Developers in the IT world have been in real demand of late with the biggies in the Internet world hunting for them. Last week Twitter and Microsoft announced their developer requirements indirectly. Google has however chosen to rework with the Android platform to help its Google TV section. The search engine giant had previewed an Android programming tool plug-in on Monday which would help a developer in writing Google TV device software.
Google TV product manager, Ambarish Kenghe blogged that the upcoming Android’s OS update which is Honeycomb, would be compatible with the Google TV devices. This would mean that the developers would have an option to work on Android apps which would be for TV. Additionally, there would even be an optimization of tablet or existing mobile apps for TV and it would be distributed via Android Market.
The integration of Internet with TV has been a task which was worked on earlier by Apple, Intel and Yahoo along with the search engine giant. The main purpose behind it was to provide an interactive experience to a higher level. another point to note here is that it would create more revenue options which can even become an advertising source for the companies. It might look encouraging to a great extent but in reality its a really tough uphill as the preference of the customers have more of the passiveness which has hit the sales of Google TV till now.
The attempt from Google is however of the next gen, wherein the use of Apps have been made. This is because playing games on the big screen is always a hit and people would love having the experience. This can be one in the most important factors if Google TV picks up after this interaction.
Again, Google has sensibly chosen its own baby for the app development for TV which would help the cause. Reason being that Android is known to many and provides a platform to get things happening. The only thing to check here would be that how easy the developers actually find this plug-in for the creation of app for the TV. The developers would definitely face a problem that the apps which are made for mobile devices can easily be converted for the tablet version as both of them have the similarity of touch screen along with virtual keyboards, but for TV there is no such option. However, if the transition is easy, then Google TV might really make it big as there are millions of apps in the Android market and on a daily basis many are coming up too.
The Android SDK (software development kit) plug-in has been detailed as to be an easy-to-use transition kit for developers by Kenghe. He wrote that it depends on the use case and on the design which would check if the app can come up for TV or no. The add-on provided would clear the doubts as to if the specific app would work fine on TV or needs improvements.
On Kenghe’s part, he noted that he has no expectation that the TV app would just explode with this integration as he predicted that initially the app count for TV would be just a few. He concluded noting that it would be a safe bet to start with as Google TV has not yet seen the limelight in the TV world.
Neither has the release date of the final form of this SDK plug-in is known, nor was it announced as to when one would see the integration of Google TV with Honeycomb.