Edgar Cervantes / Android Authority
TL;DR
- Google brought Collections to the Play Store a couple years back.
- So far, the Play Store widgets all feature multiple Collections that are shown at once.
- Google is now working on single-Collection widgets, to highlight just your favorites.
Two years ago, the Google Play Store introduced Collections, a method for making it easier to access thematically similar apps by grouping them according to topics like Shop, Listen, Food, and more. It didn’t take long after that for Google to introduce some new Collections widgets, giving us quick access to these categories straight from the home screen. Now we’ve spotted Google working on the next evolution of the Play Store’s widgets, splitting Collections out into multiple, separate widgets.
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For this, we’re looking at version 52.1.26-31 of the Play Store Android app. Just like those Google Contacts changes we just previewed for you, you won’t see any of the updates we’re taking an early look at here showing up on your phone today.
So far, you’ve had your choice of two Play Store widgets through which you could access your Collections. There’s a small one with just icons for individual Collections, or a larger widget that lists your Collections along the left edge. Depending on the size you have these configured, you probably won’t see all available Collection types at once.
AssembleDebug / Android Authority
But now Google’s working on making it much easier to focus on the specific Collections that matter most when you’re choosing a widget. With this release, Google has begun preparing to let you choose from individual widgets for all your favorite Collections:
All told, users should have their pick of eight: Food, Game, Listen, Read, Shop, Social, Travel, and Watch.
This isn’t far enough along that we can actually deploy any of these new Collections widgets to the home screen to show you how they look there, and play around with sizes, but at least this is a nice first peek at where things are headed.
Which Collections do you find the most useful? Would you be interested in deploying one of these single-flavor widgets on your handset? Let us known which down in the comments.
⚠️ An APK teardown helps predict features that may arrive on a service in the future based on work-in-progress code. However, it is possible that such predicted features may not make it to a public release.
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