Talk:Google Play

Article organization

I was planning to move the article Android Market to Google Play, however that was not possible because that title already existed. I then decided to create an article from scratch and I think it is better to add content from Android Market and Google Music incrementally instead of just making enormous copy-paste merges. Having said that, I'm currently working to update this article as fast as possible, so please have a little patience for the next hours in regards of style/references, but feel free to contribute and your opinion on the direction of the article is very welcome. --SF007 (talk) 19:30, 6 March 2012 (UTC)

Since you're merging this in as we speak, I'm going to leave you to it, but I'm a bit concerned that it might result in this article being dominated by app-related content when apps are now just one part of a larger service. I guess this is a problem we can tackle afterwards. – Steel 22:59, 6 March 2012 (UTC)

I also completely share that concern. Thats why I just merged the most important stuff and did not merged all the content right away. Meanwhile I have turned Android Market into a redirect to avoid confusing readers. The info not yet merged can still be accessed via the page history. I think the current revision is reasonably balanced, but some info can be removed, if necessary (now or in the future). Feel free to share your thoughts. By the way, I am largely done updating the text part, It is far from good, but I hope others now improve it, as I'm not that good with words. --SF007 (talk) 00:18, 9 March 2012 (UTC)

The fact that Android Market lead to Google Play where there is no explanation why is grossly confusing! The old article text at least says that "android market" now will be under the "google play". Assuming i dont read news on google daily (and have no encyclopedic knowledge on things that happened 3 days ago), how am i supposed to know the obvious to you fact of the transition? You lost the forest for the trees. EnTerr (talk) 20:27, 9 March 2012 (UTC)

Yes, you also don't seem to read the article you are complaining about. How are you supposed to know the facts? How about reading the introduction to this article! Where it clearly states "Google Play was introduced in March 2012 when Google re-branded its predecessor Android Market and Google Music services." --SF007 (talk) 00:01, 10 March 2012 (UTC)

Your approach to "move" Android Market -> Google Play is generally flawed. Android Market is just a piece of the intended G-Play (whenever they accomplish that - it is not available yet), just like Apple's AppStore is only part of iTunes store. You should have just started new "super" (or "meta" if you will) article that links to the three components (Music, Books and Apps) and let the history run its course with updates as those services become available, instead of prodding wikipedia for Google marketing's sake! I find abusive that you MOVED 20 articles in non-EN wikipedias. Do you speak those 20 languages? I doubt that, so why are you meddling with them?! don't deside for others what is good for them EnTerr (talk) 20:55, 10 March 2012 (UTC)

The Android Market already contained music, books, and apps far before the Google Play transition, so it is misleading to call it a "piece" of Google Play. The basic interface of the Market/Play app has not even changed appreciably since the transition (save for putting in "play" buzzwords everywhere). Google Play is just a rebranding of the Android Market, pure and simple.

It may have appeared (by purely looking at the Android Market and Google Play pages) that Google created a superset of several existing stores with Google Play. If this was your perception, I must apologize for myself, and on behalf of the other editors of the Android Market page for not keeping it sufficiently up to date. Now that the initial move from the Market to Play has taken place, and most of the dust has settled, I will likely return to aid in the move of information to the new Play page.

--Amlz (talk) 19:44, 13 March 2012 (UTC)

Merge

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

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• Merge; as the Android Market has been mostly discontinued, it should be merged with Google Play. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 65.93.97.90 (talk) 21:55, 6 March 2012 (UTC)
• Support; as the Android Market is now Google Play.--Wikien2009 (talk) 22:39, 6 March 2012 (UTC)
• Oppose; the android market was a separate service. BitTorrent (software) and μTorrent have separate articles even though they are now the same piece of software with different skins. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 173.34.28.208 (talk) 12:16, 7 March 2012 (UTC)
  • BitTorrent (software) and μTorrent both started by different people, very likely with different goals, both existed at the same time in the past and both exist in the present at the same time. While from a technical point of view they are almost the same, they are still two programs with different names and available at different places; In a way, they can be seen as two separate entities. Google Play is simply a re-branding of Android Market, they never existed both at the same time, and Google Play can be seen as the same "entity" as Android Market, as they are largely the same, but simply with a new name, new branding and some new features.--SF007 (talk) 00:20, 9 March 2012 (UTC)
• Support, Google Play is simply an "evolved" version of the Android Market. --SF007 (talk) 00:21, 9 March 2012 (UTC)
• Oppose; - when i looked up Android Market today, it redirected me to Google Play and there was not even mentioning what Android Market "was" nor anything about transition, no history, no nothing! Don't be so in rush with fashionable news... There should be some rule of slowing down updates - imagine the mess in the case of Netflix announcing Qwikster and deleting immediately the DVD section under Netflix and having to rework it when they backtracked in a week? EnTerr (talk) 20:32, 9 March 2012 (UTC)

