Google Now Gets Upgraded With Cards From Your Favorite Apps

Google Now, Google’s service focused on bringing you real-time information to your mobile device – including things like traffic updates, scores, stock changes, travel times, your flight status, and much more – is getting a notable update today. The company says that, going forward, the Google app will show users updates from their favorite apps, too.
At launch, Google is offering relevant information from over 40 applications, in order to show things like “last-minute hotel deals to home-buying tips,” the company says.
“In the morning, catch up on news of the day with cards from The Guardian. On your commute, Pandora can give you recommendations for music to play, based on what you like, or you can be reminded to complete your daily French lesson on Duolingo,” writes Google, explaining how the new system can work as an alternative to launching the apps directly.
Google Now has previously used data from marked-up email updates to inform some of its previous services, but for this feature Google worked directly with the developers of the apps to enable a more diverse set of use cases for this initial launch. It’s not directly linked to Google’s app indexing project that can surface information from and take you directly into apps from search results, but that effort is related to this, Google says.

There are over 30 developers – including apps like Airbnb, Lyft, eBay, Instacart, Pandora and Zillow, to name a few – supported as the new feature goes to launch this afternoon. It’s currently only available on Android devices, but likely this will come to the Google app on iOS in the near future.
Google says that other apps will be added in the future, and the feature itself will be expanded over time, as well.
Updated to clarify how the content is surfaced in the new Now cards, 6:41 PM PT