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Apr

[APK Teardown] Google Games, Anyone? Play Services Is Getting Real-Time And Turn-Based Multiplayer, Invitations, In-Game Chat, Lobbies, Leaderboards, And Achievements!

Posted by Ron Amadeo in APK Teardown, News

Last Updated: April 20th, 2013

We've got a good one for you today. A teardown of MyGlass, yes that's right, the Google Glass companion app, has given us what looks like the entire Google Games Service feature list. You just can't make this stuff up.

The games service probably has nothing to do with Google Glass; Glass can't run complex apps. The Glass team accidentally shipped the full suite of Google Play Services with their new app, which is not normal. This included a never-before-seen backend for an extensive multiplayer gaming service, with just about every gaming feature you could possibly imagine.

Background

To understand just what has happened, and why this is not related to Glass at all, we've got to talk about "GMS." GMS originally stood for "Google Mobile Services"; they changed the name to "Google Play Services," but never changed the acronym.

Mar

'Google Keep' Spotted In Drive Source Code - Is Google Taking Another Shot At A Note-Taking Service?

Posted by Ron Amadeo in News

Earlier this week, Google killed a beloved service of theirs, but now it looks like they might be bringing another one back from the dead in the form of a new note-taking service called "Google Keep." Remember Google Notebook? It's back!

We've got pictures! Google Keep's website went live for a short while and we took a bunch of screenshots. Check them out.

1E100 dug through the Google Drive website's source code and discovered the unreleased app. For starters there's this icon, which was located at www.google.com/images/icons/product/keep-512.png:

It looks like it's a good match with the other Google Drive app icons.

Mar

Introducing 'Google Play News' - A Newspaper Section Is On Its Way To The Play Store

Posted by Ron Amadeo in News

This should be fun! Here's a really early peak at Google's latest content push: it's called "Google Play News," and these bits of News come in "Issues" and "Subscriptions," so we're guessing Google's getting into the newspaper business. "Play News" will be a new, "colored" Play Store section to go along with Apps, Music, Books, Magazines, Movies, and Devices.

Our smoking gun in this case was this piece of JavaScript, (mirror) from the web version of the Play Store. It's a little hard to read, but you should be able to control+f your way to interesting bits of text like this: