Are Amazon and Google finally making nice after all the issues the past couple of years? Well, we haven’t seen much evidence of that, but it seems like a few tentative (unofficial) steps are indicating that. Some Android devices that have Amazon Music installed are seeing their apps suddenly have support for Chromecast. This means they can cast music from the app on both Chromecast itself and Chromecast-enabled devices, including the Google Home speaker. There is no official announcement but some users are reporting that it’s fully functional.
No post from Amazon about this may mean they are just testing out the functionality or they are just slowly rolling it out and then announce once there are more devices that will have Chromecast support. If you check their documentation and press website, there aren’t any mentions of this, so we will have to rely on other people’s account that it actually works. This Chromecast is actually pretty surprising given the two company’s history.
If you’re not familiar with the issues between the two companies, Amazon removed Chromecast from its online store a couple of years ago since they wanted to “avoid customer confusion” since the devices didn’t work with its Prime Video service. Google also doesn’t allow some of its apps and services on Amazon devices, including not having YouTube available on Amazon Echo Show because it violates some of their policies.
It would be nice if the two would actually play well together as some people use hardware and software from both. There are of course business considerations, but hopefully, the Chromecast support and the recent addition of the Prime Video app on the Google Play Store, indicates they are on their way to be a bit more friendly.
VIA: Tech Hive
