In the early days of Android, developers had to be serious nerds to pay the platform any real attention. After all, the real money was on iOS. Google has been working to make Android more hospitable to developers, and in that spirit, there's a change coming to the Google Play app—ads. Just like in regular Google Searches, you will soon see sponsored results at the top of the list.

Google will clearly mark these sponsored items as ads. They'll be just like regular search ads, but instead of promoting a website or service, they'll promote an app. This new ad platform is still in the early stages, though. Google plans to roll it out to a limited number of users with a pilot group of advertisers, but it will probably reach everyone soon.

Developers will probably be happy to have better promotional tools in the Play Store, but things are going well already. Alongside the new ad platform, Google has announced $7 billion has been paid out to developers in the last year. That's still far short of Apple's $10 billion annual payouts, but there are a lot more Android devices out there with potential paying customers.