Google Play Services is the golden child of Android apps

As I mentioned in my previous post, there was no new version of Android announced at Google I/O this year. I speculated, and suggested why I think they waited with the release of it, but since then I’ve been watching the keynote videos, checking what Android authorities are saying and I must admit, I think I got it slightly wrong previously.

I don’t think my reasoning was wrong, but I completely underplayed how important what we got instead of a new version of Android is. The newly announced Google Play Services tackles Android’s biggest criticism, fragmentation, and gives power over the OS back to Google. This may sound ridiculous for a 20MB app on your phone, but that’s the magic behind it. Let me explain:

Firstly, what are Google’s Play Services? Well, they’re a set of powerful APIs (application programming interfaces) combined into one place that allows devices running Android 2.2 and above to make use of the very latest Google services. APIs are snippets of code that allow one piece of software to communicate with another, and what these new tools from Google do is that they allow developers to use them as a conduit to access a lot of Android’s core features.

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