Google Play celebrates its first birthday

Source: Google

With a post on its official blog, Google marks the first anniversary of the Google Play store. Google rebranded its Android Market to Google Play on 6 March 2012 to unify its music, book and magazine services with its application store. The Play store is also central to how Google measures the penetration of Android, by monitoring the version numbers and activation status of devices that connect to it.

The company says that the store now plays host to over 700,000 applications, 5 million ebooks and 18 million songs. To deliver the content, Google says it has partnered with "all of the major music companies, movie studios and publishers".

According to the company, the most popular application during the first year of the Play store was Angry Birds Star Wars, the most downloaded album was Good Kid, M.A.A.D City by Kendrick Lamar. Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn was the most read book, while Popular Science (which is currently not available in the UK), according to Google, was the magazine most users subscribed to.

Google is celebrating the occasion with a number of offers in the Play store. The company is also saying it will be enabling payments through phone bills and via gift cards in the UK. Gift cards will be available from a number of major retailers across the country.

(fab)