Google Now will soon offer card integration with 3rd party apps

While Google Now cards can be very useful, don’t you wish they extended outside of Google’s own apps and services in a bigger way? In a new post from Google in their Inside Search blog, it seems that such integration is finally on its way!

Google Now has teamed up with “30+ developers” to bring 3rd party Google Now cards that retrieve information from many of our favorite apps including Pandora, Runtastic, the Guardian, Ebay and Kayak. A full list of the 40 currently supported apps can be found here. In typical Google fashion, these new cards won’t go live today, though Google says they should be rolling out over the next few weeks.

While Google’s post explains a bit on what to expect, some details are still unknown, such as how interested developers can get in on the action and whether or not users will have the same level of control over 3rd party Now cards as they do with standard ones. At the very least, we imagine Google will make it easy to switch off cards from apps we aren’t interested in.

So what’s the advantage of getting Google Now cards for things like news, music recommendations and other similar types of cards? As Google puts it, it helps alleviate the need for constantly opening up apps for basic information or having to rely on notifications, which can often arrive at the wrong time or become a cluttered mess.

For more details on what to expect be sure to check out the official post from Google.