Google has taken a leaf out of Apple’s book and announced Google Play Textbooks and Play Games, providing a textbook renting and buying mechanism for students, and offering a gaming portal for Android gamers. We’ll be taking a closer look at both right past the break.
It may not have been the biggest announcement made at Google's I/O developer conference, but the unveiling of the company's Google Play Music All Access service outlined the Big G's intentions to compete with the modern day streaming music services. Google Music has provided a platform for music fans to listen to and store some of their favorite tracks, but with All Access thrown into the mix, the likes of Spotify and Pandora now have a genuine contender from Mountain View. The accompanying app was updated for Android straight away, and while any kind of Google Music app for iOS has been conspicuous by its absence, Google has announced a version for iPhone, iPad and iPod touch users is now incoming.
The updates to the official Google Play app have been arriving thick and fast over the last couple of weeks. Google Play Store 4.0.25 APK brought a substantially revamped user interface when released earlier on in the month, and that was quickly followed by last week's arrival of Google Play Store 4.0.26 APK, which offered a bunch of bug fixes and performance enhancements. Today, the APK of Google Play Store v4.0.27 has appeared, and as with the last week's version, it's mainly a housekeeping update.
An incremental point update has been made to the official Google Play Store app, bringing us up to version 4.0.26. It follows on from last week's altogether more significant release of Google Play Store 4.0.25 APK, which brought a bunch of new features including a Card UI. According to some users, there were bugs with that new interface as well as a couple of other niggling issues with the release, and thus here we are no less than a week later with this housekeeping update.
Although Apple's App Store still leads the way when it comes to numbers, Google's online content portal is now teaming with content including books, music, apps, and videos. Given its vast array of content, it was recently renamed the Google Play Store, ditching the old Android Market moniker in a move said to better reflect what it has to offer.
If you were engrossed by last week's Apple announcements, you may have missed the fact that the Android Market was renamed to the Google Play Store. The Big G felt the move would better reflect the content available, which now includes books, movies, music and apps.
In a timely announcement on the eve of Apple's big media event, Google has really wrung the changes to its online content-selling infrastructure - know hitherto as the Android Market.
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