If you haven’t gone into the Android Market for a few days,
you may have missed the notification asking you to agree to a new set of terms
and conditions for something called “Google Play”. Wondering what that is, exactly? Well, it’s
an update to the Android Market that pulls Google’s other content sources –
like books, movies and music – into a single market experience along with
Android apps.
Google is bringing the cloud into the equation, too: in
addition to being able to store up to 20,000 songs, it also makes all of your
purchases available to you online. So, for example, you can go to Google Play
and see all of the apps you’ve purchased previously using that particular
Google account, even if you’re on a different device…or even logged in from a
web browser on a desktop.
While you can go to Google Play directly from your mobile
device, you may actually want to use the extra screen real estate on your
notebook or desktop to manage your content. You can pick out an app on the
computer, and tell Google Play to push it to your device. Or pick out a book or
movie on the desktop, and it will appear in the appropriate place (say, the
Play Books app) on your mobile device if you have the sync function turned on.
As always, some are sure to have privacy concerns about this
– all of your Google purchase history is now sitting there in one place, and
accessible to anyone who nabs your password. Of course, Google itself has always had access to your purchase
history, so no additional concern there…and it’s always a good idea to have a
strong password strategy to be sure that unauthorized third parties can’t get
in the door to peek at or mess with your data. So, it’s probably business as
usual.
So far it looks like Google has avoided pulling a Facebook,
and has kept your purchases from appearing automatically on your Google Plus
profile. Just keep your fingers crossed that it stays that way. You don’t need
the world knowing you love Barry Manilow. Trust me on this.