Google's Secret Web-Based Android Music Service Discovered By Hackers
Hackers have uncovered Google's long-awaited online music locker service for Android, which will let users store all their music on Google's servers and then stream it to any device.
The service is a nice selling point for music fans who can't fit all their tunes on their phones, but probably won't make much difference to average users. Google first demonstrated a similar service at its I/O conference last May, but has struggled to reach the necessary licensing deals with music companies.
A user on the XDA Developers Forum first noticed the feature when he installed the music player found in Android "Honeycomb" -- a version that is optimized for tablets -- on a phone running an earlier version of Android. The phone began syncing tunes back to the cloud-based service almost immediately, and by the next day the user could listen to those songs from the service even if they weren't on the phone.
