Google gets ready to make the Play Store wishlist a whole lot more useful

Google Play is home to countless apps and games, and with new and upgraded discovery tools arriving continually, how are we supposed to find the time to try them all? If an app catches your eye but you’re not ready to install it just yet, the Play Store’s wishlist can be a great way to keep it in mind for later. And today we’re looking at a big change for it that could soon make finding entries a whole lot easier.

Take a look over at Google’s support page for the Play Store wishlist, and something interesting might catch your eye. Midway down, Google describes how you can “Use the filters at the top to sort by Games, Apps, Books, or Play Pass.” Except, fire up the Play Store on your Android phone today, and you won’t see any filters like that, at all.

At least, we haven’t seen them show up live on any of our devices just yet, but looking over the changes present in version 53.5.48-34 of the Play Store for Android, we can see the framework for these filters arriving. Here’s how they should look when Google finally switches them on:

As you can see, in addition to those main app categories, we also discover some extra filters to help find apps that are on sale, or change those sorting options to surface apps by release date, price, rating, or name.

Granted, that all feels pretty basic, but options like this are classics because of just how useful they are. Being able to easily organize wishlist entries with these tools is probably only going to encourage Play Store users to take more advantage of the feature — something we’re sure must be on Google’s own wishlist.

In addition to that filter-equipped wishlist, we’ve also spotted a couple other in-development changes beginning to reveal themselves in this update.

If you’ve found the existing buttons in Play a little anemic-looking, check out the big, fat ones above. Google hasn’t enabled these yet — and we’re not sure it will — but somebody’s sure thinking about making the change.

Finally, there’s a new icon in the works for Play Store search. Instead of the regular old magnifying glass, Google’s getting ready to add a little AI sparkle to it. Considering all the new AI-fueled app discovery tools just announced today, we wouldn’t be surprised if this one makes its debut in the very near future.