Newsletter
Android fans certainly had an exciting morning as Google held an event in San Francisco where the company announced an assortment of new hardware and software. This includes two new Nexus smartphones, a new Chromecast as well as Chromecast Audio, a new Pixel tablet, and some significant updates to a couple of Google’s apps. One of those apps being the companion app for Google’s ever so popular Chromecast. These changes and updates that Google discussed for the Chromecast app are not small by any means and they just went live on the Play Store.
First and foremost when it comes to the changes to the Chromecast app is a huge new focus on content discovery. When users open the newly updated Chromecast app they will be greeted with personalized content suggestions. This includes movies and TV shows that Google thinks the user may be interested in based on their previous watching history. A great thing about these recommendations is that the Chromecast app will only recommend content that is available within apps on the user’s device. Meaning that if somebody does not have the Netflix app installed on their device then the Chromecast app will not recommend movies that are only available via Netflix. All of what was just described is located in the default tab within the new Chromecast app called ‘What’s On,’ but if users scroll down past the content recommendations they will see a nice grid of apps. These are the apps that the user has on their device that are Chromecast compatible. Tapping one of these apps will take the user directly into the app itself.
Then there are the other two tabs, ‘Devices’ and ‘Get Apps.’ Tap the Devices tab and the user will gain access to all of the Chromcasts that are currently available to them. Tapping on the Get Apps tab will allow the user to see a selection of Chromecast enabled apps that they don’t currently have installed on their device. And then there is one more significant feature in the new Chromecast app that is not associated with any of the three tabs, universal search. Yes, that’s right, users can now tap the search bar that is always located at the top of the app and then search for individual TV shows or movies. Doing so will bring up a page with information on that movie or TV show as well as a list of apps or services that particular piece of content is available on. All of these changes are now available on the Play Store as an update to the Chromecast app.
