Gamer IDs come to Google Play Games: your new identity for Android gaming

Social networking: it ain’t for everyone. Or maybe it is for you, but you’ve already found the network you like to call home, and you’d rather not be bothered keeping up with every competitor popping their head up like an inquisitive prairie dog. Google+ has found itself the target of a lot of that too-many-networks resentment, especially as users interpreted a number of Google’s actions as trying to force Google+ upon them – like it or not. To the company’s credit, it’s been easing up on such practices recently, and

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Google Play Games sign-in and permissions process easing up

Play a lot of games on your Android phone? You’re probably in it to win it and that means getting onto the scoreboards. You’re probably familiar with signing into Play Games every time you open up a game. Well, since Google’s been reforming its permissions processing on Android Marshmallow and the

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This week’s Google app-update Wednesday is a big one

We’re no stranger to Google updating its software on Wednesdays, and each week we look forward to news of a few apps picking up a tweak, bugfix, or new feature here and there. While normally that means a handful of apps being tapped for updates, this week’s lineup is a bit larger than most, with at least a dozen Android apps seeing updates headed their way today.This isn’t necessarily an exhaustive list, but new updates are available today for Blogger, Chrome (as well as Chrome Beta), ...

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Google builds upon Play Games with addition of Quests, saved game improvements

Gaming has never been Android’s claim to fame (despite a wide variety of quality titles), but today’s Google I/O very much saw the company giving gaming some needed attention. As part of the next release of Google Play Services, we’ll be seeing some new features come to Play Games.First up is the arrival of the new Game Profiles, which will show what you’ve been playing lately and keep track of your achievements, all placed out there publicly for your friends to see.

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Google app updates: Play Games, Search (with parking support)

Today marks the arrival of some new apps from Google, with the debut of those Docs and Sheets programs for both Android and iOS, but that’s just scratching the surface. This being an update Wednesday, Google’s got some new builds available for existing apps, as well, and this afternoon we learn about new versions rolling out for Google Search and Google Play Games. Remember back near the start of the month, when an APK teardown ...

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Google Play Games adding gift-giving, cross-platform multiplayer

A little under two weeks ago, as part of one of Google’s regular Wednesday app update binges, we saw a new version of Play Games arrive for Android users. While we learned of changes like improved leaderboards and some UI tweaks, the update seemed relatively minor – really, the only notable feature was to support invitations in multiplayer titles. Today, however, with the Game Developers Conference getting underway in San Francisco, Google shares some additional details of where

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Google app updates: Play Games and TTS on Android, Gmail on iOS – see what’s new

Despite the dozens and dozens of apps under its belt, spanning multiple platforms, Google manages to keep a relatively steady stream of updates coming, stomping-out bugs, delivering new features, and refining user experiences. Today we’ve got three such updates to check out, coming to both iOS and Android. The first update to cross our desk is the new version 3.0 of Gmail for iOS, hitting the App Store today. The big news here is background mail fetching for iOS 7 users, letting the app retrieve mail from ...

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Google Play Games continues with tradition of hidden Easter eggs

Loyal Google users are only all too aware of the Easter eggs the company’s developers love sneaking into its products. How many of you, on your first boot of a new Android release, head on over to the About screen and start tapping away at the new version number? While all types of software have seen their own hidden secrets over the years, games have long been at the forefront of leaving surprises for their users to discover. As such, it probably shouldn’t be too surprising to learn ...

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Google launches Play Games app

In the weeks leading up to this year’s Google I/O, we saw a number of leaks concerning a new multi-player gaming service Google appeared to be cooking up. Sure enough, we got an announcement of new gaming extensions to Google Play Services, including achievements, matchmaking, and leaderboards. At today’s Google event, launching the new Nexus 7 and

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Google Play Games: Revealed

Last month’s discovery of the framework for a new Google Play Android gaming service made it look like this project was just about to launch. Many of the pieces seemed to be in place, and all we needed was for Google to go official with it all (possibly at Google I/O). Since then we’ve heard some less-than-convincing stabs at a name for the system, but today it looks like we can finally confirm that it will arrive, simply, as Google Play Games. Sure enough, ...

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