Everyone’s wearing Shorts: Play Store adds video clips to promote games and apps

The Google Play Store is getting a YouTube Shorts-style video carousel at the top of its homepage. I bet you didn’t wake up expecting to read that, did you? According to a new Keyword Blog post, the company is officiating “The Play Report,” a pilot video series that dives into the apps and games you should know about. It’s a clever move, similar in spirit to YouTube Music’s “Samples,” albeit not quite as interesting to me.

Now, instead of aimlessly scrolling through an endless list of apps and games, you’ll get highlights served to you by influencers. Speaking of which, isn’t it something how the tables have turned? Years ago, many of us YouTubers were just happy to share our thoughts with whoever would listen. Fast forward to today, and Google’s enlisting influencers as a major part of many of its new features to push sales. That says a lot about how much the digital landscape has changed, and how important influencer culture has become, I suppose.

If you’re not part of the chosen few to get this feature on your Play Store home screen, no worries. You can catch these video clips on YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram. Google clearly wants to meet us where we’re at, which is smart.

It’s a novelty feature to be sure, but how long until it wears off? How long until our patience grows “Short” for this level of inundation with short form content? I, for one, don’t like how YouTubers are basically just ad reads now. I bought YouTube Premium to get away from ads, and now I have unskippable human ads to listen to there, in the Play Store and elsewhere!

Either way, “The Play Report” is an intriguing way to highlight apps and games, giving a new twist to your app discovery journey. My hope is that Google somehow finds a way to curate which Shorts are shown to you so that you only see things which you’re interested in. I imagine this can easily be done with tags for each game or genre.