Google acquires PushLife in move to give Android its own iTunes

Google has just announced that it will be acquiring PushLife, a small company that develops software to sync media on mobile devices.

Google seems to have acquired PushLife for a song: the number being floated is just $25 million. Even so, it’s pretty easy to see what Google’s going for here. They want to integrate PushLife’s technology and expertise into Android… and with cloud storage and wireless syncing at the top of everyone’s minds these days, it seems pretty likely the PushLife acquisition was made in pursuit of the launch of Google’s own music service.

Before it was acquired, PushLife’s products included media management applications for Android and BlackBerry supporting wired synchronization with both iTunes and Windows Media Player, as well as social network integration with services like Last.fm, Facebook and Twitter.

This isn’t the first company Google has acquired in pursuit of rounding out their media syncing and musical offerings on the Android platform. Last year, Google acquired Simplify Media, a company that allowed users to stream their iTunes libraries to other computers over the Internet.

The fruits of that acquisition have yet to be seen, but it’s easy to see how both the acquisition of PushLife and Simplify Media could come together into Google’s own answer to iTunes: a sophisticated media syncing and buying engine that will also offer Amazon Cloud Locker style storage.

It’ll be interesting to see what Google ends up putting together. The search giant sorely needs its own analog to iTunes, which is often cited as a big advantage of the iPhone over Android. For the last year or so, Google’s definitely been picking up all of the stray pieces it needs to launch its own media syncing software and buying platform. The only question is how well integrated all these pieces will be when Google unveils it… likely at next month’s IO conference.

Read more at Engadget