The Future of the Play Store

Back in March of 2012, Google decided to change the Android Market to the Play Store. At the time, it made a great deal of sense to do what they did. It was pretty clear they wanted their media to be on every device and not just Android. Google Books, Movies, and Music just did not make sense to only be in the Android Market.

During that time, I thought maybe they would try to make their apps cross platform and they did a little bit by playing with Android apps running in Windows, but nothing ever official. The demand and the interest just was not there because of how superior PCs were. It was pointless to use watered down versions of programs on a PC.

Now, we are seeing a different story. The Tegra K1 processor has shown mobile can run full blown Unreal Engine 4 games and with every company trying to prove they can be as good as the Tegra, ARM processors have reached PC level performance. So now that the processors can do it, we will soon see the programs catch up.

Enter Android Runtime. Right now Google is starting slow with it, much like the Chromecast API. Chromecast started out being available for select apps, but then they opened it up and it exploded with apps. The same thing will happen when Android Runtime is opened up.

This means good things for Chrome OS. We will start to see many more stand alone apps for Chrome OS and hopefully full blown programs like Inkscape and Blender.

But Android Runtime does not have to be limited to Chrome OS. Like Java, it can be made to run in any OS. So if they do release an Android Runtime for say other Linux distros, Windows, or OS X, suddenly the market for the Play Store has become massive!

I believe this was the ultimate intent for the Google Play Store. Not just media across devices but apps as well. Doing this means buying a program once and it running on all your devices regardless of what OS you use. Though, let's be honest, Apple would never allow such a thing on iOS and will probably push to eliminate OS X to rectify the problem.

This is a very good move by Google because it safeguards their Play Store. If sometime in the future another OS begins to dominate the market, Google will have lost very little as all they would need to do is make Android Runtime for it and now all the people invested in Play Store apps will not have to re-buy anything even though it is a different OS. Not only that, but they could continue to buy from the Play Store even without an Android device.

It is pure business genius.