How the Google Drive SDK could help Android game developers

Details

Published on Tuesday, 24 April 2012 10:42

So as many people must know by now, Google Drive is available as of about an hour ago and along with that comes the official Google Drive Android application for Android devices. Also announced is the Google Drive SDK which could seriously benefit Android developers if the SDK allowed for it.

Storage space on Android devices, or any mobile device for that matter, is still limited. It doesn't take long to fill up 16GB with photos, music, games and applications. Now before I got further into this, I've read the official posting from Google about the new Drive SDK as well as checked out a bit of the documentation. As far as I have read, developers can use the Drive SDK for Chrome application integration but, as far as I've seen, not for Android applications or games.

Perhaps it is possible and I just haven't found the documentation for it and if that is the case, yell at me vigorously! In all seriousness though, Google Drive is a nice concept even though it's not really original since services like DropBox have been around for awhile now. Still, having all the Google services tied into Google Drive can be very handy. With the SDK, developers can integrate Google Drive into their Chrome applications like I mentioned above. However, something like this could seriously benefit Android developers, especially when it comes to games.

Think about the idea of being able to save game data to Google Drive and loading it up whenever you want to play your games but having this integrated right into your games. It would save space on your Android device and give developers more freedom to develop their games with more assets if they so choose. While standard assets have to be store on the phone itself, and the SD Card, such as graphics, saved game data could be transferred and loaded up from Google Drive.

Hell maybe there could even be a way when it comes to graphical assets, generally what takes the most space on your device when it comes to games, and having them stored on Google Drive but accessed by the game when the game is loaded. That might be a far stretch but at least you can hopefully see where I am going with this whole idea of native integration of Google Drive with Android apps and games. It may not be too far fetched when you think about it though since browser-based games load all the graphics and other assets from a server on time of playing.

So how does everyone else feel about Google Drive? Is it the next best thing since sliced bread for you or are you relatively 'meh' about the whole thing? What do you think about the idea of native Android application and game integration with Google Drive? Let us know in the comments below.

• < Prev
• Next >