Google today announced several different new advertising features for Android developers, but there’s some interesting news in there for us regular folk, too.
First up is Search Trial Run Ads, which will let you try a game before you download it. These ads will show up when you search Google for a game, and they’ll appear as a card with a “Try now” button that’ll let you stream a game without downloading anything. The trials will only work over Wi-Fi, and once the 10 minutes are up, you’ll have the option of installing the app from Google Play or going back to your Google search.
Search Trial Run Ads sound like a nice addition to Google and Android. They’ll make it much faster for you to try out a game because you’re streaming it rather than downloading the full title, and another way that they can save time is that if you end up not liking a game, you don’t have to worry about digging through your Settings to uninstall it because you didn’t download it in the first place.
Google is also rolling out a video recording API that’ll make it easy for developers to add video recording support to their games. Google is also adding live streaming functionality, which will let you stream your games you YouTube.
Another user-facing tweak that Google is rolling out is portrait video advertising. Google says that more than 80 percent of in-app video ad views in the Google Display Network are from devices that are held vertically, even though the ads are in landscape orientation. Portrait video ads will mean that those users can view ads correctly without having to rotate their devices.
Finally, Google has launched an Indie Corner section in the Play Store to highlight games made by smaller developers. You can check out the initial batch of games selected to the Indie Corner right here.