone and in Android Studio Canary) for Google AI Ultra subscribers, and in Android Studio and Google AI Studio via the paid tier of the Gemini API.

Velocity & Autonomy: Closed-loop build self-correction

Argon has significant improvements in long-horizon autonomous execution and the ability to plan and run multi-step, complex software tasks over time.

• Self-Healing Build Loops: When a local build fails, the Antigravity execution harness captures error streams directly from Gradle daemons and Kotlin compiler logs. Using this feedback, the model iteratively diagnoses the root-cause of build failures to arrive at a revised solution. Gemini 4 Argon's training dramatically improves on this process. It's engineered to maintain a consistent hypothesis across successive rounds of editing, as well as making use of internal Abstract Syntax Tree (AST) awareness to better inform edits. This means Gemini 4 Argon is more resilient and better able to address the true root-cause of build failures.

UI sophistication: Fluid motion & shader-backed Jetpack Compose

Argon demonstrates exceptional design craft, generating production-ready Jetpack Compose code out of the box:

• AGSL Shaders on the GPU: Argon possesses the advanced mathematical reasoning needed to write complex, production-ready Android Graphics Shading Language (AGSL) directly into Compose Modifier.graphicsLayer blocks and shader brushes. From live frosted glass shaders to dynamic lighting and ripple effects, Argon can handle complicated vector and rendering math that produces lightweight GPU shaders that run alongside fluid 120 FPS Compose animations.

A flexible developer experience with Android CLI

Antigravity operates across multiple surfaces, from the desktop app and IDE extensions to the command line. No matter which surface you prefer, the official Android CLI plugin is the de-facto engine that connects your agent to local Android tools, enabling it to run programmatic commands for common tasks and execute custom developer skills.

Starting today, you can access and configure this agentic workspace in two primary ways:

1. Setting up visually (Antigravity Desktop & Android Studio Canary)
   • In the Antigravity Desktop App: Go to Settings > Customizations > Build With Google Plugins (or the Antigravity Plugin Marketplace), locate android-cli-plugin, and toggle it to Enabled
   • In Android Studio Canary: Log in to your Antigravity account in the agent tool window to enable agentic workflows directly alongside your editor
2. Setting up via the Terminal CLI

   For Google Antigravity, run:

   agy plugin install android-cli-plugin

3. For any terminal agent (via Android CLI), run:

   android init

Availability & getting started

Starting today, Argon is rolling out globally to developers in supported regions. You can access and begin building with the model in your local environment across three primary development surfaces:

1. Google Antigravity: Google AI Ultra subscribers can build with Gemini 4 Argon in the standalone Antigravity desktop app (available for macOS, Windows, and Linux) or directly via the terminal CLI
2. Android Studio:
   • Via Google Antigravity: Google AI Ultra subscribers can build with Gemini 4 Argon by logging into Antigravity within the latest Android Studio Canary.
   • Via the Gemini API: Developers on the paid tier of the Gemini API can build with Gemini 4 Argon in Android Studio.
3. Google AI Studio: Google AI Ultra subscribers or developers on the paid tier of the Gemini API can build with Gemini 4 Argon via Playground and Build in Google AI Studio.

4. Firebase AI Logic: Starting today, developers globally on the paid tier of the Gemini API can use Gemini 4 Argon client-side to build intelligent features in their mobile and web apps via Firebase AI Logic.

To begin building with Argon in your local environment:

We are eager to see the high-craft Android experiences you build at the frontier. Share your projects and feedback with us on X (@AndroidDev) and LinkedIn!

13 Oct 2026 4:00pm GMT

Today, getting the most out of AI workflows requires access to a terminal with a command line, even if someone doesn't identify as a programmer or software developer. With Googlebook, we're excited to help users express themselves and gain access to these tools. Googlebooks come with pre-installed tooling to get you going. In this post, we'll explore the capabilities of our new Linux terminal- now available in preview- share our future roadmap, and invite you to help us shape this ecosystem together.

Entry point for agentic development

AI agents use the terminal to install packages, write files, automate tasks, and create apps based on prompts written in plain language. For Googlebook to be the perfect companion for building and working at the frontier of agentic AI, the terminal needed to be easily accessible.

We understand AI comes with risks. Googlebook OS has been architected with defense-in-depth as a core principle. All terminal commands run entirely inside the Linux VM, creating an isolated sandbox. This design allows users to grant `sudo` (administrator) privileges to AI tools like Antigravity and other agentic AI platforms, that make heavy use of command-line tools, while limiting opportunities for system corruption or unauthorized access to your private files. The VM boundary helps protect the host OS and unmounted files; each directory made available to the Linux VM is only mounted after the user's explicit permission. Best of all, a one-click VM reset makes experimentation stress free because users can easily retain their files on the host file system when they reset the VM. You can even see your Linux files inside the Googlebook Files app, where a user can access local folders - including photos and files synced effortlessly from their Android phone. Using a quick Python script or AI agent, you can batch-process your files in seconds.

Linux VM benefits

The terminal provides users with the freedom to create and use the software that they choose. We're excited to see users build tools that are hyper-specific to their needs as well as prototype apps for broader use. With a Debian Linux environment, users benefit from the mature ecosystem familiar to Linux developers. This means that they have access to the latest CLI tools and common developer workflows like `apt`, `git`, `ssh`, and common compilers and runtimes.

Out of the box, our preview of the terminal on Googlebook has been optimized for rapid prototyping, web development, scripting, and agentic workflows via CLI. There is automatic localhost port forwarding to the host browser, and support for modern runtimes (e.g., Node.js, Python, Ruby, Go, Rust). Users can adjust the amount of memory made available to the VM to best suit their workloads. Our own engineers have been using Googlebooks to build a Linux kernel and use the terminal for platform engineering.

Looking ahead

We can't wait for the terminal and Linux VM to continue getting more capable over time, including Linux GUI app support with integration directly into the app launcher. Here are some key areas on the roadmap:

• We are working hard to get you building not only on Googlebook but also for your other devices. In addition to the existing network passthrough and wireless ADB, USB passthrough and support for ADB over USB are coming, enabling local device debugging and more from our Linux VM and Antigravity. Learn more about Antigravity on Googlebook.
• Our testers have been eager to run more complex tasks. To make this more seamless, we are adding dynamic memory and storage scaling for the VM.
• We will be adding GPU/NPU hardware acceleration for heavier local workloads, allowing users to leverage the performance and power efficiency of dedicated hardware.
• VM persistence and separation from the terminal window will better support long-running processes, when you want to take on more demanding agentic workloads.

We're looking forward to seeing your creations and will be sharing more soon. Questions? You can reach us here for direct support. We've also really enjoyed hearing your early thoughts and feedback in r/googlebook.

12 Oct 2026 6:00pm GMT