Virexa

Mobile GamesRelease

Expanding our stage for PC and paid titles

  Posted by Aurash Mahbod, VP and GM, Games on Google Play Google Play is proud to be the home of over 200,000 games—many of which defined the mobile-first era. But as cross-platform becomes the standard for players, we are evolving our ecosystem to match the scale of your ambitions. In recent years, we focused on elevating Android gaming quality while significantly deepening our support for native PC titles . We know that maximizing your game’s reach across different platforms is complex. The Level Up program serves as your strategic roadmap, helping you prioritize optimizations that drive great experiences on Android. Building on this foundation, we’re doubling down on our investment to make Play the most accessible home for every category of play . We’re adding new tools for paid games and making the PC game discovery to purchase seamless. Keep reading to learn more about how we’re creating a bigger stage for your games . Scale your discovery across mobile and PC platforms Building a bigger stage starts with making your games easier to find—and easier to buy—no matter which device your players prefer. We’re expanding your reach by bringing cross-platform discovery directly to the mobile storefront.  With the new PC section in the Games tab, your PC titles gain high visibility placement among our most active mobile players.  The PC badge ensures your cross-platform investment is recognized. This creates more opportunities to acquire players on mobile and transition them seamlessly to your high-fidelity PC experience. PC in the Games tab and PC badging expands your game’s reach With ‘ buy once play anywhere ’ pricing, we’re making it easier to sell your games across different devices.  If you choose to opt-in your mobile game for Google Play Games on PC, you can now offer a single price that covers both mobile and PC versions. We’re rolling out this feature in EAP with select games including Brotato: Premium .  For PC-only games, players can now complete the full purchase journey on Google Play Games on PC with the same trusted security and privacy standards they expect from Google Play.  ' Buy once play anywhere’ pricing to sell your games across devices Lower the purchase barrier with Game Trials  To help you convert high-intent buyers with less friction, we’re introducing Game Trials , a feature that enables players to experience your game for a limited time before making a purchase on mobile. Accessible directly from your game’s store listing, Game Trials provides a fast-track for players to start exploring your world with a single tap. Game trials are now in testing with select titles and we’ll roll it out to more titles soon.  To ensure this is low maintenance for you, Game Trials is added directly into your Android App Bundle. This enables you to offer a high quality trial without the burden of a separate codebase or a demo version of your app.  Play ensures trials are secure and seamless . Game Trials are once per user and protects your game while the trial is active. When it ends, players can purchase your game and keep their progress.  We’re also working on tools that will give you more control —such as specifying a custom time limit or an in-game event to conclude the trial.  Game Trial for DREDGE to help convert high-intent buyers Diversify your revenue with a dedicated player community on Play Pass Play Pass is another way to diversify revenue and grow your player audience. It has been a strong launchpad for indie hits such as Isle of Arrows , Slay the Spire , and Dead Cells . With Play Pass, you can reach highly dedicated players seeking a more curated gaming experience, free of ads and in-app purchases. To help you deepen engagement, paid titles on Play Pass can now opt in to Google Play Games on PC — making it easy for players to find and play your games on a larger screen. Later this year, you can nominate your game through a streamlined opt-in process directly in Play Console.    Drive long term sales with Wishlists and Discounts Wishlists and Discounts are one of the most effective ways to capture player intent and drive long term sales. To support players at every stage of their purchase journey, we’re integrating them directly into Play. Players can save titles to their wishlist and manage them from library settings. To keep your game top-of-mind, players will receive automated notifications for your latest discounts — starting with mobile and expanding soon to PC games.  Wishlist and discount notifications drives long term sales, rolling out today How leading studios are finding a new path to success on Play We’re thrilled to welcome Sledding Game , 9 Kings , Potion Craft, Moonlight Peaks, an d Low Budget Repairs to Play [1] . It marks an exciting expansion of our catalog and a step forward in our mission to build a bigger gaming ecosystem for all developers. This growth is fueled by our developer community, whose feedback continues to shape our roadmap and help us better support your success. Sledding Game, 9 Kings, Potion Craft, Moonlight Peaks, and Low Budget Repairs is coming to Play. That mission brings us to GDC and the Independent Games Festival (IGF) Awards   [2] , where the next generation of games awaits! This year, we’re inviting you to come along for the ride as we go backstage to chat with the finalists and winners, sharing the moments of triumph and the creative stories behind their development. Not joining us at GDC? You can take the next step in your journey to launch your game on Google Play today . 1.  Sledding Game, 9 Kings, Potion Craft, and Moonlight Peaks are coming to Google Play in 2026. Low Budget Repairs is scheduled for release in 2027. [Back] 2.   Independent Games Festival (IGF) Awards is hosted by Game Developers Conference (GDC) and requires a valid GDC pass for entry. [Back]

