The company is revamping the Play Store for the AI era with changes to publishing, recommendations and more.
As part of a collection of updates to the Play Store, Google has announced that it will allow anyone who vibe codes an Android app to distribute it through the Play Store with just a Google account. The company’s app store has changed a lot in the last few years, both in the wake of Google’s efforts to inject AI into everything and legal pressure the company has faced to open the Play Store to competitors. But this change could prove to be one of the biggest.
Users have been able to sideload APKs of Android apps to their phones or tablets for a while, with Google making the process more complex in the last year. This new publishing process will make things easier. Rolling out to users in the US and other select markets who are 18 years and up, Google will let you upload a vibe-coded Android app from Google AI Studio without a paid developer account. For those who aren’t familiar, Google’s AI Studio is capable of generating apps with just a written prompt to Gemini, and you can adjust your results with more prompts or directly editing the generated code yourself.
Your app will only be available on your own devices to start (including tablets and computers with access to the Play Store) in a new “personal library” section, but Google eventually plans to let you securely share your vibe-coded apps with friends and family, too. When you want to distribute your apps to a global audience, the company says it will also be possible to “graduate” to a professional developer account and submit your apps to the Play Store’s normal safety reviews.
Alongside this major change to app publishing, Google is also making tweaks to app discovery and its ever-growing list of gaming-focused features. The company already introduced its biggest change, Ask Play, at I/O 2026, but now it’s also bringing similar app discovery features to Gemini by allowing the AI assistant to surface direct links to Play Store apps in chats. Google will also feature more apps through its sports topic pages that appear in the Play Store during live matches. They’ll now expand to cover soccer games from Premier League, Major League Soccer and more. In cars with Google built-in and Android XR, the company is also updating the Play Store’s layout to better fit the size of your physical or virtual screen.
If you’re specifically interested in finding games, the new Game Finder feature can recommend things to play that fit your unique taste. Google says it’s able to offer these recommendations based on your Gamer DNA, a new taste profile that you can finetune with your preferences and favorite genres. In a roundtable with press, Google suggested it hopes to make the filters and genre tags increasingly granular, opening up the possibility of drilling down into, say, games that specifically offer controller support, for example. You can also find new things to play via the new game playlists feature, which lets you recommend a collection of mobile games for other people to try.
The company is updating the overall experience of playing games on Android, too. Its Sidekick overlay has a new feature that allows it to record 30-second clips of gameplay, and developers are receiving a collection of new tools they can use to increase engagement. These include Sprints, Community Posts and an expansion of the Quests feature.
Sprints are 48-hour in-game challenges that match you with players of a similar skill level to compete for the highest score. Quests, which allowed developers to reward players with Play Points, now also lets them provide in-game rewards. Finally, Community Posts adds a Q&A section to store pages so players can ask and answer questions about games in the Play Store.
The helpfulness of these new features depends a lot on your faith in AI’s ability to build apps and offer recommendations. But they’re a sign that Google is trying to stay competitive with third-party app stores now that they can be installed through the Play Store.
