Android Experiments website showcases open source apps for Android devices

Google recently unveiled a new website showcasing experimental applications designed for Android and Android Wear powered devices. Titled Android Experiments, the website could have the potential to take emerging apps in a new direction.

So far the website has around 20 apps that are being showcased and is expected to add to that. According to Techcrunch, the developers will be using current tools like the Android SDK and NDK,Android Wear, the IOIO board, Cinder, Processing, OpenFrameworks and Unity.

Innovation in the app development world is going to be strongly dependent on the open source requirement that Google has on the developing apps. Google expressed the difficulty in app creation and how open source development can change how we perceive the functionality of apps.

“Each project challenges in small and big ways how we think of the devices we interact with every day,” wrote Google design advocate Roman Nurik and Google Creative Lab member Richard The.

One of featured apps in the Android Experiments page is Inkspace by Zach Lieberman. According to Lieberman, you can draw on your device, move the phone by tilting in different directions, adjust line that you are drawing, create an animated line which pulses and re-draws itself and record an animated gif of whatever you make. What you draw is then transformed into an animated 3-D picture.

Designed by Anthony Tripoldi, Landmark is another frontrunner open sourced application on the website.The app uses your device sensors, coupled with GPS and the Google Places API to show you the world around you in a completely new way.

This isn’t the first time that google has put open source information on a website before. In 2009, the tech company showcased Chrome Experiments, a website dedicated to open source chrome extensions. Chrome quickly became one of the leading browsers around and some have credited the experiments portion to its success.

If Android Experiments provides anything to the users, it is innovation across platforms. The developers have a chance to work on each others’ applications and perfect the user experience. That could have a cascading effect that up-and-coming developers can use on other devices (looking at you, Apple).