Android this week: Play Music on SD; Moto X sales; Chrome apps on Android

You can now play more music if your Android supports microSD cards. Moto is taking a do-over on its Moto X Cyber Monday sale. And much ado was made about Chrome apps for Android; something that was demonstrated back in May.Need to carry more music on your Android phone? As of this week, you can, provided your handset has a microSD card slot. The Google Play Music app got an update that adds support for storing music on a memory card. The card support for offline music is officially supported on KitKat but Google says it could work on Android devices running older versions; its experimental on those for now.

Although the Moto X now runs KitKat, it doesn’t have a memory card slot. Still, the Moto X was a bit popular this past week since Motorola attempted to offer it at a $150 discount for the no-contract model. I say attempted because it didn’t go as planned.

On Cyber Monday, the day of the deal, Motorola’s servers couldn’t handle the influx of traffic. And for those customers that could actually order a Moto X, the discounted prices weren’t applied. Motorola quickly apologized for the issues and decided to hit the re-dial button, offering the same discount on Wednesday. It was still difficult to get the reduced price but if you struck out, Motorola is repeating the sale this coming Monday.

Also this week there was much ado about Chrome apps coming to Android; reports surfaced as if this was breaking news. But those who went to Google I/O in May knew this was already in the works. It’s part of Google’s strategy to unify the web and native platforms with one tool set to create apps.

Tune in to the 12:20 minute mark here to see a demonstration from May: The 500px Packaged App runs on both a desktop version of Chrome and on an Android phone:

Google did add something new to the mix this week however: It improved support for emulating and screencasting Android phones directly in the Chrome browser. Through its Chrome Developer Tools feature, Chrome can now be used to more easily create and debug web apps on Android devices; without the need for arcane command lines or the Android SDK. Eventually, I expect are more uniform experience between apps on Chrome and Android, provided developers see this as cross-platform opportunity.