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Google Play Shop: Android Market rebrand rolls out in the UK

Google are in the process of rebranding the Android Market around the world to Google Play store in a bid to address the fact that a lot of content on the Android Market wasn’t Android specific. With Google’s intent being to sell apps, movies, books and music across platforms, a more generic name that still had light, fun connotations seemed like the right way to go – and so Google Play was born. With the store’s introduction to the UK taking place last night via an Android Market update (below) came a host of special offers as well as well as a new logo.

Rebrandings generally don’t go down well with consumers. People don’t tend to like change and there’s usually a backlash – this is exactly what’s happened with the Google Play store. Twitter, went, ballistic. That said, looking at the reasoning behind the Google Play name, it’s not the worst rebranding effort we’ve seen *cough* Consignia *cough*.

Given Google’s announcement yesterday that they will be increasing the app size limit in the Play store to over 4GB, with no hardware currently supporting 4GB app downloads, it’s clear that the search giant have a (very) long term plan in mind. The Google Play store will likely house some pretty impressive games that start to take advantage of the quad-core processors en-route phones and currently available on the Asus Transformer Prime.

Add to that the fact that Google’s branding tends to evoke feelings somewhere between fun and productivity and naming it Google’s Play store seems pretty appropriate. The name should cover music, movies and games which can all be played. With Google Books also including a read aloud function, the word Play is relevant to that, and the idea of ‘playing’ apps is a pretty attractive way off looking at interacting with your smartphone.

In turn, we dig the re-brand. It’s innoffensive, the logo boarders on attractive and makes sense with each colour in the Play icon representing a facet of the market – and it’s succinct to boot. What do you think? Miss the market or dig Google Play? Thoughts below.

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