page.title=Open Marketplace
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<p>Android offers an open distribution model, not a walled garden. Once you’ve developed an
app for Android and want to distribute it, you have choice.</p>

<p>Your final application is contained in an APK file that you can make available to users any
way you want. For example, you can upload it to your own web site to allow visitors to
install it onto their devices. More often, you’ll want to use a trusted
marketplace where users can discover and search for your apps.</p>

<p>How you choose to distribute your app affects precisely how many users your app will reach. Which
distribution provider you choose also affects the kinds of services available to you as a publisher,
such as licensing and in-app billing APIs, user bug reports, installation analytics, marketing
services, and more.</p>

<p>Among your choices is Google Play, the premier marketplace for selling and distributing apps
to Android users around the world. When you publish an app on Google Play, you reach hundreds of
millions of customers in over 130 countries.</p>


<h3>Your business, your customers</h3>

<blockquote>Google Play makes your apps available to your customers
immediately</blockquote>

<p>As an open marketplace, Google Play puts you in control of your business and makes it easy for
you to manage how you sell your products. You can publish whenever you want, as often as you want,
and to the exact set of customers you want.</p>


<h3>Visibility for your apps</h3>

<p>Beyond growing your customer base, Google Play helps you build visibility and engagement across
your apps and brand. As your apps rise in popularity, Google Play gives you higher placement in
weekly "top" lists and offers promotional slots in curated collections. You can engage customers
using rich, colorful product pages that feature app screenshots, videos, and user reviews, as well
as cross-marketing links to your other products.</p>

<h3>Flexible monetizing and distribution</h3>

<blockquote class="right">You can distribute
your apps free or priced and you can sell in-app products for additional revenue</blockquote>

<p>Google Play offers a choice of monetizing options to meet your business needs. You control the
pricing of your apps and in-app products&mdash;you can set and change prices at any time, even
individually in local currencies around the world. On purchase, Google Play handles transactions in
the buyer’s currency and makes payouts in your own currency.</p>


<p>After publishing, you can manage the distribution of your app. You can distribute broadly to all
markets and devices or focus on specific segments, devices, or ranges of hardware capabilities.
Google Play provides the tools for controlling distribution and ensures that your app is available
only to the users who you are targeting.</p>
