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The Play Store may be about to make waves with these UI tweaks (APK teardown)
- The Play Store shows evidence of work in progress on a few new visual changes.
- Wavy progress bars, blue review stars, font changes, and new warning messages could be on the way.
- Right now, none of these tweaks are yet visible in the public Play Store release.
We’re just a week and change away from 2025, and beyond all the partying, that spells time for resolutions and reflection. How are you going to reinvent yourself in the new year? Google looks like it could already be off to a head start, as we spot the company playing around with some still in-development tweaks to how the Play Store looks.
An APK teardown helps predict features that may arrive on a service in the future based on work-in-progress code. However, it is possible that such predicted features may not make it to a public release.
Nothing we’re looking at today appears to be too impactful, and could just be developers trying out some new ideas to see what’s possible. And while we wouldn’t put any money on the odds of these showing up on your phone tomorrow, this work at least offers a little insight into what nooks and crannies of the Play Store’s interface are getting attention right now.
We’re checking out Google’s new version 44.1.17-31 build of the Play Store. You won’t see any of these changes using the app on your own phone just yet, but we were able to get a few of them to show up for us a little bit early. Easily the most visible one here is all the progress indicators picking up a new, wavy design:
It’s basically the same kind of look we’re familiar with from Android’s media player UI — though admittedly, the wavy look makes a bit more sense over there, at least invoking comparisons to an audio waveform. It’s definitely visually striking, and the motion might make it feel like app installs are moving along just a bit faster.
Did you spot any other changes in that video compared to the Play Store you have now? This one is super subtle, but if you look at an app’s review you can see that Google’s trying out the idea of making the star blue, instead of the black we have now. We can also see the Play Store trying out a different font for the text in this row, identified in app code as Google Material typography.
Finally, Google may be thinking about calling a little bit more attention to warning notices in the Play Store. Rather than colored text on a white background, developers are trying out an alternate presentation with dark text in a colored box. You can check out before-and-after views of both this and the blue star change above.
Like we said, none of this is really going to change the way we use the Play Store, and at best it amounts to trying on some fresh duds. Love ’em? Hate ’em? Come down and complain about the weird wavy progress bar in the comments below.