We’re substantially revamping our Android all-in-one “omnibus” apps!
Installation
The first step is to join our Google Group
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On your Android phone/tablet, open the Google Play Store, and double check which Google Account you’re using there. (Having multiple Google accounts can make this process quite confusing.) Tap on your profile picture in the upper-right corner; your Google Account email address will appear at the top of that screen.
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On the web, sign in as your “Google Play” Google Account, and go to https://groups.google.com/g/choiceofgames-android-public-beta-testers/about
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If you’re signed in to Google, you’ll see a “Join Group” button on that page; click it. (If you’re signed out, you’ll just see a “Contact owners and managers” button. If you see that, you’ve got to sign in first.)
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You don’t need to sign up for emails or anything. I plan never to post to the Google Group; regular users aren’t allowed to post on the group. (Post here on the forum, instead!) Signing up for the Google Group is simply a prerequisite to access Google Play testing links.
The next step is to opt-in to testing
On the web, sign in as your “Google Play” Google Account, and visit these links:
If you’re signed in as the same user that joined the Google Group, you’ll see a button to “Become a Tester.”
“App not available”: If you haven’t joined the Google Group, you’ll see an “App not available” screen. (You probably joined the Google Group as a different Google account. Use the same Google Account as the one that joined the Google Group, which must be the same account as the one you use in Google Play.)
Expect to reinstall the app quite a bit
You’ll likely need to uninstall and reinstall the app from time to time.
What’s new:
CoG 5.1.2 (59), HC 4.1.1 (53), HG 3.1.9 (78)
• Search/filter games by Favorites, Purchased, Downloaded.
• Try the new “Download all games” button on the Settings tab.
• Choose a font on the Settings tab: serif, sans-serif, or OpenDyslexic
• We now support Google Play Games.
• If you run into issues, use the new “Troubleshooting” section on the Settings tab.
• Behold our luxurious page-curl animation. (You can turn the page-curl animations off on the Settings tab.)
There are a lot of modes to test
- Different operating system versions: As of Apr 2026, this omnibus beta supports Android 7 and later. (Users on Android 6 and lower can continue to use the older version of the omnibus.)
- Offline: Test the app in airplane mode. (Once you’ve downloaded a game, you should be able to play it offline.)
- Dark Mode: Test the app in dark mode / light mode. Note that you can choose a color scheme on the Settings page; the app initially prefers to match you phone’s settings, but if you choose a color scheme in Settings, that setting will stick, even if you change your phone’s settings. (There’s no way to switch back to automatic mode, except to reinstall the app.)
- Tablet: Tablet is quite different from phone, especially when you hold your tablet in landscape mode, with the stats screen appearing on the side, updated live.
Accessibility modes
- Screen Reader: On Android, this is called TalkBack. Get started on Android with TalkBack
- Font Size: In your phone’s Accessibility settings, you can go to Display and Text Size → Larger Text to increase the font size very large. It won’t necessarily look great, but it should be legible; everything should work.
- Reduced Motion: This will prevent the page curl animation in the game.
How the app works
I wrote these bullets to give you an idea for how you might think about testing the app, poking around in all the hidden-away corners that might not be obvious when you first open the app.
How the app works
Store Tab
The Store tab is the first tab you see as you launch the app. It has four or five sections:
- Recommended games (unlabeled): Top 5 games sorted by Bestselling (see below)
- If you’ve never played a game yet, we show a list of genres
- Otherwise, if you have played a game, we show a “Similar to [Last Played Game]” section, and remove the big list of genres
- Bestselling
- New Releases
- Top Rated
Bestselling, New Releases, and Top Rated have “View All” links that take you to the Search tab.
How Bestselling sort works (Store Tab + Search Tab)
When sorting by bestselling, if there are any games/DLCs currently on sale (or temporarily free), we sort those to the top of the list. (Except, if you’ve already purchased the products that are currently discounted, we don’t sort those to the top.)
(Putting games on discount is not possible to test on TestFlight / Google Play Internal Testing.)
Search Tab
- Search box: You can type stuff in it to search for games.
- Genre tags: Select any number of genres. There are a few “special” genres:
- Free: Applies only to games that are “free to win,” meaning that you don’t have to pay anything to enjoy the entire game. Those games show a full-screen interstitial ad when you start them.
- Favorites
- Purchased
- Downloaded
- Sort order: Select a sort order (and click the arrow to reverse that sort order).
- Detail/Grid Switcher: Tap the round button on the right edge to switch between “grid view” and “detail view.” In Grid view, you see a compact grid of cover art images + titles. In detail view, we also show author, 80-character description, ratings, and price. (It’s particularly odd to search by price/ratings when that data isn’t visible in the search results.)
