There’s a new release of Google Play services, which brings some love to the long-unrevised Maps API, and introduces Photo Sphere APIs. The world hasn’t figured out how big a deal Play services is; one of the highest-impact changes in Android’s history.
Historically, big new features in Android required Framework revisions, which require major releases with updates right down into the Linux kernel, which only ship twice a year, and which aren’t reliably made available on older devices.
Play services allows the Android group to ship major new features (OAuth 2.0, Mapping, and Photo Sphere so far) in a way that is auto-refreshed on all compatible devices back to 2.2 “Froyo”. That’s a lot of devices. That’s a lot higher impact than all the new magic that rolls out any one major OS upgrade.
Seriously: Pay attention to Play services.
Contributions
Comment feed for ongoing:
From: Kevin Marks (Dec 03 2012, at 22:16)
Could this be used to fix the tying of the Bowser to the platform problem on Android?
It would be great to be able to rely on HTML5 etc features on Android?
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