The application war remains one of the central areas of concern when considering Google’s market position in the mobile device world — and mobile devices (including smartphones and tablets) will, according to several industry analysts, play a prominent role for all involved companies in the upcoming years. There’s little doubt that Apple is still leading this race, but Google is stepping up their game by hiring “dozens” of engineers for in-house applications.
The state of the game right now is that Apple and Android are far ahead of the rest of the pack, but Apple has a significant lead. After all, in addition to having more applications — period — Apple also has a more strict approval process, bolstering user confidence in downloaded applications. Additionally, Apple has been working on their own applications, such as the daily news application being released today (February 2nd) for the iPad.
While Google is definitely retaining their policy of “a free flood of applications,” allowing the best to (hopefully) rise to the top while the less popular are tossed aside, the search engine giant is also trying its hand at internal application development. The company already developed applications for its major services and shifted some current employees to their “app lab” division. Further, Google told the Wall Street Journal that they were intending to hire “dozens of software developers to create applications for smartphones and other mobile devices.”
We don’t know precisely what projects these new hires will be working on, but it seems at least a good chunk of it will be open-ended. After all, one of the categories for what Google is willing to hire is “others who have ideas for mobile apps.” It’s rumored that the developed advertisements will be free of charge, with the possibility for ad support, although there’s been no direct statement along those lines.
