The Google Play Store is celebrating its 10th anniversary, and the Mountain View firm decided to celebrate.
The Play Store has officially turned 10 years old and Google decided to celebrate this milestone. In addition to the new logo, which is in perfect harmony with the modern aesthetics of the American giant (see above), a promotion is running right now that offers 10 times more Play Points for those who make purchases.
Google Play Store celebrates its 10th anniversary
Mountain View launched the Play Store in 2012 to bring all of its online stores under one banner: Android Market apps, music, e-books and videos. You can then buy whatever Google has to offer from one of the many sites or from several different apps. For a while, you could even browse the digital kiosk and hardware products like Nexus devices and Chromebooks. It’s no surprise that the service is hugely popular given its prominence on Android, with more than 2.5 billion people using it every month in 190 countries.
The anniversary also marks a real evolution of the service. The company rebranded Play Newsstand as Google News in 2018 and discontinued Play Music in 2020 when YouTube Music ceased to exist. Google is removing its Movies & TV section this year to bring all that content back to the TV app. The Play Store remains intact, but it’s much more app-focused than it was 10 years ago.
and the Mountain View firm decided to celebrate this event
There were also controversies in the Play Store. While Play Protect’s anti-malware system and various security processes have made the store more reliable than when it launched, there are still questionable apps that manage to slip past the radar. Google has also struggled with its various policies. Fortnite creator Epic Games and others have accused Google of nearly banning third-party payment systems and even going so far as to block vendor agreements. In June, Google tightened its rules, making it mandatory for many apps to use the Play Store payment system.
The European Union partially undermined this approach by passing a law making access to third-party payment platforms mandatory. Other regulators demanded similar changes. As important as the Play Store is to Android and Google in general, chances are it will lose some of its luster, or at least its importance, in the coming years.