Goodbye Android Market, Hello Google Play

Google has introduced Google Play, which is essentially a unification and rebranding of the Android Market, as well as its movie, music and books stores. Google Director of Digital Content Jamie Rosenberg, who detailed the new service in a blog post, says that Play is cloud-based, which means "all your music, movies, books and apps are stored online, always available to you, and you never have to worry about losing them or moving them again."

In the 'coming days,' Google will rename the Android Market app to the Google Store App and video, book and music apps will be renamed Google Play Movies, Google Play Books and Google Play Music.

This seems like a smart move by Google to make it easier for customers to buy games and other forms of entertainment in one play, and making them available cross-platform via cloud is quickly becoming the standard with digital downloads. Apple launched its cloud service last year, making it somewhat easier to access your purchases from various Apple devices, and Microsoft launched a cloud service for its Xbox video game console as well, which allows players to access game saves from any system.

Of course, what's most interesting to us is -- will this be a gamechanger for mobile games on Google? I often hear complaints complain on how impossible it is to find anything in the Android Store (and how much easier it is to find 'em in iTunes), so this could be something that gives Google an edge over Apple when it comes to apps and gaming.