A few days ago, we heard unofficial reports that Google was disappointed with the performance of Music thus far. While it's barely been out for a full quarter to date, there have been a few major factors holding the service back. In my opinion, one of the biggest factors holding it back thus far is the lack of an API - or, in English: third-party app support for the service. Luckily, a developer by the name of Simon Weber read the post about Google Music and got in touch a few days ago to let me know that he had a solution to the problem: an unofficial API he's been working on.

Simon's API has support for nearly all of Google Music's features. In fact, just about the only major thing missing is support for uploading formats other than .mp3. It's the result of a month of hard work, but there's a major downside: it's coded in Python. In layman's terms, that means there's only desktop support at the moment. And since it's an API, it's effectively a toolkit; now that it's put together, it can be used on other projects - but it can't stand on its own without direct manual interaction.

Luckily, there is light at the end of the tunnel, at least when it comes to seeing the API integrated into music players. I put Andrew Neal, the developer behind the amazing CyanogenMod 9 music player (now named Apollo), in touch with Simon, and there's at least prospective interest in porting the API to mobile and integrating it into the CM9 music player. While things are still ultra-preliminary at the moment, and there are already some obstacles to overcome, I definitely have an optimistic outlook that we'll see something great. Even better, since most of the work in establishing an API is back-end (figuring out protocols and the like), porting should be fairly simple, so support may be coming to other apps soon.

It's worth mentioning that there could potentially be a minor roadblock - though I'm fairly confident there's nothing to worry about (so much so that it's really just something of an aside). While it's unlikely (and not exactly clear how), Google may take issue with his API, and attempt to shut it down or disable its functionality. Again, though, that seems extremely unlikely.

Simon will be interning at Google this summer - we hope he can put out some equally awesome work while he's there.

If you'd like to check out the code, contribute, or fork it (for example, to begin porting it to mobile), hit up the source link below.

[Source: GitHub