Welcome to the Google Show

Google has been dominating all the headlines over this past week and this time it’s for more than one reason.

First, the search engine super giant celebrated reaching 1 million apps within its Google play store, doubling last year’s tally, and in the same week has announced that they have sold out all of their initial orders of ‘Chromecast’ on the same store.

Let’s start with Google play reaching 1 million apps. Back in June of this year, Apple announced that it boasted more than 900,000 apps within its store and now Google has announced it has gone one better, reaching a million. These 1 million apps have collectively brought Google Play a huge 50 billion downloads.
What this does also mean is now Android is both the most popular smartphone platform worldwide, as well as having the most apps. Not a bad feat!

The head of Android and Chrome teams, Sundar Pichai, has said that this is a huge reflection of Android’s growth and strength on both smartphones and on tablets. He’s not wrong!

Then, to top a great week off for Google, they also announced that ‘Chromecast’ has sold out all initial orders on the Google Play store too. Chromecast is Google’s new media streaming accessory, enabling it’s users to bring their web content to the TV. This HDMI dongle also allows users to control this content through use of the apps on their phones and tablets. At $35 a pop, Google must be seeing ‘pound signs’.

If this all wasn’t enough, Google has also hinted that people will be able to rent and buy textbooks through Google Play too. All we know is it’s going to be one big store, and one successful one too. No pricing structure has announced for this as of yet, but if directed at student’s it will have a huge target market so we can expect to see quite a lot of discounted textbooks for the initial launch.

As you can see, it has been quite a successful couple of weeks for Google, but don’t for a minute expect that to be the end of their domination in the technological world.