Google has rolled out a few changes for Android Developers today, and they could end up making the experience much better for everyone. By offering more cloud solutions for Developers, which allows them to focus more on designing and building great apps, Google takes a lot of the laborious tasks off their hands. Increased language support for Android apps also helps Developers reach a broader audience.
The changes made to the Cloud Platform are meant to offer Developers a way to easily deploy apps across multiple operating systems and the web with APIs. Specifically, using APIs on Google’s Cloud Endpoint gives Developers a way to offer their products to a wider swathe of people without having to specifically build each time, for specific purposes. By using the App Engine as the backend service, Developers can take advantage of things like Google’s Cloud storage. According to the Google Cloud Storage page, “For mobile developers, Endpoints provides a simple way to develop a shared web backend and also provides critical infrastructures, such as OAuth 2.0 authentication, eliminating a great deal of work that would otherwise be needed.”
The other change is the opening up of Google’s App Translation Service, first seen at I/O this year. The service allows for Developers to purchase app translations through the Google Play Developers console, and have the supported languages appear natively to people who speak a different language than the one the app was written in. According to the blog post, the service ranges from about $75 to $150, but it’s a nominal fee when considering the potential income from a wider audience.
While not listed as coinciding to take on wider deplyment, the launching of both these service is not coincidental. APIs that are meant to reach a broader audience, and language services meant to have an Android app make sense. For the next billion people Google hopes to reach, these are two important steps.
