If you’ve been following the Play Store’s Material Design update, you know it’s been a rough ride.
Google’s digital store has been slowly tweaked and redesigned over the last year. Back in April, it seemed the update was finally coming in a staged rollout, but after a month of radio silence, Google began rolling back the update in June.
However, a new version of the Play Store is rolling out now complete with the redesign. You’ll need ‘version 15.2.38’ of the Play Store to get ahold of the new look, but it appears to be rolling out in stages. Thankfully, if you know what you’re doing, you can track down the 15.2.38 APK and sideload to activate the redesign.
Once you’ve got the new Play Store booted up, you’ll notice that things really aren’t that different. The lack of colour will probably be the first thing you see. For example, the top bar trades the familiar green for white, and the search bar now says ‘Search for’ and then either ‘apps & games,’ ‘Movies & TV’ or ‘ Books’ depending on which section of the store you’re in.
Directly below the search bar are the categories for the section of the store you’re in, including ‘For You,’ ‘Top Charts,’ ‘Categories’ and more.
At the bottom is a new navigation bar for switching between the storefronts. These let you quickly switch between apps, games, movies/TV and Books. Plus, switching plays a nifty little animation and changes the highlight colour of other elements to match the storefront colour. For example, switching to Books changes the titles and buttons to blue, while apps or games make it green.
Observant readers may notice that there’s no section for music in the navigation bar. Likely in preparation for the shut down of Play Music, Google has pushed it off to the side menu as a link to ‘Open Music app,’ which resides with links to other Play apps like Books.
As for the other sections of the app, almost all of the Play Store is just white with green accents now.
Google got rid of the light separating lines and rounded several buttons. Overall, the new look is really clean, and I’m happy it’s finally starting to roll out.
Source: 9to5Google
Update:02/08/2019: Beginning on August 1st, Google will roll out a Material Theme revamp to the Google Play Store. This rollout will occur for users all around the world. Hopefully, it doesn’t stop this time.
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