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After launching in the US, Google Play Family Library started expanding and is now available in over 20 countries. The official list doesn't mention India, but if you live there, you may start seeing the Family option pop up in your Play Store. For some, signing up for it and making purchases on the account is a smooth process, for others though, an error might show up. The feature could be in its early stages of rollout, or it's possible someone pulled the plug very prematurely.
Over the weekend, many of you tipped us telling us you were surprised when you launched Google Play Music and noticed a banner saying you're now eligible for the family plan and that also gives you access to the Google Play family library.
Over the last several months, most of the changes to the Play Store have been on the smaller side, usually part of A/B tests to determine if individual tweaks to the interface would work better than others. An update began rolling out to users yesterday, bringing the current version up to 7.4. No significant changes seem to be turning up yet, but there are bits and pieces that hint at future plans. In this teardown, we'll be looking at a new version of the My Apps screen, statistics about reviews over recent history, remote authorization for family purchases, and even a strange requirement to install the Play Games app before taking some actions.
Family Library and sharing have been a long, really long, time coming on Google Play. In his different app teardowns, Cody has repeatedly discovered strings pointing out to the feature coming to Play Books, Play Movies, Play Services, the Play Store, but up until recently, the only Google entity that had benefited from any kind of family sharing was Play Music and its Family Plans.
We knew it was coming eventually, but just before the Google I/O keynote began, Google updated its developer documentation with more details about Family Library. Most important, we have a launch date of sorts: July 2nd. That date marks when app purchases will be shared in the Family Library by default unless the developer opts out.
