The first Android tablets began to appear about a year and a half ago, but the company is still having trouble getting third parties to design applications optimized for their larger screens. To combat this problem, Google has put together a new Tablet App Quality Checklist designed to push developers to make better tablet apps. The company also plans on using the Google Play store to more aggressively push apps optimized for tablets, it announced in an accompanying blog post.

The new guidelines are mostly focused on tweaks developers can make to their existing phone applications to make them more visually appealing on tablets. To provide more efficient layouts for "large" (7-inch) and "xlarge" (10-inch) screens, the guidelines suggest displaying multiple application panes at once, as well as increasing the resolutions of icons and other graphics, the size of touch targets, and the size of fonts.

While most apps designed for Android phones will run on Android tablets, apps designed for smaller screens don't always make the best use of tablets' additional real estate. The most common offenders usually include vast fields of unused white space, or "exceedingly long line lengths," both of which are called out by Google in its guidelines.

After a rough 2011, several Android tablets started picking up market share in 2012—recent data from the Pew Research Center suggests that all Android tablets combined now make up roughly 48 percent of the market, with smaller 7-inch tablets like the Kindle Fire and Nexus 7 leading that charge. The better Google can make Android's app ecosystem, the better equipped it will be to fight off contenders like the rumored iPad Mini and the forthcoming Windows 8.