My Library Tab
Includes three sections:
- Last Played
- Favorites
- Purchased
- Downloaded
If you’re logged into Apple Game Center or Google Play Games, there will be an “Achievements” button that shows your “meta achievements.” See “Achievements” below for more details
Settings Tab
Here you can sign in/out. When signed in, you can click a link to delete your user profile (but it’s just a link that takes you to our web site).
There are other settings here, too:
- Push notifications (see below)
- Use Game Center / Google Play Games
- Font selector: Serif, sans-serif, or OpenDyslexic
- Font size
- Background color
- Animate between pages (i.e. curl animation)
- Enable touch slide controls
- Offline: There’s a button here to download all games
Troubleshooting
In the Settings section, there’s a “Troubleshooting” section.
- Purchases: What you’ve bought and where (App Store vs. Google Play vs. web)
- Receipts: If you’re signed in to choiceofgames.com, we automatically transfer your App Store / Google Play Store receipts to the web, so you’ll have the product both on your phone and the web (so you can restore your purchases on another OS).
- Downloaded games: See the last updated date, refresh the download (and see any errors from the refresh)
- Game state: See all of the saved game files and (gulp) delete them
- Achievements: Apple Game Center / Google Play Games meta-achievements vs. “event log” tracking number of choices made, game completion dates, and in-game achievements (“state achievements”)
- Updates: When you launch the app, we query for the latest games, ratings, and prices automatically, and, if you’re signed in to choiceofgames.com, we post your receipts. The “Updates” section shows the “last updated” dates for those, including any errors.
Game Details
- Free games: To play a Free game, you’ll have to watch a full-screen advertisement first.
- Cover art: Tap on a game and you’ll navigate to the Game Details screen. You can tap on the cover art to see the full-size cover art.
- Full description: Initially, we show the 155-character description, and the word “Loading…” but then we show the first paragraph of the full description, with a “Read more…” button.
- Game series: For games that are part of a series, we show the episode number, and link to the series on the Search tab.
- Authors: Each author is separately clickable, taking you to the Search Tab. (Some games include “additional content.” Those authors are clickable, too.)
- You can also click on the genre tags to find more games in that genre.
- Restart: Initially, the option to restart is hidden. Once you play a game and make at least one choice, you can return to the Game Details screen and restart.
- Delay Breaks: For Free games that include a delay break, you’re not allowed to restart until the delay break is finished. The restart button will appear, but it’ll just pop-up an alert if the timer’s not done yet.
- Restore purchases: You can login with a Choice of Games account to restore purchases. (We also refresh your purchase history with Apple when you click “Restore purchases.”) We display an alert message if you restore the game but the current game is not yet purchased.
- Credits: There’s a link to read credits here, too.
Inside the game
- Stats Screen
- Layout
- On small screens (phones), you’ll start on the “main” screen with a “Show Stats” button in the toolbar.
- On larger screens (tablet) in portrait, when you tap the “Show Stats” button, the stats will appear in a popover.
- On larger screens (tablet) in landscape, the stats appear automatically on the right-hand side of the main screen; they’ll automatically update as you change stuff in the main game. You can tap the “sidebar” icon in the upper right to hide the Stats screen sidebar.
- Restoring a checkpoint from the Stats screen: When you restore a checkpoint on the Stats screen, it will affect the main game screen.
*finishon the Stats screen: When you reach a*finishcommand on the Stats screen, it will close the Stats screen. On phones, you’ll navigate back to the main screen; on tablets, the stats screen will close/hide.- Some games modify stats on the stats screen, e.g. for settings (Storyteller mode) or for cheats. Those changes only kick in when you tap "Next back in the main game.
- Layout
- Achievements
- Layout
- On phones, when you tap “Show Stats,” if the current game includes achievements, you can tap “Achievements” to see the list of achievements you have/haven’t achieved.
- On tablets, there’s an Achievements button on the main game screen.
- Restarting the game does not undo achievements.
- Layout
- You’ll see a banner ad if you haven’t purchased the game.
- For Free games, you’ll eventually hit a delay timer.
- During the timer, you won’t be allowed to restart the game.
- If you’re signed up for push notifications (see below), the timer will send you a push notification when it’s finished.
- At the end of the timer, you’ll have to watch a full-screen advertisement to continue.
- At the end of the game, you’ll have some special menu options.
- Review this game: If you rate a game 9 or 10, we’ll prompt you to review the app on the app store.
- Share with friends: We’ll pop up a little sharing sheet, inviting you to send the link to someone via one of the apps you have installed.
- Subscribe: We’ll prompt you to send an email to subscribe@choiceofgames.com, which will sign you up for our mailing list. (This even works offline; the email will eventually get sent when you get back online.)
Achievements
Apple Game Center / Google Play Games can support achievements, but they assume that your app is itself one “game,” not a collection of games. As documented in Achievements in ChoiceScript, Apple puts a limit of 100 achievements per game, and up to 1,000 points of achievements; Google has similar limits.
