Topolsky on Android M’s Now on Tap

Speaking of Josh Topolsky, his new column for Bloomberg is on Google’s Now on Tap, announced last week at I/O:

This is a major move for two reasons. The first is that it really brings Google back to a place of dominance as the glue that holds your digital life together. The web has thrived and grown in no small part because of Google’s ability to track, organize, and understand all of its disparate pieces. Now it’s able to do the same thing with every app running on your phone. It allows Google to get back into the search game by speaking the common language of apps. It gives the company a second life with access to user behavior and needs.

That’s a great way to think about Now on Tap. Google rose to prominence/dominance through their superior ability to (a) index the web and (b) make sense of what they’ve indexed. Everyone gets this — it’s obvious. But it’s also obvious that Google’s ability to index the web matters less in a world where people spend more and more of their time in native apps. Now on Tap is a step toward Google indexing the content we see in native apps.

★ Monday, 1 June 2015