The Google Play Store and Google Play Services are two very critical components of a great Android experience. Google maintains a changelog of new features that it adds through automatic app updates, often categorized as a Google System Update. For the end of October 2024, Google has announced the following changes to various parts of its ecosystem:

• Google Play Store v43.4 (2024-10-28):
  • [PC, Phone] With this new feature, you’ll see a pop-up message to create your Play Games profile from different places in the Play Store.
  • [PC, Phone] With this new feature, you’ll get improvements to help prevent the disablement of your protection due to exploitation.
  • [Phone] With updates to the search suggestions UI, you’ll get an improved search experience.
• Google Play services v24.42 (2024-10-28):
  • Account Management: [Phone] With this new feature, you’ll be able to get more relevant search results and a dedicated section for related help center articles in the search page of your Google account settings.
  • Wallet: [Phone] With this new feature, you’ll be able to use the Pix payment method with the “Tap and Pix” option in Google Wallet.

The highlight of these changes is that Google Wallet now supports Pix for Brazilian users. Further, with the latest Google Play Services update, you’ll get more relevant results when you search for queries in your Google account settings.

Globally, the Play Store will now prompt users to create a Play Games profile in more places. A Google Play Games profile makes it easier to sign into supported games automatically, letting you save your progress and earn achievements. It’s a good way to sync your progress status to the cloud on several supported games. So if something happens to your phone, resulting in a data loss, you can restore your game progress without much thought.

Google also mentions “improvements to help prevent the disablement of your protection due to exploitation,” which is a rather odd statement to make without any further context. We’ve contacted Google to learn more about this change, and we’ll keep you updated when we hear back from them.