Fidel Vanegas

Is Google TV one more reason to lean towards building Android Apps?

May 21, 2010 Android, Computer Programming

In a previous post I got some time to think about smart phone’s “apps” world of Software Development Kits. One of Google’s most recent announcements may shake the apps world up quite a bit. Google in partnership with Logitech may easily change anyones perspective’s around building apps. Google’s TV runs over Android OS and as commented by “Vincen Dureau” the geek behind Google’s TV on recent interview; they are aiming to have mobile apps running natively on your TV and later they will be adding some specific TV APIs into the mix but certainly a Google’s TV SDK is coming.  So if you have been thinking on getting into mobile apps wagon Android OS is aiming to get positioned more as a broad web enabled appliance platform which may lead to “DEFACTO” standardization in the future including mobile, home and business devices that require to be always connected to the web.

Today, Samsung and Sony are about to offers SDKs for their TV sets and Yahoo in collaboration with TV makers also offers a TV widgets SDK. TiVo media SDK much like the Google TV but without the search component just yet. Apple is still to announce an SDK for its Apple TV that would presumably be competing against Android Market too. Microsoft with its media center SDK was a pioneer on this end but for some reason it has not gotten into the consumer’s stream but an option to be considered which has not an appliance factor yet.

JUST A HUMBLE OPINION: After so many years of operating systems battle in the PC arena, seems like the PC is becoming the less attractive emerging platform to deploy applications and the platforms showing a winning trend are Unix/Linux like operating systems in pretty much all fronts. As a Linux Desktop user for many years now I am not surprised of how things have been evolving. While Microsoft designed their operating system platforms to incrementally be extremely HW demanding with every new release (which I suspect to accelerate PC market replenishments)  Linux like operating systems has always bet on small footprint and performance which is finally paying back on the mobile devices arena and will be certainly aiming to the web enabled devices at homes, retail spaces, factories and enterprise offices in the near future.

The only one thing I can certainly say is that there has not been a better time to be a Software Developer and it is getting better every day. There are tons of options to capitalize and grow on the apps market with hundred of millions of potential user’s in the playground.