Google I/O is, and always has been, a Developer event, which means that despite all of the previous years with all of the hardware launches such as the Nexus 7 and such, it’s always been about the developers. This year, Google gave developers lots of reasons to be excited about what’s on the horizon, including the fact their Android apps in the Play Store are coming to Chromebooks. Of course, a developer event such as Google I/O is not just about the tools that developers will be using in order to make the next generation of apps, but how to make those apps.
Google offers up a wealth of information to developers new and old alike, and even though much of it can be found at developer.android.com, there’s valuable information on YouTube, articles they run elsewhere and so on. This is where the new Playbook app from Google comes in. It launched this week during Google I/O and is in a beta right now, and will offer developers all sorts of information from all over the web in one central place and then allow them to organize and keep it in their own Playbooks. Developers will need to join the beta – by hitting the big Google Play button below – and then tell the app what sort of apps or games they do, from there the Playbook will suggest articles and resources from not only Google, but the rest of the Web as well.
These are the sort of apps that make Android such a great platform, and while some can argue that developing for iOS is almost as easy, it’s hard not to like Google for all of the help that they – freely – give out to app developers, regardless of how much money they make or how many users they bring to Android. Android Studio 2.2 was also launched this week in a preview, and it offers developers even more automated tools and such for making their next best apps. It’s been a big week for developers in general, and it seems that now the week of Google I/O is starting to die down, smaller app releases and such are making their way to the Play Store.