Tech giant announces nominees for inaugural Google Play Awards

Following in the footsteps of rivals (and sometimes business partners) Apple, Google is also launching its own annual awards to reward what it believes to have been the best apps and games over the past 12 months. Google will be debuting what it calls the "Google Play Awards". The award winners will be announced at the company's I/O conference in May 2016.

Per Google's announcement, the program will feature five nominees across 10 categories, and these are now showcased in a unique collection on the Google Play platform.

The apps that have been selected will be chosen by a "panel of experts" at Google, and will be rated on a number of factors, part of which will include app quality and innovation. Also, the apps will also need to have been launched or had a major update over the past 12 months, to qualify.

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Google also announced the first group of nominees for these new awards. In comparison to Apple version of the awards, Google's awards will feature apps across a wider variety of categories, according to Techcrunch.

Google has released a full list of this year's nominees whilst also noting that its Google Play storefront reached more than 1 billion Android users across 190 countries over the past year.

The final winners of the awards will be announced live on May 19, 2016 at the Google I/O conference and will be livestreamed.