In case you have not been following Google’s plan to dominate the social space then here is a quick recap. Google has been consolidating and streamlining all its services to align with one thing, social, which is to say, Google Plus. But that’s not all, Google has also been working hard to recreate the Android Market, now called Google Play as it seeks to bolster credibility and trust in the market.
The market has been hit by low consumer confidence with users only being willing to download free stuff, something Google is hoping to reverse. To revamp the market, Google re-branded it to Google Play and has now brought it closer to what you usually use, Google search and Gmail.
The Google Play label has cropped up on the top navigation section of Google properties with a very conspicuous red “New” label attached to it. Google wants more people to head over to the market and buy something, anything. What may have been a big mistake that Google made in the first place was to allow the market to a be a free for all sort of place where anyone could put up any app, and trash apps abound.
This is markedly different from Apple, which has asserted its authority over what appears on the Apple App Store and as such, has made sure that the large corpus of applications are actually great quality applications. Google Play on the other hand has a long way to go and Google may have come to this realization which triggered the name change.
It has, however, been seen that Google has consolidated books, movies, music and other digital goods on Google Play in the hope that it can cross-sell these other products to people visiting the market for Android applications. The success of this is yet to be seen as the demand for applications is not often an indication of demand for digital goods in general.
