Introducing 'Google Play News' - A Newspaper Section Is On Its Way To The Play Store

This should be fun! Here's a really early peak at Google's latest content push: it's called "Google Play News," and these bits of News come in "Issues" and "Subscriptions," so we're guessing Google's getting into the newspaper business. "Play News" will be a new, "colored" Play Store section to go along with Apps, Music, Books, Magazines, Movies, and Devices.

Our smoking gun in this case was this piece of JavaScript, (mirror) from the web version of the Play Store. It's a little hard to read, but you should be able to control+f your way to interesting bits of text like this:

To read Google Play News, you must have a supported Android phone or tablet

Please sign in to get this News edition.

Please sign in to purchase this News Issue.

Please sign in to purchase this News Edition Subscription.

Subscribing you to this news edition...

You have subscribed to this news edition. It is now available on your device.

So, first, the obvious stuff, you'll be able to buy a single newspaper issue or have a recurring subscription. If you dig through the js file you'll see that most of this text is directly next to identical text for the Magazine section, which suggests the two will be closely related. I'm not sure what the difference is between "News Issue" or "News Edition," maybe Google isn't sure what it wants to call a single issue yet. They also need to fix their capitalization, they keep switching between "News" and "news."

The "supported Android phone or tablet" text links to http://support.google.com/?hl=en&p=news_androidapp, which is a support redirect that currently doesn't work. (Seehttp://support.google.com/mobile/?p=magazines_androidapp for a working version.)

As I'm sure you know, the Play Store is color themed - Books are blue, Music is orange, etc. So the most important question a discovery like this raises is "What color will the News section be?" It turns out we can actually answer this one thanks to the Play Store CSS (mirror):

It's yellow. The News section will be yellow.

For those who don't know what they're looking at, this section of the CSS has a hex triplet (the "#xxxxxx" things) for each section of the Play Store. The hex triplet is used to describe a color to the browser, which I've translated into "human" after each line. The other names and colors line up perfectly (Music is orange, Books is blue, etc.), so it's safe to assume the News section will be yellow.

Unfortunately, I don't have any icons for you, right now Google is just using the Magazine icons as a placeholder.

Needless to say, APK Teardown is now on high alert for the next few versions of the Android Play Store. It looks like we have the first of our Google I/O spoilers this year. We'll keep our eyes peeled for more.

Thanks for the tip, Anon! You rock!

Source : androidpolice