Android Developers BlogMarch 11, 20265 min read

MobileRelease

Evolving how LLMs are measured for Android: the next era of Android Bench

Posted by Zoe Lopez-Latorre, Senior Developer Relations Engineer, Android Back in March, we introduced Android Bench —our LLM leaderboard for real-world Android development tasks. Our goal was to provide transparency around model capabilities in Android development and to encourage model improvements, to give you more helpful AI options for your everyday workflow. Since then, we have enhanced the benchmark based on your feedback, including evaluating open-weight models and adding cost and efficiency dimensions to the leaderboard. But AI capabilities are ever-evolving, and measurement needs to follow suit. As part of our July release, we have adopted the Harbor framework , which includes an updated version of the benchmarking agent used to evaluate models. Along with this change to our evaluation, in this July release we’re adding 8 new models ( Claude Fable 5, Claude Sonnet 5, Claude Opus 4.8, GLM 5.2, Kimi K2.7 Code, MiniMax M3, Qwen 3.7 Plus and Qwen 3.7 Max ) to the leaderboard. We’re also sharing opportunities for you, the Android developer community, to contribute to the benchmark. Upgrading our methodology with the Harbor framework When we designed Android Bench, we anchored our methodology on leading industry standards available at the time. We used mini-swe-agent v1, a general-purpose benchmarking agent, and adapted it to the nuances of Android development to provide a baseline measurement for the capabilities of models for common Android development tasks. To continue providing you with state-of-the-art evaluations that accurately measure the latest model capabilities on Android development, we are standardizing our benchmark to the Harbor framework . Harbor defines standards and integrations that make it easy for anyone to run the benchmark, evaluate their preferred set-up, or share results – providing you with additional transparency and visibility. This upgrade enables us to more rigorously evaluate models and their capabilities, and we re-ran the benchmark on all models to establish an updated baseline. This means there is a minor shift in scoring, but you will still be able to view historical scores within the archive on our website. We want to ensure Android Bench is helpful for you, so we will continuously update it as our evaluations and the industry mature. Expanding the leaderboard with 8 new models As part of our commitment to keeping the leaderboard fresh, we have added Claude Fable 5, Claude Sonnet 5, Claude Opus 4.8, GLM 5.2, Kimi K2.7 Code, MiniMax M3, Qwen 3.7 Plus and Qwen 3.7 Max to the Android Bench leaderboard. You will see that Claude Fable 5 is at the top of the leaderboard with a score of 84.5, followed by GPT 5.5 with 80.2, with Claude Sonnet 5 in 3rd with a score of 76.2. When just comparing Open-weight models, GLM 5.2 is at the top with 72.2, followed by Kimi K2.7 Code with a score of 70.4. You can check out model performance and efficiency metrics on the updated leaderboard to see how these new and previous models navigate Android-specific challenges like Jetpack Compose migrations, wearable networking, and platform API updates. Opening Android Bench to community contributions From the beginning, we’ve valued an open and transparent approach, which is why we made our original methodology and test harness publicly available on GitHub. You’ve asked for a way to provide feedback on our dataset, so now we’re taking collaboration a step further by giving you, the Android developer community, a chance to shape Android Bench. Starting today, you can contribute to Android Bench in two ways: Design and submit your own Android development tasks to evaluate how models handle the scenarios that matter to you. Run and share benchmark evaluations firsthand, testing your preferred models against our dataset or your own custom tasks. We will be reviewing the submitted tasks and will be assessing if they get added to the benchmark. We hope to build a benchmark that truly reflects the diverse, day-to-day realities of the global Android developer community. Looking ahead With more and more options for agentic development, maintaining a cutting-edge benchmark ensures that the AI assistance you rely on keeps getting smarter, more helpful, and more effective. Head over to our GitHub repository to check out the tasks. We invite you to submit a task to our team for review, and you can check out Harbor Hub to explore the dataset or submit evaluations. As always, you can find the updated leaderboard , or read the methodology on our website. Android Bench, LLM leaderboard, Harbor framework, Android development, Claude Fable 5, GPT 5.5, Claude Sonnet 5, GLM 5.2, Kimi K2.7 Code, MiniMax M3, Qwen 3.7 Plus, Qwen 3.7 Max, AI benchmarking, Jetpack Compose migration, wearable networking, mobile AI agent, Zoe Lopez-Latorre, model evaluation, open-weight models, developer community contributions.

Android Developers BlogJuly 8, 20264 min read