The Google Play Store is the go-to place for your favorite apps, games, books, and promos on Android. We’ve come across multiple redesigns for the app hub in the recent past, ranging from minor changes to significant ones. While Google has supported dark theming across its apps and services for a while now, the color scheme isn’t fully black, but instead a variation of gray. YouTube was found testing a deeper version of black for the dark theme in September last year, going public with it eventually. It looks like Google has similar plans for the Play Store now, with the latest version of the app market showing a darker palette of black in the background, making it suitable for phones with OLED screens.

This visual tweak was first spotted by 9to5Google within version 37.0.22-29 of the Google Play Store, though it’s seemingly live only on one device tested by the site. Nevertheless, this points to a long-awaited visual change for the Play Store, particularly for people who own AMOLED-display toting phones like the Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra or the Google Pixel 7 Pro.

Old version (left); The darker black background in the new update (right)

The publication goes on to note that every screen on the Play Store picks up this deep black color scheme (Hex 131314) when dark theming is on. This includes the Settings page, the four primary tabs, Manage apps & device, as well as the app listings page. Google is darkening the color of the bottom bar, too, but it’s somewhat lighter than the rest of the pages to help distinguish between each other, as you can see above.

Since Google hasn’t confirmed these changes, it’s up to anybody’s guess if this would appear widely for all users or if similar changes are on the cards for Google’s other first-party apps. But considering the precedent with similar updates to other Google products, we’re hoping to see this reflected across the large ecosystem of Google apps eventually. What’s also uncertain is whether this darker shade will also apply to Dynamic Color-based dark themes, as 9to5 rightly mentions.

Among the other Play Store experiments in the recent past is the appearance of the bottom bar across multiple pages, including on app listings. This was in contrast to the previous behavior of the bottom bar, wherein it would only appear on the home page. Just a week prior, the Play Store app for foldables and tablets was revealed to be picking up some handy UI tweaks to better utilize the split screen interface.