Google is to sell gift cards for its Play Store in UK shops, as it looks to push its paid content to rival Apple’s App Store.
The cards are already on sale in the US after being launched in August 2012. Customers in the US can buy fixed-value cards with single-use codes to add cash to their account.
Available in $10, $15, $25 and $50 values, Google positioned the cards for those who don’t have access to a credit card – or who don’t trust Google with their credit card details – and who would prefer to journey to a physical store to add more cash to their account.
According to the company’s official support page, Google Play gift cards are to launch in the UK in the very near future – so near, in fact, that the page lists them as being “currently available.”
As with their US equivalents, the Google Play UK gift cards will be sold in differing values of £10, £25 and £50 – putting a higher minimum purchase price on the cards than in the US, but one adequately explained by the need for Google to charge 20 per cent VAT in the UK.
The cards contain a single-use code that can be redeemed for Google Play Credit and added to a user’s account, either in advance of a purchase or during the checkout process.
If the cash spent is less than the value of the gift card, the remaining balance is placed into the user’s Google Play account for future use.
Google has yet to formally announce the launch of the gift card service.
Read the announcement on the Google support page here
The news comes as Google pledges to launch a new ‘Red Guide’ to its app store.
Last week, Google made the following announcement:
Mountain View, 24 February, 2013 – As part of an industry that owes so much to Steve Jobs, we remember him on this day, the 58th anniversary of his birth, with great sadness but also with gratitude. Of Steve’s many achievements, we particularly want to celebrate the Apple App Store, the venerable purveyor of iPhone software.
Introduced in 2008, the App Store was an obvious and natural descendant of iTunes. What wasn’t obvious or foreseen was that the App Store would act as a catalyst for an entire market segment, that it would metamorphose the iPhone from mere smartphone toapp phone.
This metamorphosis provided an enormous boost to the mobile industry worldwide, a boost that has benefitted us all and Google more than most.
But despite the success of the app phone, there’s no question that today’s mobile application stores, our own Google Play included, are poorly curated. No one seems to be in charge, there’s no responsibility for reviewing and grading apps, there’s no explanation of the criteria that goes into the “Editors’ Picks”, app categorisation is skin deep and chaotic.
Today, we want to correct this fault and, at the same time, pay homage to Steve’s elegant idea by announcing a new service: The Google Play Red Guide. Powered by Google’s human and computer resources, the Red Guide will help customers identify the trees as they wander through the forest of Android apps. The Red Guide will provide a new level of usefulness and fun for users – and will increase the revenue opportunities for application developers.
With the Google Play Red Guide, we’ll bring an end to the era of the uncharted, undocumented, and poorly policed mobile app store.
The Red Guide takes its name from another great high-tech company, Michelin. At the turn of the 20th century, Michelin saw it needed to promote automotive travel in order to stimulate tyre sales. It researched, designed and published great maps, something we can all relate to. To further encourage travel, Michelin published Le Guide Rouge, a compendium of hotels and restaurants. A hundred years later, the Michelin Red Guide is still considered the world’s standard; its inspectors are anonymous and thus incorruptible, their opinions taken seriously. Even a single star award (out of three) can put an otherwise unknown restaurant on the map – literally.
Our Red Guide will comprise the following:
• “Hello, World”, a list of indispensable apps for the first-time Android customer (or iPhone apostate), with tips, How-To guides, and FAQs.
• “Hot and Not”. Reviews of new apps and upgrades – and the occasional downgrade.
• “In Our Opinion”. This is the heart of the guide, a catalogue of reviews written by a select group of Google Play staff who have hotline access to Google’s huge population of in-house subject matter experts. The reviews will be grouped into sections: Productivity, e-Learning, Games, Arts & Creativity, Communication, Food & Beverage, Healthcare, Spirituality, Travel, Entertainment, Civics & Philanthropy, Google Glass, with subcategories for each.
Our own involvement in reviewing Android apps is a novel – perhaps even a controversial – approach, but it’s much needed. We could have taken the easy path: Let users and third-parties provide the reviews. But third-party motives are sometimes questionable, their resources quickly exhausted. And with the Android Store inventory rapidly approaching a million titles, our users deserve a trustworthy guide, a consistent voice to lead them to the app that fits.
We created the Red Guide because we care about our Android users, we want them to “play safe” and be productive, and we feel there’s no better judge of whether an application will degrade your phone’s performance or do what it claims than the people who created and maintain the Android framework. For developers, we’re now in a position to move from a jungle to a well-tended garden where the best work will be recognised, and the not-so-great creations will be encouraged to raise their game.
We spent a great deal of time at Google identifying exactly the right person to oversee this delicate proposition … and now we can reveal the real reason why Google’s Motorola division hired noted Macintosh evangelist, auteur, and investor Guy Kawasaki as an adviser: Guy will act as the editor-in-chief of the Google Play Red Guide.
With Guy at the helm, you can expect the same monkish dedication and unlimited resources we deployed when we created Google Maps.
As we welcome everyone to the Google Play Red Guide, we again thank Steve Jobs for his leadership and inspiration. Our algorithms tell us he would have approved.
The Red Guide is an open product and will be published on the web at AppStoreRedguide.com as well as in e-book formats (iBookstore and Kindle formats pending approval) for open multi-platform enjoyment.