Google Launches New Site To Showcase Experimental Open Source Apps For Android And Android Wear
Google is launching Android Experiments today, the mobile apps counterpart to its Chrome Experiments site. — Just like with Chrome Experiments, the idea behind Android experiments …
Context & Ripple Effects
With Android Experiments, Google ports the [[entity:Chrome Experiments|Chrome Experiments]] playbook — an open gallery of boundary-pushing builds — to mobile, explicitly covering both phones and Wear devices. The corpus shows the format stuck around: it later surfaced Sprayscape, a 360-degree VR collage camera and Science Journal, a sensor-based data-logging app under the same experimental banner.
It matters because Google is formalizing what was previously ad-hoc: rather than leaking demos or burying tests in the Play Store, it now curates open-source experiments as a public channel. Twitter had already moved in parallel that summer, expanding its own Experiments beta program to iOS, so platform owners were converging on 'experiments' as a named product category.
First-order effects
- Android developers gain an officially curated venue to publish open-source experimental work, with Wearables elevated to co-equal status alongside phones from day one.
Second-order effects
- Rival platforms face pressure to match the format — visible in Twitter extending its Experiments beta program to iOS months earlier — turning public experimentation into a competitive signaling tool rather than an internal QA step.
- Google's own pipeline fills the channel quickly: within a year it ships Science Journal and Sprayscape through it, and by late 2017 it is testing three photography apps (Storyboard, Scrubbies, Selfissimo!) as explicit technology experiments.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, structured experimentation channels become permanent infrastructure — alongside moves like Google opening a beta channel for the Android Google app — shifting how consumers first encounter new features: through labeled experiments and betas rather than finished product releases.
The trend: Platform owners are institutionalizing branded experimentation channels — experiments galleries, beta tracks, sensor-based side projects — to road-test consumer technology in public while courting the developer ecosystem.