With new changes to the official Play Store app policy and tighter control over Chromecast, Google’s era of openness may be coming to an end. That may seem like a bummer for developers, but it could be a new way of doing business that’s ultimately good for everyone.
It’s a favorite gripe among Android fans: Apple’s walled garden approach to iOS is unnecessarily...
restrictive. They may have less to wag their fingers at in the future. When it comes to its new streaming hardware and Android operating system, the search company is exerting more control than developers expect. The unlimited sandbox of early Android is gone, replaced with … a better user experience.
The television world is changing rapidly, and Google, with its new low-cost streamer, wants to be part of the change. The Chromecast stole the show at the July event that was supposed to be all about the new Nexus 7. The $35 dongle streams YouTube and Netflix. But most importantly it streams online content from the Chrome browser from your computer, or an Android or iOS device. It went on sale and quickly sold out.
While not as full-featured as a Roku or Apple TV, the $35 price tag (along with three months of free Netflix streaming for those lucky enough to purchase the Chromecast within hours of its announcement) made it the no-brainer technology purchase of the summer. It also excited developers hoping the Chromecast would be as open as Android. But in the nearly five weeks since it was launched, the Chromecast has been locked down tighter and tighter as Google updates the software and plays coy with its future third-party plans.
Over the weekend, developer Koushik Dutta posted on Google+ and Reddit that his AllCast app had been disabled by an update to the Chromescast. The update shutdown the ‘video_playback’ API that had allowed third parties to stream videos stored on their Android devices to the Chromecast. Dutta posted the following on Google+ about his app being disabled by the update:
Given that this is the second time they’ve purposefully removed/disabled[1] the ability to play media from external sources, it confirms some of my suspicions that I have had about the Chromecast developer program:The policy seems to be a heavy-handed approach, where only approved content will be played through the device. The Chromecast will probably not be indie developer friendly. The Google TV team will likely only whitelist media companies.
He might be right. But, it’s worth noting that Dutta reverse engineered a protocol to get his app working, which is something most companies frown on to begin with. Concerning its future plans with Chromecast, a Google spokesperson told WIRED via email,
We’re excited to bring more content to Chromecast and would like to support all types of apps, including those for local content. It’s still early days for the Google Cast SDK, which we just released in developer preview for early development and testing only. We expect that the SDK will continue to change before we launch out of developer preview, and want to provide a great experience for users and developers before making the SDK and additional apps more broadly available.
So something is coming, but just don’t expect it to be as open as the first days of Android. In fact, Android is becoming less of the wild west of operating systems. It’s maturing and removing some of the “openness” that’s made it the darling of developers but also filled the Google Play Store with spammy apps that made Android look more like a 1990s malware-infected PC than a modern mobile operating system.
The recently updated Google Play Developer Program Policies kills a lot of irritating ways ads are being served. Ads being pushed via notifications are no longer allowed and they can no longer impersonate the notifications of the UI or other apps. Plus, all in-app purchases must be made via Google Plus. These are all meant to create a better experience for anyone with an Android phone.
The Chromecast is Google’s chance to do right by its users before they are served ads on their TVs by apps. And while Google could be commended for taking it’s time to figure out its strategy, this is something that should have been hashed out before the device launched. A well defined SDK out of the gate would have given Google a jump start on anything Apple or others may announce before the all important pre-holiday announcement cycle. The price point may have sold the Chromecast, but the features are what keeps it attached to TVs in the future, and the longer Google waits to release an SDK, the more likely it is to lose any momentum it had during the initial launch.
Google should encourage third-party developers both large and small to create quality apps for its streaming dongle. If anything, the Chromecast should be more like Roku and less like Apple TV with big-name media partners next to smaller apps built by developers pushing the envelope of what a streamer can do. It just needs to move more quickly — before the Chromecast becomes another Google TV.
Source:http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2013/08/chromecast-streaming/?mbid=social11220954
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