Gift giving, family sharing coming to the Google Play Store (probably)

Google is finally going to give Android users a way to buy apps and media as gifts for other users. The company hasn’t officially announced the feature yet, but that’s one of the takeaways from a teardown of the latest version of the Google Play Store done by the folks at Android Police.

Oh yeah, there’s also a new family sharing feature coming. It’ll let members of a family share purchased content across multiple devices.

We’ll probably have to wait for Google to officially activate the features before we have all the details, but for now it looks like you’ll be able to purchase an item from the Play Store and send it to another user as a gift. If that person doesn’t accept the gift you’ll have the option to send it to another user — but it’s not yet clear if you can get a refund for a gift that’s rejected.

As for family sharing, you’ll be able to link multiple accounts to let Google know who the members of your family are. Then you’ll be able to buy content and put it into a “family library” that can be accessed by all of the members of your family. There also seem to be options aimed at parents, giving them the ability to approve purchases requested by their kids.

At this point it’s not entirely clear if this will apply to apps and games or just music, movies and videos. It’s also not clear if you’ll be able to put items you’ve already paid for into your family library or if you’ll have to buy them again.

Again, all this comes from examining lines of code found in the latest version of the Google Play Store app for Android. So there’s a chance Google could change some things before the features go live… or the company may even decide not to actually launch these new features.

You can find more details at Android Police.