Google Takes Its Google+ Platform Mobile With Android, iOS SDKs & Social Plugins For The Mobile Web
Google+ is obviously a major focus for Google these days, but until now, the company hasn't really focused on extending the Google platform beyond its own services and its +1 buttons.
Context & Ripple Effects
The move answers a question that has hung over Google+ since launch: whether it would stay a set of Google-owned surfaces or become an actual platform. Developers were already signaling appetite a year ago, when social game makers voiced hope about Google+ platform potential in August 2011 and mobile developers rated its promise above iCloud's that same month. Bradley Horowitz's platform talk last October set the framing; these SDKs are the first concrete delivery on it.
Until now the extension story stopped at +1 buttons on the desktop web. Shipping Android and iOS SDKs alongside mobile-web social plugins takes the platform to where developer attention had already shifted — and the pickup across iMore, The Next Web, Inquirer and WebProNews shows how closely the Apple- and Android-centric press is watching Google's social push. It lands the same week Google folded Google+ usernames into YouTube and let Play developers reply to reviews, part of a broader tightening of Google's social-developer loop.
First-order effects
- Android and iOS developers can now build Google+ sharing and identity directly into their apps instead of routing users out to the browser, making Google+ a component of third-party apps for the first time at scale.
- Mobile-web publishers gain social plugins designed for touch, extending Google's reach beyond its own properties onto sites it does not control.
Second-order effects
- Facebook's position as the default social layer inside mobile apps now has a direct challenger with OS-level reach on Android, forcing a comparison on which sign-in and share buttons developers embed by default.
- Google Play's new ability for developers to respond to user reviews pairs with the SDKs to give Android developers a fuller engagement toolkit, raising the baseline for what a mobile platform must offer to keep developers.
Third-order effects
- If adoption follows, competition among social platforms shifts from building destinations to supplying the identity and sharing infrastructure inside other companies' apps — a structural fight over who owns the mobile social graph.
- Cross-platform SDKs from a company that owns one of the two dominant mobile operating systems sharpen the open-versus-closed question regulators and partners are already probing elsewhere in Google's mobile business.
The trend: Social platforms are repositioning themselves from destinations users visit to embedded identity-and-sharing layers distributed through mobile SDKs.