Google has announced two near features that will be joining the redesigned Google Play Console when it rolls out next month. Publishing Overview and Managed Publishing are both aimed at giving greater control over how your creations are rolled out to customers.

Publishing Overview

Publishing Overview is a new page offering a dashboard of your apps’ store listings, release changes, and current status (such as whether they’re still being reviewed by Google). Great for individual developers, but where it really shines is in larger groups, where it can help coordinate developer team efforts and synchronise releases. This is different from the standard developer logs, because it can be organised by change type or release track, and only shows the information that you want it to — usually changes that will affect what your users see.

Timed Publishing -> Managed Publishing

Managed Publishing is a replacement for Timed Publishing from the old Play Console. The big change is that, if you opt in, you can schedule publication at a set time after your app is approved — it won’t get published automatically when it has finished the review process unless that’s what you specify.

That means that you can set a hard release date, knowing it won’t get caught in the queue for approval, or worse still, find on the day that your app has been rejected. You’ll see two sections in the Managed Publishing window — one that shows published apps, and another that shows apps ready to publish.

Additionally, you can now publish changes, even if there are others outstanding, and you’ll no longer have to wait for pending reviews before opting in or out of the service.

Google is offering an online course on the new Google Play Console in the Play Academy. The new Google Play Console design arrives on November 2nd for all developers. There's more about what to expect in our preview.