Tuesday 14 April 2015

Sony Companies on Google Play

This is just an interesting exercise to look at what products are made by Sony, but are listed under different children.
  • Sony Corporation
    • Seems to mostly be legacy apps and device-specific apps
  • Sony Mobile Communication
  • PlayStation Mobile Inc.
  • Sony Insider
    • Has only one app: Sony Insider
  • Sony Music Entertainment
    • Apps for fans of bands
  • Sony Entertainment Network
    • Used to have Music Unlimited, but that’s been gutted in favour of Spotify on Sony devices. Now just holds Video Unlimited and Account Manager.
  • Sony Digital Entertainment Services Inc.
    • Seems to be dedicated to the east-asian market
  • Sony Digital Network Applications, Inc.
    • Picture and video editing apps that seem to all use the same UI - an application suite, in essence.
After seeing so many weird Google Play listings, this began to make me wonder whether they had additional companies without Sony in their name. This would require some research on Wikipedia for subsidiaries.
Surprisingly, their major non-branded subsidiaries are just various movie and music companies. The only relevant app is a pretty huge streaming service, listed as being developed by itself.
  • Crackle
    • Stream movies and TV at the price of watching ads.
Ultimately I suppose all I could request would be a feature to allow developers on Google Play to list themselves as subsidiaries. It would allow some interesting transparency, but in all fairness, none of this data is really being hidden. This took me only a little time, and I discovered a couple cool apps in the process.
Perhaps I shall investigate other megacorporations soon.