Breaking: Android News From Google I/O

It's in yur base, killing yur market sharez.

Google's I/O developer conference is underway, and some of the news is of great interest to game developers:

• Android activations have hit 100 million devices now, and new activations are happening at the rate of 400,000 per day. There are now over 200,000 apps in the Android Market, and they've had 4.5 billion installations.
• Google TV is getting Android 3.1, the Android Market, with Sony, Vizio, Samsung and Logitech all on board with selling hardware. Hopefully we'll hear more specifics in the next day or two.
• The Android version coming in Q4 of this year is called Ice Cream Sandwich, and it will work on phones, tablets, and Google TV too I bet, intelligently detecting the nature of the device and configuring the interface accordingly.
• Android goes multimedia: The Android Market is launching movie rentals and a music streaming service for Android devices or web browsers is coming up, where you can upload your own songs (up to 20,000 of them) and have them available anywhere. Who needs local storage?
• Google invades the rest of your home, announcing a link to home automation. These guys are everywhere.

In-app purchasing is also due to kick off soon, which will certainly help game developers. Also in the works is a plan to get all the phone manufacturers on board with upgrading Android on their devices in a more consistent way. Hopefully this will happen, because device and OS fragmentation is a huge problem for Android developers. While the Android market in aggregate is huge, it's really a collection of much smaller markets with significant differences between devices and Android versions... differences that may require you to test your game out on dozens of devices.

There will be more news coming, and I'll keep an eye on it.