Google Play Services now rolling out bringing better battery life and Turn based Multi-player support

The Android Developers blog has been updated to advise that there is currently an update to Google Play Services rolling out now, bringing with it improved battery life as well as a new feature for Google Play Games – Turn based Multi-player support and for Android App developers, there’s also a new API for integrating Google Drive into their Apps.

The improvements to battery life are mainly focused on those users with Google Location Reporting enabled, but in this day and age, any improvement to battery life is appreciated.

The turn based multi-player support will allow Game developers to support from 2-8 players per game, with turns being recorded and data being uploaded to Play Services and then shared to other players in the match automatically. There’s also a new animation – Connecting to Play Games – which developers can add to their games during the sign-in stage to help give a more forthright transition outlining the process of signing into Google Play Games.

The Google Drive API is at this stage a developer preview, which will allow developers to integrate the ability to read and write files in Google Drive, while also allowing their users to work with files offline, with changes synced with their Google Drive account automatically when they reconnect to a network.

There’s been improvements in Google Mobile Ads and Google_ sharing as well, with DoubleClick for Publishers, DoubleClick Ad Exchange, and Search Ads for Mobile Apps now fully supported. With a location based API included as well to help localise ads to the users. Google+ sharing improvements include ‘better auto-complete and suggested recipients from Gmail contacts, device contacts and people on Google+’.

The rollout of Google Play Services is an automatic and usually fairly quick process, while I often update Apps as soon as possible, I usually leave Google Play Services well enough alone. You should see the update over the next few days.