Up until today when you can get the latest update to the Play Store, it has been a tough process finding beta testing programs for all the Android applications you care about. That is because the process has been rather cumbersome. First and foremost you needed to find the specific link. At times, you even needed to request an invite to join the specific group on Google+ before finally getting a link that redirected you to the Play Store where you would install the app and get subsequent updates from. So. Much. Work. It’s probably why it took WhatsApp forever to loop in Google Play for its beta app distribution.
Anyway, that is all water under the bridge now. An update to the Play Store that is only available to some users at the moment but will soon be rolling out to everyone, synchronizes everything. Users can now join and leave beta testing programs of apps right from the Play Store. Proper labelling on the Play Store will help users distinguish regular stable apps from the ones they are beta testing. Unreleased apps will also be labelled as such. Before the update, there was no way of telling whether one was using a beta version of an app or a stable version.
One other thing about beta apps is that users of such apps may want to submit feedback to the developers. That is why those Google+ communities were mostly a must join. Now that can happen in the reviews section where usually users post reviews of the app. In this case however, only the developers will be able to view this feedback.
More information on this and a download link if you can’t wait to get the update are available on the source link below.
Via Android Police