Your reasoning is flawed, as I mentioned above, this article clearly indicates Google Play is a re-branding of the Android Market. If you think this article is bad or missing info (I certainly agree this article is far from good, and I take a great deal of responsibility for that), then the solution is to improve this article, not to keep an article with pretty much deals about the same entity (Google Play = Android Market with new colors and some new features). --SF007 (talk) 00:05, 10 March 2012 (UTC)

well that statement is wrong, Google Play is a fusion of "Android Market", "Google Books" and "Google Music", not simple re-branding. And it is not ready yet!! The market app is still called "Market" - why are you rushing ahead of Google even? So far "Google Play" is just a marketing blurb? EnTerr (talk) 20:39, 10 March 2012 (UTC)

The Android app is no longer called 'Market', and has been replaced by the 'Play Store' on all of my devices, at least. --Amlz (talk) 20:03, 13 March 2012 (UTC)

I notice User:EnTerr has restored the old Android Market article. I am in half a mind to summarily revert this on the basis that his/her objections make no sense. As above, this article clearly does explain on the third line that Google Play is a rebranding of existing services. Also the edit summary restoring the old article complained about a lack of history, which is puzzling because all the history info for each service has been moved here in their relevant sections. That's not to say this article is perfect, because it isn't. It's not SF007's fault, he's done a really good job of this so far, but this page is only three days old and it will take a little while longer to figure out where to put everything and what we don't need and so on and so forth. Should the article say more about the rebranding? Yeah, probably. But restoring the old article doesn't solve any of these issues. – Steel 15:25, 10 March 2012 (UTC)

how about Wiktionary:measure twice and cut once? sounds you are suggesting to keep chiseling until something turns out. this is encyclopedia that is live, people come to read about a subject and if you don't have the "google play" article ready with everything from the "android market" - do not redirect the title yet, as simple as that! i was really annoyed the other day when i came to look something about android market and get redirected to google play and i had no idea what's going on. i am not computer illiterate yet i had no idea android market is just getting re-branded and from the "new" article it was not OBVIOUS that was so. can you imagine the state of confusion other people get as well? EnTerr (talk) 20:25, 10 March 2012 (UTC)

• Support; Google Play is just a rebranded version of the Android Market. No need to have two separate pages. --Amlz (talk) 20:02, 13 March 2012 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

I've redirected Android Market back here. There is still some information about application approval and security which we ought to bring over to this article - or maybe it would be better off at Android software development and this article can just link to it there. I'm not sure. I'll give things a better look later this week if nobody does it sooner. – Steel 01:12, 14 March 2012 (UTC)

Icons

Do we really need the icons for various sections of the store? I can't see that it particularly helps the reader to illustrate that the icon for the "music" store is a pair of headphones, or that the icon for "books" is a book. --McGeddon (talk) 10:03, 8 March 2012 (UTC)

I think that it actually improves the article.

And a picture is worth 1000 words as they say Jenova20 10:31, 8 March 2012 (UTC)

I agree with Jenova20. We could argue if they are needed or not, but then what? If they are needed should we then conclude they should be removed? We could easily say "all logos in wikipedia are not needed" or even "no images are needed". I think they should stay as they are clearly fair-use and certainly improve the article and navigation through it. - Joel Bastos — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2.80.220.252 (talk) 23:26, 8 March 2012 (UTC)

This article at the moment fails WP:NFCC because of the number of non-free images which add nothing to the article, and the icons do make the page look cluttered. I'm not going to do anything because this kind of thing usually ends up in a fight, but still... just saying. – Steel 23:35, 8 March 2012 (UTC)

I'm not so sure it does as there's no absolute limit on pictures and i had to use this article myself the other day just to figure out what happened to the Android Market.

