14 DAY TRIAL // Shortly after announcing the new changes it will add to Google Play Games, the search giant confirmed it has kicked off the rollout of Google Play Services 4.3, which includes all the goodies previously tipped.
According to Google, this is a staged rollout, which means the new update may not be available for quite some time in certain countries, but the important thing is the deployment has already started and in just a few days the new changes will affect all Android users.
Speaking of which, the most important new feature aimed at Android end users are game-related. As we reported before, Google plans to enable cross-platform multiplayer with iOS devices.
In addition, Google announced the introduction of game gifts, but not as you might think. You still can’t gift a game to one of your friends or family members; instead, Google will make it possible for Android players to send virtual in-game requests to anyone in their Google+ circles or through players search.
Basically, you may ask another player for a particular in-game item, or you can send a “gift” request to grant another player the item he/she needs or a specific benefit.
This multiplayer functionality is expected to work cross-platform at some point, but even if you download Google Play Services 4.3 you won’t be able to benefit from it for the moment.
There aren’t any games that would allow you to use this gifting system yet, but once developers include it in their apps, you will be ready to take advantage of it.
Another new feature included in the latest version of Google Play Services 4.3 is called Drive API and is a very developer-focused functionality.
This will allow developers to add a few useful features to their apps, such as Pinning, which provides devs with the option to pin files that should otherwise be kept up to date locally, so that it is available when the user is offline.
App Folders is another new feature made possible by the updated Drive API, which can now be integrated by devs into their apps. Given the fact that some apps may need to create some temporary files in various places like a photo editor, Google made it possible that this process may be handled using App Folders.
With Change Notifications, devs will be able to register a callback to receive notifications when a file or folder is changed.
There’s also a new Address API, so that devs can now request access to addresses to fill out a delivery address form or other simple processes.
Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager have now been integrated into Google Play Services. They have been released long ago as standalone apps, so those who have already used them won’t notice any changes.
For those unfamiliar with these technologies, Google Analytics, as the name suggests, allows devs to get detailed info on how their apps are being used by their customers.
On the other hand, Google Tag Manager lets devs change specific characteristics of their apps on-the-fly without having to push an update from Google Play.
Last but not least, Google confirmed that a number of new metadata fields are now accessible, in additional to the changes above.