4 months ago
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I have a problem. I keep too many of my apps open on my phone. I do it because I constantly check my feeds and then forget to close them out. Google’s latest Android feature could finally offer a new way to browse my feeds without diving into each app individually. If you’ve been enjoying a few of the new capabilities of the Android 15 beta, this is another one to try out. However, you may need to fiddle with privacy settings to avoid the feature becoming a sludge-filled pit of algorithmic content recommendations.
Starting Wednesday, Android users just need to hold down on the Play Store app icon on their home screen to add one or more Category widgets to their phones. There are seven different categories, from “Read” books and news apps to “Listen” for all your music or podcast content. You can adjust the size of these from taking up the whole screen to the size of a single icon.
Google How Does Play Store Collections Work?
These widgets offer a few unique ways to keep on top of your apps. The “Games” category provides a rundown of limited-timed events in your installed mobile titles. The “Food” collection will use Uber Eats or Google Maps to recommend some restaurants based on your location (though not if you disable location tracking). The “Shop category will display if you’ve left any items in your carts.
You won’t have much control over what apps get added to different Collection categories. The “Watch” collection includes most of your regular streaming apps and YouTube and showcases your TikTok For You feed. The “Social” collection displays other apps like Pinterest, Reddit, and TikTok.
Several apps won’t show a feed at all. Apps like Twitter, or (sigh) “X,” along with Meta apps like Instagram, won’t display any recommended content, though you can select the apps from the bottom bar inside the widget. Google says neither app supports the current SDK, which is pretty on-brand for Meta and Elon Musk. At the very least, Collections is an easy way to find all your various apps without scrounging them in your app list or home screen.
The feed refreshes every day, but its recommendation algorithms are still opaque. For instance, if you recently caught a few minutes of Milf Manor yesterday, Google TV might be in the “Watch” category and suggest several more reality TV shows to help rot your brain. If you sunk some time into Clash of Clans, the “Games” collection will shove a bunch of YouTube videos of tutorials and strategy videos to get you playing even more.
At least you can manually turn off which apps bombard you with recommended content. With the latest Play Store, you can navigate to the “Personalization in Play” settings page to manually disable different apps from recommending content. This gets applied across all Categories and inside the Play Store itself.
Google told Gizmodo that it plans to let users create their own custom collections. That feature might roll out sometime later this year, but as it stands, Categories could be a quick way to check on multiple feeds all at once without having to dive into each app individually.
An App for Apps
Photo: Kyle Barr / Gizmodo This is Google’s larger effort to make Play Store less of a single shop for apps into its kind of App for apps. Google is also launching a “Comics” curated space inside the Play Store, though it will be restricted to Japan for now. This will display content from various manga apps, including select sample chapters. It’s still algorithmically curated, and you can’t simply browse the full list of sample chapters available through the various manga distributors daily.
But if the point is to get you to return to the Play Store, then Google will likely need to cool it on algorithmic content generation. The Mountain View tech giant is trying to entice users to spend more money on the Play Store by giving those Play Points members more rewards. Those who have only spent a few bucks on Play Store for Bronze tier status might not get much, but Silver and Gold members can try out a few exclusive events at San Diego Comic-Con. Platinum and Diamond members, or those who are spending a lot more on Play Store, might be able to receive exclusive, physical hardware rewards in compensation for the cash they’re dropping regularly on their apps.
