The Google I/O conference is this week in San Francisco, giving Google and a number of other developers a forum in which they can present their apps to the world. That attitude has grown significantly from last year, when Google’s Android platform was still an afterthought in the mobile apps landscape.
This year’s apps announced at the conference, as well as those that have updated their existing apps for Android, reiterate the growth taking place on the mobile platform.
Google I/O Conference
To keep you abreast of all the wonderful things going on at the Google I/O conference, Google has launched its own app on its own platform. The free Android app, aptly called Google I/O 2010, gives you the schedule, session details, and presenters. The app is sensible, too; it contains a conference map and a tool for taking notes on sessions.
Another company, mSpot, released a heavy-hitting Android app that saves your music to the cloud, allowing you to access it from your computer, the Internet or your mobile phone. You can also get streaming music through its subscription service. If you find yourself locked out of the beta, warm up with mSpot’s on-demand movie rental service, which brings flicks straight to your phone.
SpringPad is another app that looks to organize your life. No matter what you need or where you need it, the free app has a link, note, comment or map for it. That’s because it offers a barcode scanner, geo-locater and search tool to help you bookmark everything in your life. Automatic organization makes retrieval of all that bookmarked information easy.
Everything else
Layar Reality Browser 2.0 has gained some steam this month, bringing a more iPhone-like reality augmenter to the Android. Its commercial success has landed the company bigger partnerships, leading to the incorporation of new reality layers for places like Disney World. This is a good way for the free app to approach consumers.
Kyte earned some kudos points this week with its increased support of the Android platform. This will enable developers to create Android apps using or powered by Kyte’s live video-broadcasting tool. The added support boosts interest in Kyte’s Android app initiative, expanding the brand past the iPhone.
LauncherPro is actually a free app, and it transforms your Android home screen into something more customized to your needs. The popular app released a series of updates these past few weeks, adding more multi-touch personalization, new shortcuts for the phone, SMS and contacts (yay!) and some pretty slick animated screen previews.