It would have been more difficult do this if i had to use Google instead of Wikipedia.

It should come down to just 2 questions-

• Is the article quality improved by the pictures - yes
• Would the article quality suffer if there were no pictures but instead descriptions of them - yes

Thanks Jenova20 15:16, 9 March 2012 (UTC)

I don't think anyone's suggesting that we alter the article so that it's no longer possible to learn what happened to Android Market.

I've moved the images from the top-left of subsections per Wikipedia:IMAGES#Location, but I still think it looks awkwardly cluttered to have a grey box with a much smaller icon floating inside it. It'd look good if the image was just floating with no caption or border, but that would lead us away from how images are used on Wikipedia - we aren't designing a standalone website about Google Play, we're writing an article to fit with Wikipedia's house style.

I've tried replacing them with larger versions of the app icons, but they still look cluttered. I think it'd be more useful to have a screenshot of the actual app in each case, rather than just showing the reader what its (entirely literal) app icon looks like. But the Books and Music sections need fleshing out with some text anyway, they're both a bit sparse. --McGeddon (talk) 17:42, 9 March 2012 (UTC)

Regional Availability section/table

I don't think we need a table of regional availability when we already have that information in the appropriate sections. It just wastes space, is redundant, and is simply not necessary. Is there a good reason to keep it? --SF007 (talk) 01:18, 9 March 2012 (UTC)

Yes it is redundant, but i think it brings a lot of clarity into worldwide coverage, which otherwise is scattered over a long article. Many tables (and other stuff like infoboxes) in WP are redundant but still included because they provide "ease of use". I vote for re-adding the section --RScheiber (talk) 12:14, 9 March 2012 (UTC)

That is a solid reasoning, however, there is still a problem with the table itself: it is incomplete at best and misleading at worst. The problem is that it list "Apps and games are available for the rest of "the world", but that is only true for free apps, paid apps are only available in 129+ countries. The table:

Country/Region	Apps and Games	Books	Movies	Music
United States	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
United Kingdom	Yes	Yes	Yes	No
Canada	Yes	Yes	Yes	No
Australia	Yes	Yes	No	No
Japan	Yes	No	Yes	No
Rest of the World	Yes	No	No	No

Anyone feel free to suggest a table with the complete info. --SF007 (talk) 19:23, 9 March 2012 (UTC)

There used to be a fairly complete table on the old Android Market page (last seen here [1]), although Dcxf decided [2] (and rightly so, in my opinion) to simply ref to Google's Paid App Availability list [3] instead, as the table was getting a bit unwieldy. --Amlz (talk) 19:59, 13 March 2012 (UTC)

This table would be a good addition to the article and if it gets too big it could be encased in a collapsed section. Thanks Jenova20 14:58, 14 June 2012 (UTC)

Corporations changing product names, where is the line?

Android Market was a more descriptive identification for this page than Google Play. Where is the limit where Wikipedia will rename to whatever the corporation wants? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 85.53.8.189 (talk) 19:07, 24 April 2012 (UTC)

What would be the point of keeping the name as Android Market when no such thing exists only to then create the exact same article under the Google Play name?

Google has No influence over Wikipedia, we change article names to reflect encyclopedic value and since the Android Market article can no longer grow and the Google Play one can then it's a no brainer to rename the article. Think about it Jenova20 21:33, 24 April 2012 (UTC)

If the Android Market existed still and so did Google Play as different services we would have both articles, but since Google Play IS the Android Market then we rename. If tomorrow Google renames it to Google Store then we would likewise rename again since this article would become a dead end and there's no point duplicating content when it can be avoided. Thanks Jenova20 21:37, 24 April 2012 (UTC)

Question

http://www.appbrain.com/stats/ Why do you guys have that there are 600,000 apps when there are only 495,000 according to appbrain?

Books

• "Google Play's books are available in the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Germany, Italy and Australia."

Can we have this reworded or deleted since it's an unreferenced ever-expanding list of countries? It's not so encyclopedic compared to what Google Books actually is anyway. Thanks Jenova20 14:51, 14 June 2012 (UTC)

The above section "Regional Availability section/table" would be a perfect cure for these lists of countries appearing in the article if there is agreement to add it? Thanks Jenova20 14:54, 14 June 2012 (UTC)