The CoG and HG omnibus apps each have hundreds of games, and each of those can have up to 100 achievements. CoG and HG would each have over 5,000 achievements, and even HC would have over 500 achievements, well over Apple’s limit.
So, instead, we’ve created a list of “meta achievements” that apply across multiple games. These achievements ask questions like,
- How many games have you finished? (In which genres?)
- In the last X days (1 day? 7 days?)
- Lifetime?
- How many times have you replayed the same game (all the way through to the end)?
- How many games have you “tried” (i.e. made at least one choice)?
- In the last day?
- Lifetime?
- How many choices have you ever made?
- How many days in a row have you made at least one choice? In other words, how long is your daily “streak”?
- How many in-game achievements have you unlocked?
- How many 100-point achievements?
- In how many games have you unlocked all of its achievements?
We went to some effort to ensure that you can unlock all of these “meta achievements” without paying us any money. For example, we ask that you finish only three fantasy games to unlock the “Fantasy Hero” achievement, even though we have way more fantasy games than that, but we only have so many free fantasy games.
Backing up game progress and achievements in Game Center / Google Play Games
Apple and Google strongly recommend automatically backing up game progress to Game Center / Google Play Games, and that’s what we do.
I think some users may find it a bit surprising to find that if you reinstall the app from scratch, all of your game progress remains. If you play up to Chapter 4 of a game, reinstall, and resume playing the game, you’ll resume the game in Chapter 4, right where you left off.
I think this is a good thing, but you can always use the “Restart” button to restart a game. If you truly want to reset all game progress (including in-game achievements), you’ll have to do that in the Settings → Troubleshooting → Game State menu. Hopefully, that will be a very rare occurrence!
There is a tricky issue that happens if you make some choices on a device X while you’re offline, and make other choices on another device Y that’s online. When device X comes back online, this will be treated as a “conflict” between versions; our app is configured to prefer the most recently modified version. But this means you will “lose” progress on the oldest save.
You can disable Game Center / Google Play Games to ensure that we never have save conflicts.
Push notifications
To send push notifications, we have to prompt the user. But, if we prompt the user and they say no, we’re not allowed to prompt the user again in-app, even if they tap a “please notify me” button. So, we have to be very careful about how/when we prompt for notifications.
We have a red notification reminder banner that appears at the top of the Store, Search, and My Library tabs, but we don’t show it when you first launch the app. We only show the red banner once you’ve started playing one of our games (i.e. when “Last Played” is not empty) and only when you’re not signed up for push notifications.
You can trigger the notification prompt by tapping on the banner or on the “Notify me” switch on the Settings tab. But, if you decline the prompt, we can’t prompt you again until you reinstall the app.
If you decline the prompt, and you tap the notification banner or the “Notify me” switch again, we’ll prompt you to send you to the Settings app, where you can tap on a switch to enable notifications.
Test notifications with a Free game’s delay breaks
Search for the Free genre and you’ll turn up some games that are free to win. All of them include delay break, where you have to wait a few seconds/minutes to continue. If you’re signed up for push notifications, you’ll receive a push notification when the timer runs down.
Known bugs
General
- The credits screen is white in dark mode
- Search results when typing may be out of order
- OpenDyslexic font sometimes displays incorrectly on the stats screen
- In certain free games, when you get to the ending, you should be able to pay $1 to skip the delay break and play again immediately. But when you try to pay to skip the break, instead of prompting you to pay, it fails with an error message.
- On some phones, you can swipe from the right edge of the screen to go back, which can conflict with “slide to select.” (It doesn’t seem like we can control this, but maybe we’d just add some more margin on the right edge of the screen in that case.)
- The “Play Games” banner will show at the top of the screen when you launch the app, even if you disable “Google Play Games” in settings. This is beyond our control; to make the banner really, truly go away, search for “Play Games” in the Settings app, tap on “Sign in account”, (it doesn’t look like a button, but it is,) and tap the “Change” button next to each app. Select “Sign out.” The next time you visit our app, it will show a full-screen sign-in banner; if you tap “Cancel” on that, the Play Games banner will go away and stay gone.
Visual glitches
- Slow, stuttery animations throughout
Accessibility
- In TalkBack, after tapping Next, it should immediately start reading you the next page (“focusing” on the first paragraph), but sometimes, that doesn’t work.
- “Reduced motion” in the Settings app doesn’t disable all animations
- “Increased Contrast” in the Settings app should disable all unnecessary backgrounds/gradients, but it currently only works in a few places
Features Coming Soon
- More control over which games you download and keep downloaded. The old app would download games into a “cache” folder; your phone was allowed to delete any downloaded games there if you got low on disk space. Now, we download games into an “application support” folder, which never gets cleaned up. Maybe there would be a setting to allow Android to autodelete some games but not others.
- Customization options for “My Library.” You should be able to put games in a custom order, reorder sections, etc.
- Game Controller support?
