google store next update

Google’s effort to re-paint Android with its Material Design brush is now coming to the Play Store app.

Version 5.0.13 is hitting devices over the next few days (you can grab the APK now if you’re impatient), bringing deeper hues, reworked animation, and more app curation.

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The tabs move to the top while scrolling through the Play Store so you can quickly navigate to other sections.
The makeover is identical to leaked images from September that gave us a peek at the new look. The Action Bar, which houses the page title, search bar, and triple-bar navigation button (often called the hamburger icon) is now morphed together with the page categories. It creates a large block of color at the top, though it fades away leaving just the categories when you scroll down the page (see the above image).

There are a couple of other notable changes. The “new plus updated apps” section gets higher placement and there are more curated categories, part of Google’s effort to bump up its Play Store revenue.

The Play Store icon is also redone, with a flatter appearance that looks less like a real-world shopping bag. Android’s other icons, such as Play Music and Play Books, are also retooled. We should see if these new become the new default icons for the apps once Android L hits the ecosystem, which should happen very soon.

Deeper hues and higher placement of new apps are part of the Material Design makeover.
The story behind the story: Material Design is Google’s effort to unify the look and feel of Android. The company is slowly updating its core apps to match the aesthetic, most recently Google+ and Google Play Newsstand.

Doing this piecemeal instead of in one full swoop gives Android owners a chance to get used to the new design and app developers time to remodel their apps. Given that the Play Store is the prime moneymaker for Android (outside of targeted advertisements), its turn in the Material Design makeover studio indicates that we should see Android L (along with a whale-sized Nexus 6) very soon.