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Google is done asking nicely for foldable app optimization
App developers will soon have more incentives to develop well-adapted foldable apps.
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Paul Jones / Android Authority
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TL;DR
- Google has announced at the Android Dev Summit that the Play Store will evaluate foldable app quality starting next year, rewarding well-adapted apps with boosted visibility and prominent placement.
- While specific criteria for Play Store visibility will be announced later this year, it remains unclear whether non-compliant apps will face active search penalties or simply miss out on promotional incentives.
- The quality push comes alongside updated developer tools, including Compose adaptive skill and platform updates, that make it even easier for apps to adapt across foldables, laptops, and other form factors.
Android foldables have existed for almost a decade, but even Google admits that Android apps still haven’t optimized well enough for them. Google is even hopeful that Apple’s iPhone Duo could expand the foldable audience enough to encourage better app experiences across both iOS and Android, and we already see a glimpse of that with iPhone Duo’s app support on launch day. However, Google is done waiting for developers to pick up the slack voluntarily, and it is preparing to take a more proactive approach towards better foldable apps on Android.
Starting next year, the Google Play Store will evaluate how apps and games run on foldables, giving well-adapted apps increased visibility and prominent placement in the store. Google confirmed at the ongoing Android Dev Summit that specific Play Store requirements around this change will be detailed later this year.
Google has not yet specified whether failing to adapt will trigger explicit Play Store search penalties or if the platform is relying solely on discovery incentives for compliant apps. There’s also room for interpretation of what a “well-adapted app” means in this context. Is it an app that merely follows all established guidelines for a “good” foldable experience, or one that goes above and beyond to deliver user delight through its design and experience?
Either way, applying Play Store-level leverage will mark a necessary shift from passive guidelines that relied entirely on the whims of the app developer, which in turn were dictated by their own assessment of consumer interest in foldables as a product category. Compared to traditional glass-slab smartphones, the foldable phone category is still growing (admittedly quickly, now that Apple has entered), and the numbers might still not be enough for an app developer to dedicate significant resources. With the right incentives, Google could break out of this chicken-and-egg situation.
The timing of this change is also crucial given the arrival of the Googlebook ecosystem, where unoptimized phone apps risk creating complicated app support situations on larger screens, something even Google’s own apps are guilty of.
To combat some of these complications, Google says developers can now scale Android apps to laptops and web environments without maintaining separate codebases. Google is shipping updated developer tools powered by its Compose adaptive skill, which allows AI coding agents to transform compact mobile apps to scale across phones, foldables, Googlebook, tablets, parked cars, and XR.
The Compose adaptive skill can now audit mobile interfaces and automatically implement essential desktop controls, including keyboard shortcuts, custom pointer cursors, hover states, and control tooltips. For foldables, the skill can automatically refactor camera and media screens into dedicated tabletop layouts as needed.
These user-facing changes are backed by core platform updates, including Navigation 3 v1.2 and the upcoming Compose 1.13 release, which brings stable Grid and Flexbox support for responsive layouts.
For consumers tired of stretched phone apps across foldables, tablets, and now Googlebooks, Google Play’s upcoming quality push could finally turn years of soft guidelines into a consistently polished app ecosystem.
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App developmentFoldable PhonesGoogleGoogle Play StoreGooglebook OSGooglebooks
