Google Play Store to add prepaid plans, better Wear OS app discovery

Google Play cross-devices installs are finally going to be a thing for Wear OS.

What you need to know

• Google announced new updates for the Play Store at Google I/O.
• The Play Store will soon be able to offer prepaid plans, multi-quantity purchases, and more.
• Users will soon be able to install Wear OS apps on their watches directly from their smartphones.

Google is preparing several useful additions to the Google Play Store. In Wednesday's Google I/O session, Product Management Director Alex Musil went over some of the changes that are arriving on the Play Store, including new ways to discover and pay for apps on both smartphones and Wear OS.

One new feature coming to the Play Store is multi-quantity purchases. This allows users to select more than one item in their cart by selecting how many they want. This will most likely be useful for certain types of passes.

Google is also introducing multi-line subscriptions, making it easy for users to include add-on items to their monthly payments. Lastly, prepaid plans will allow users to pay for content only for a certain time period, like a month pass for transportation.

In addition to these new payment options, Google will make it easy to install apps on the best Wear OS watches directly from a smartphone. When installing certain apps, users will now have the option to choose where to install the app. Users can choose from just the smartphone app, the Wear OS app, or both, and the app will theoretically be pushed to your smartwatch automatically.

Google will also make it easier to discover which apps have Wear OS counterparts by giving the platform its own dedicated section on the Play Store. This should make it more convenient than the current methods of downloading from a desktop or even from the smartwatch itself, which isn't an ideal experience in its current state.

Many of these new features will arrive soon on the Google Play Store, so users can expect to see them sometime this year, along with the new updates arriving for Google and Samsung's Wear OS.

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The best Wear OS watch you can buy right now

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