Google Play Store seems to be preparing for a whole new category of Android

[phillynews215]

• Google’s Play Store may be planning to add support for a new device type.
• The app’s been adding text and image resources allowing it to identify “XR headset” devices.
• With both Samsung and Google interested in XR hardware, it would make sense to plan like this for the software, as well.

The Google Play Store is your destination for apps running on all sorts of Android-powered hardware. It’s got apps for smartphones, obviously, plenty of apps optimized for tablets and other big screens, as well as apps ready to run on your Wear OS smartwatch. Today we’re looking at the possibility of Google extending those categories to include a whole new product type, as we discover evidence that the Play Store is working to support extended reality (XR) headsets.

XR, if you’re not familiar with the term, is a bit of an umbrella label that covers everything from full-immersive virtual reality to augmented- and mixed reality systems that blend real and virtual worlds. We know that Google and Samsung are both interested in XR hardware, so it would make a fair amount of sense to start seeing Android apps get ready to declare support for such devices.




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