We are now only a few days away from Christmas and if you have young children in your family they will likely be getting really excited about having a visit from Santa Claus. For years now people have gone onto the internet to use the NORAD Santa Tracker and in more recent years will have also used the mobile application. Now though the Google Santa Tracker for Android app has been launched to rival offerings from NORAD.
The NORAD Santa tracker is available for a variety of mobile platforms while Google are more famously known for tracking Santa via its Google Earth service, the company has announced it has now launched some new services that include the dedicated Santa Tracker for Android app.
Google’s Maps engineers have certainly been busy recently as after launching the new Google Maps iOS application they have also built a new special algorithm to track Santa around the world delivering gifts to children on Christmas Eve. Besides the new Android application users will also be able to follow Santa via Google Earth and Google Maps.
There is also a new Chrome extension being provided to aid in the tracking of Santa this Christmas, and this news comes after it was revealed that the NORAD service will no longer be using Google Maps, and instead decided to use Microsoft’s Bing maps service.
The Google Santa Tracker for Android application is obviously a free download via the Google Play Store, and is available to users of the platform using hardware running Android 2.2 or later. It will be interesting to see how the two tracking apps actually perform from December 24th, and which one users prefer to use.
This ends the five year deal that NORAD and Google had for the older Santa tracking service, and the Google service can also be followed via Facebook, Twitter, and Google+. Will you be giving the new Google Santa Tracker for Android app a try this year or will you continue to use Norad?