RIP Android Market, long live Google Play

The Android Market has been Google’s content store for apps since 2008, and more recently for books, movies, and music as well. Now, all that has changed with the announcement that the Android Market was being retired, and in its place users will get Google Play. This new brand will be much like the old Android Market, but it marks a change in the way Google talks about content.

Before we can decide how this will affect users, we have to sort out what is changing. From now on, going to the old Android Market web store will redirect to Google Play. This site looks an awful lot like the Android Market, but with a different coat of paint, and a few rearranged design elements. This page will still link you to the sub-categories of content: apps, music, movies, and books.

On the phone, that friendly little Android shopping bag icon is about to be replaced with the hard-edged triangular Google Play icon and branding. The app has not been demoed in its entirety, but like the desktop site, we wouldn’t expect any drastic changes in functionality, though design might be a little different. The Android Market app will be updated on all phones running Android 2.2 or higher in the coming days. Android Market updates happen in the background, so at some point you will open the Market, and it will be Play.

The new content portal will just be called Google Play, but the associated services are getting a refresh, too. Updates to some core apps are already available in the Android Market on phones; the Market’s last gasp, really. The naming is a little awkward with Music becoming Google Play Music and Books becoming (confusingly) Google Play Books. These updates don’t change any functionality, just the name.

When you look past all the name changes, the new icons, and UI alterations, this is really just a substitution of one brand for another. The feature set that made the Android Market a compelling, and sometimes rough experience will still be intact. We can, however, see some users getting quite confused when the Market app on their phone ceases to be the Market, and all those Android Market links on the web turn into Google Play links.

Despite what seems to be a sometimes clumsy sort of branding scheme, it’s not hard to see why Google needed to change things. After adding books, movies, and music over the last year, it made little sense to go to the Android Market to buy all that content. Plenty of users might be interested in, for example, picking up some MP3s to use in Google Music on the web.

Google is offering an olive branch to anyone upset by the death of the Android Market with big sales on apps, music, movies, and books. Changing from the Android branding gives Google to opportunity to reintroduce its cloud services to people, and even make it clear this is not only for mobile users. Certainly the app ecosystem is important to Mountain View, but the time has definitely come to decouple Music, Books, and Movies from the Android brand.

RIP Android Market, long live Google Play