Just in case you thought I/O is all about the keynotes and the swag, another major bit of Android news was revealed in one of the development sessions. In what is sure to be a boon to many Android app developers, Google recently demonstrated its upcoming YouTube API during its iconic I/O conference in June. In fact, if you watched the keynote address live via the I/O app for Android, you have already seen the API in action. Basically, it allows playback of high-quality YouTube videos from within a given app, such as Twitter or Google+, so you don't have to use the browser or switch to the YouTube app to see them. You can view the I/O session in which the YouTube API is demonstrated below.


Of course, Twitter is just a possible example, and there's no guarantee that Twitter or any other Twitter Android client will include native YouTube playback in its app. Nevertheless, it would be in the best interests of the developers of these apps to include such a compelling feature, since the most popular way in which Android users share music recommendations with each other is still via tweeting YouTube music videos. There are, in fact, many other apps that would benefit greatly from integrated YouTube playback, such as Google+ or TNT's Falling Skies app, just to name a couple more examples.

Personally, one of my pet peeves is that If someone tweets a YouTube video for a music recommendation I want to check out, I have to leave my Twitter client of choice (Plume) and view it in the YouTube app. Since many of these "videos" are actually still images accompanied with audio, I would like to continue looking at my timeline while listening to the music, which isn't currently possible, since YouTube doesn't continue in the background. Still, this is just one scenario in which this new API being released by Google would be a very welcome addition to Android. Please feel free to describe other apps you would like to see featuring native YouTube playback in the comments below.