Early access to Google Play. What's inside?

This fall, Google has opened a separate Early Access section for applications and games in Google Play that are only available in beta. My application got into this section two weeks after launch and was there for two months.

In the article I will tell how I got into this section, how it currently functions and what opportunities it provides for the development of the application.

In May 2013, Google provided developers with the opportunity to publish their applications on Google Play in the status of alpha and beta. Initially, the management of users who have access to the beta version was carried out in the social network Google Plus. It was a logical option because it provided convenient means for communication and allowed to immediately form a community around the product.
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Google Plus has not received enough popularity. And two years later, Google added the ability to run an open beta test, which was accessed through a direct link. And it became possible to create a closed beta test using a list of email addresses of users.

In May 2016, the company included open beta versions in search results and added the ability to subscribe to a beta test directly on the application page. Then she announced the creation of a separate section of Early Access for applications and games, which are currently available only in beta.

On September 1, the section came out of the test mode and any developer had the opportunity to send a request to include his application there. I did it that evening.

In the middle of summer, I released my small home project in an open beta. Social networks helped to collect the first hundred installations and get the first reviews, and then slowly began to come users from Google Play search.

By the end of the summer, the project was debugged, improved, translated into several languages ​​and was completely ready for release from the technical side. I did not publish it because I did not decide: I consider the project as commercial and will invest money in its promotion or leave everything at the home level and turn the publication into a lottery with a minimal chance of winning.

Before applying for a hit in Early Access, I did not know how this section works. At that moment, it was known that it was framed as a collection, accessible from the main screen in a mobile client, and not available in the web version. Applications and games are divided into two groups and in each group about 14 items. Most of the applications are from small developers, but there are a couple and big players, for example, one of the Disney divisions.
The application should have indicated the planned date of publication of the application. I assumed that the applications in the list are updated once a week - only in this case, a significant number of applications can pass through the section - and set the publication date to September 19 - Monday, estimating that in three weeks I will have at least a small chance of hitting in the section.

By the last week of the designated period, I did not receive any response from the Google Play team and decided that the application did not fit them. At the weekend I left the city and checked the statistics only on the day of the planned publication. The numbers were unusual for me: 74 installations on Thursday September 15 and 290 installations on Friday the 16th. I thought that one of the sites where I had previously accessed, published the news about the application, but the mailbox was empty. Then I manually checked all possible sites, but did not find any references to my application. As a final option, I checked the Early Access section and suddenly I saw that the application was published there.

The Google Play team sent a letter about getting into the Early Access collection only on September 21, 6 days after it happened.

Section Early Access is a new experiment for Google. The rules for which it works will be revised more than once. In the first three months, these rules were:

• The section is available to users only from mobile devices, the web version is available only by a direct link.
• The collection is updated every Thursday morning by EDT.
• 2-3 new applications are added to the collection, old applications are not deleted.
• New applications are mostly added to the end of the list, but there are exceptions.
• during the week, the authors themselves remove applications from the list: someone closes the beta test, someone releases their application.
• several applications are in the collection since its opening. At the moment - it is three and a half months.
• the number of applications fluctuates around the number 14, the number of games is constantly increasing and now there are more than 20 of them.
• The collection includes applications available around the world or only in one country, both with and without tablet support. Because of this, on different devices, in different countries the list of applications is different.

Attention of users to the application depends on its position in the list. There are exactly the same rules as in the usual rating: those who are at the beginning get a lot of views and attitudes, those who at the end get less. My application started from the twelfth position and gradually moved to the fourth, so I managed to make an approximate graph of the dependence of users' attention on the position.



The closer the application was to the top of the list, the more random users paid attention to it. The number of page views of the application has grown, and the conversion to installations has decreased and the percentage of deletions has increased.

At the start of the application installed 9% of users from those who opened its page. Having altered the description and screenshots, I increased this value to 11%. After release, this figure ranges from 15% to 35%, depending on the country.

The application belongs to the category "Health and Fitness." It is translated into English, Spanish, Russian, French and German. The exact numbers are correct only for my application, but I think the relative change in conversion rate for traffic will be similar for all applications.



The general schedule of installations and deletions for two months looks like this:



For two months in Early Access, I received about 150 feedback from users through the standard feedback form on the application page and about 10 emails. Some of the reviews were quite helpful, but the current Google toolkit doesn’t allow convenient correspondence, so I received less information from this channel than I could. Usually it looked like this: I thanked for the feedback and asked a clarifying question, trying to keep within 350 characters, but did not receive any answer.

For myself, I decided that before launching the next beta test, I would integrate third-party feedback collection solutions into the application.

Much information gave analyst. The number of users allowed several A / B tests. But there is a difficulty with the interpretation of the data. The audience from Early Access is very different from the target audience of the application. For example, after the release of the application install 80% of women and only 20% of men. In Early Access distribution was: 60% of men and 40% of women.

The most useful was the feedback from the Google Play team, which they sent one month after the application hit the section. It contained 5 points that related to improvements in the visual part and support for new Android features. It was not a deep analysis of the application, but it was not a set of standard tips from the blog developers.

Press attention section Early Access attracted only at the time of launch. Applications that were part of the starter kit have been mentioned in a number of reviews. I could not realize the opportunity that Google gave me. Getting into Early Access did not help me in promoting the application through other channels.

At the moment, Early Access is still of interest to the audience of Google Play and may be useful for small developers. This is by no means a new traffic channel, but it’s doing its job — gaining a user base for testing the application — it does an excellent job. You can send a request for inclusion of the application in this section here .