Google Play Award Winners Announced; Clash Royale Wins Best Game

Google last month had revealed that it will recognise the developer community and highlight some of the best apps and games at its I/O developer conference. The company finally kicked off its first-ever Google Play Awards at I/O 2016 where Google announced the best apps, games, and startup awards across 10 categories.

Apart from the awards, these apps are also featured in Google's dedicated collection on Google Play - Google Play Award Winners. Google says that the nominees were selected by a panel of experts on the Google Play team based on several factors such as app quality, innovation, and having a launch or major update in the last 12 months.

Clash Royale app won the best game award and was chosen for the strong mechanics, informative tutorial, broad appeal, and tasteful design. Thinkrolls 2 was selected as the best Families app for encouraging creativity and exploration.

Alphabear was selected as the best app in Standout Indie category for focusing on the artistic design, high quality and innovative gameplay. Pokemon Shuffle Mobile won the best app in Go Global category while Table Tennis Touch won the best app in use of Google Play Game Services. Houzz was selected as the best app for beautiful design, intuitive UX and high user appeal, quality and rating. NYT VR won the most innovative app award. Some of the other apps that won include World Around Me for the early adopter category and in the standout startup category Hopper was selected the best app.

"Google Play has seen tremendous growth over the past year, reaching more than 1 billion Android users across 190 countries. As a way to recognize our incredible developer community and highlight some of the best apps and games, we're kicking off our first-ever Google Play Awards," said Purnima Kochikar, Director, Apps and Games Business Development, Google Play in a blog post last month.