Google seems to be all about unity and ease of use these days, something they’re going to great lengths to push to nearly all areas of their products and services. Even with small things. Like the Chromecast category in the Play Store for example. Google is making some changes to the category so that users might be able to better understand the differences between the Chromecast itself and the feature that makes it possible to stream media content to the device.
For anyone that is even half way tech savvy, it’s easy to understand the differences as we’ve read about it, spent some time with the device and so there’s no mistake. For the average consumer though, all they know is that the Chromecast is an awesome device that can allow to fling content to the big screen, and that certain apps support the capability. For those of us that also use the Google Cast extension through the Chrome browser, it almost forces you to put two and two together and make the leap that any apps that support the Chromecast are using the Google Cast protocol and feature to do the streaming. Currently the category for Chromecast supported apps is listed as Chromecast, which if you think about it kind of makes things really easy, but Google seems to want things cleared up and has already changed the name of the category to Google Cast.
This does make sense, as Google Cast is the technology behind the streaming, and more devices are grabbing the capability to use it, so in the name of unification, it just makes sense for Google to call everything by one standard name across all devices. As the Play Store update has begun rolling out today those who have already gotten it should see the name change, and those who haven’t quite yet received the update will most likely still see the category listed as Chromecast. This change doesn’t really affect things much for the end user, short of really just having a new name to stare at when you want to go look for a new app that you can use with the Chromecast. Even small, incremental changes have their place though. Are you already using a Chromecast for use with Google Cast supported devices? What device do you use it with the most, and what are you typically streaming?