Not everyone was overly happy about Google’s decision to change the Android Market brand to Google Play, with reasons ranging from not liking the new look to simply not seeing the point. The name of the app doesn’t really affect me personally, but what I do find annoying is the amount of issues this has caused. Some people are still waiting for the update, some people have gotten it but can’t use Google Play or Android Market at all now, and I’ve personally experiences issues with launchers being unable to launch the service after the update, and even had one instance of it not launching from the app tray. If you’re having issues, there are solutions to most of them:
- If you haven’t gotten the update at all, and have an Android version that is supported (2.2+), you can try to either uninstall the updates in the application menu under main settings (on the device itself), or download the .apk manually and install it. Droid-life has the .apk for download.
- If your icons no longer work, try re-adding them. This varies depending on the launcher, but normally just involves going to the app tray, holding down on the icons and dragging them somewhere to get them to the home screen.
- If your app launcher icon doesn’t even work, try a reboot. That worked for me. Uninstalling updates and doing it all over again can be a solution if it still doesn’t work.
- If any other shortcuts don’t work, you might have to just wait for a system update. Google seems to have changed the internal reference to the store app with Google Play, which essentially creates dead links. Adding manually after the update should work for launchers though, even if that’s not where you used to access the app.
Certainly not a great start for Google Play, but hopefully it will all be worth it as we get used to the new name and start seeing more content from Google consolidated under the same brand. The app store is perhaps the worst app that can break on an Android device, so I think Google should have prepared a bit better before they released it.
