Google Play Store, formerly known as Android Market, is the official app store for devices that are running on Android OS and comes pre-installed. While you can always use APK files provided by developers to install and update the apps on your smartphone, Play Store provides an alternative to download all the apps as well as acts as a barrier between bad builds that could affect your phone or impact your privacy or security.
Google Play Store offers a variety of apps, games, music and movies and many more apps just like Apple’s App Store. Its Play Protect feature also ensures that all of the apps available are safer to use and don’t have malicious code. You can also make in-app purchases or get subscriptions through Google Play.
To ensure that you’re getting the best of what the Play Store has to offer on your device, it’s important that the app is kept up to date. Although Google Play Store updates on its own if you have an active internet connection, if somehow it does not update automatically, which can inadvertently lead to issues with your device, then here is the guide to help you update Google Play Store.
Also read: How to redeem a code in Google Play Store?
Updating Google Play store
Follow the steps below to update your Google Play Store.

- Tap on the Hamburger (triple horizontal bars) icon on the left side of the search box on the top of the screen.
- Tap on the Settings option in the menu that appears.
- In the settings menu scroll down to the bottom of the list and tap on the Play store version (second last option in the list).
- If your Google Play Store is up to date then a box will prompt with a message that Google play store is up to date.
Alternatively, you can also force update the Google Play Store on your device by deleting the app’s storage and cache. Check out our article here if you need help deleting app cache and storage on Android.
Also read: How to log out of Google Play Store?