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Google has a tendency to create multiple products that end up competing with each other, to some degree. Android and Chrome OS, Google's handful of messaging clients, the list goes on. But two of Google's subscription services, YouTube Red and Google Play Music, will soon merge into one offering. The merge was confirmed during a panel session at the New Music Seminar conference in New York, by YouTube's head of music, Lyor Cohen. He explained that Google needs to merge the services to help bring in new subscribers, saying "The important thing is combining YouTube Red and Google Play Music, and having one offering." Google later provided a statement to  The Verge , which stated that the company is still evaluating options and would notify users before any changes. Google's music ecosystem is a bit complicated, but I'm not sure if a merge would solve that. Google Play Music is a more typical music streaming service, while YouTube Music focuses on music vi

Instagram has become more prevalent on the web than Twitter, according to an analysis by website tool provider  SimilarTech  of the top 1 million sites based on their global traffic, including publishers, brands and e-commerce sites. At the start of 2016, Instagram trailed Twitter in the number of sites that embedded its users’ posts or featured its social widgets, like follow buttons. But from January through December, Instagram’s footprint expanded by 308 percent to overtake Twitter, whose footprint expanded by 36 percent over the same period. It’s unclear what pushed so many sites to begin embedding Instagram posts and widgets on their pages in 2016. Instagram introduced the ability to  embed people’s posts on sites back in July 2013  and rolled out  follow buttons, or “badges,” in November 2012 . Instagram’s monthly user base growing from  400 million people in September 2015  to  600 million people in December 2016  likely helped. But it doesn’t explain what spurred the adopti

Improvements coming to the integration of Progressive Web Apps on Android. Google is continually looking to empower developers with more tools to help deliver great web apps for Android users. It began back in 2015 , when Google first introduced Progressive Web Apps as a feature in Chrome for Android, which allowed developers to create web apps that prompt users to add a site shortcut to their Home screen while offering features such as push notifications. Google is ready to introduce the latest version of this experience which will start rolling out to the Chrome beta over the next few weeks. The aim is to make things much more convenient for users by improving the overall integration with the Android OS. From the  Chromium blog : For example, Progressive Web Apps will now appear in the app drawer section of the launcher and in Android Settings, and will be able to receive incoming intents from other apps. Long presses on their notifications will also reveal the normal Android no

Do you want Andromeda? Because this is how you make Andromeda. I remember thinking last November (2016 if you're reading this from the future), while watching speakers at the  Chrome Dev Summit , that Google remembered how important the web was several times. Not the internet where data files back and forth, but the web, the part of that internet you see through a web browser. Whether you're using Chrome or another program that is built for seeing all the things on the web, or a component in another app that can show you a part of the web that's meaningful and relevant to what you're doing right this moment, the web is a powerful medium for all things. It's also one of the first user experiences we all had and our children may have. The web was was the first look at what we call User Experience for all things tech. OK, maybe  remember  isn't the right word here. Google has spent countless amounts of money and time building tools to both make the web and s