Newsletter
The Google Play Store is getting a slight redesign right now. However, the big thing that people are noticing that’s missing, is a dark mode.
Google Play was already a pretty bright app, with tons of white space. And with this redesign, there’s even more. Which means that you aren’t going to want to open this app up in a dark room, unless you’re looking forward to losing your eyesight.
The big changes that are in this redesign, is the bottom navigation. So instead of the Games, Apps, Movies & TV and Books being at the top of the app, they are now at the bottom. This could be part of Google’s set of changes to make it easier to use these apps on a larger device. Like what Samsung did with One UI. Bringing more of the UI elements lower on the screen so that users can actually reach them.
At the top of the screen, you’ll still find some navigation, like the For You, Top Charts and such. It’s more of a split navigation, and it’s something that’s going to be a bit confusing for a number of people at first.
There’s one more change that users are going to notice with this update to Google Play, and that’s on the app page. When you download an app, the progress bar is now a circle around the app’s icon on the left-hand side. Buttons for Cancel, Open and Download are now larger and are vertical instead of horizontal. For the most part, everything is a tad bit bigger on the Play Store, and to be honest, it looks pretty good.
The Google Play Store has undergone many redesigns in the past few years, some of them have been rolled back because they weren’t ready and/or because users did not like it. This redesign, however, actually looks pretty good. It makes things easier to use, at least on the app listing page. The “home” screen of the Play Store will take some getting used too, with the split navigation at the top and bottom.
However, it’s still pretty strange that Google did not add a dark mode to the Play Store yet. Especially with Google doing a system-wide dark mode in Android Q, and many of its other apps adding a dark mode. It’s almost as if the Play Store team didn’t get the memo about dark mode. Google actually went the opposite way with this redesign, as there is now even more white space in the app. While yes it looks pretty good, but just don’t open the app at night.
If you haven’t gotten the new Play Store yet, you can try clearing the cache in settings (Settings > Apps > Google Play Store > Storage > Clear Cache) and then reopening the Play Store. If that doesn’t trigger the update, you can also sideload the new version from this link. Remember to choose the right version for your device. If you are unsure of the correct version, just wait for the update to get pushed out to you.
