Google I/O didn’t give us the Android update we were expecting—or did it??
Andrew Cunningham
Google covered a lot of ground in its three-and-a-half-hour opening keynote at Google I/O yesterday, but one thing it didn’t announce was the oft-rumored next version of Android. However, persistent rumors insist that the elusive Android 4.3 is still coming next month—if that’s true, why not announce it at I/O in front of all of your most enthusiastic developers?
The answer is that Google did announce what amounts to a fairly substantial Android update yesterday. They simply did it without adding to the update fragmentation problems that continue to plague the platform. By focusing on these changes and not the apparently-waiting-in-the-wings update to the core software, Google is showing us one of the ways in which it’s trying to fix the update problem.
Consider the full breadth of yesterday’s Android-related improvements: you’ve got an update to the Android version of Google Maps, due this summer, that incorporates some of the features of the iOS version and the new desktop version. There’s a WebGL-capable version of Chrome for Android and an entirely new gaming API. A shotgun blast of improvements are coming to the Google Play Services APIs. And that’s to say nothing of the products that affect Google’s services across all supported platforms: Google Play Music All Access (say that five times fast), Hangouts, and Search improvements.
Leap Motion was showing off its still unreleased gesture motion controller for computers at Google I/O 2013. The demo unit allowed you to use the controller to navigate Google Earth, and the functionality felt ready for prime time to me, as this was the first time I’d ever used the Leap Motion. The controls seemed intuitive, and within a few minutes I was flying around the globe pretty handily, though I did have some trouble finding San Francisco.
I asked about Leap Motion’s recent announcement that it would delay launch in order to further beta test Leap, and as you can see in the video the company is keen to note that the hardware is solid, but there’s a need for more testing around the consumer experience. Leap seems very confident they can deliver by their new anticipated ship date of late July, however.
The tech is impressive regardless of whether it hits a little later than anticipated, but it’ll be interesting to see if the extended beta has an effect on how it’s eventually received by consumers.
Yesterday, Google announced its new, beefier Hangouts app for Android phones. The newest iteration integrates video chatting, Gmail, and Google’s late “Google Talk” app all into one. Hangouts is available for free on all Android devices running Android 2.3 or higher, but if you pay phone bills to AT&T, you can forget about that video chat for now.
Slashgear reports that customers trying to access video chat on AT&T are met with a message saying “You must be connected to a Wi-Fi network to join a video call.”
The message is reminiscent of news from a year earlier, when AT&T decreed that customers would not be able to use Apple’s new FaceTime video chatting over its networks. The company later sort of relented and said it would make the service free to customers on 3G networks—but only if they were on a shared data plan. (We polled Ars readers last July and 89 percent said they’d never pay extra just to use FaceTime). Amid genuine customer outrage and rumors that it was violating network neutrality rules, AT&T eventually saw a formal FCC complaint filed against it. The company then started independently loosening its restrictions on FaceTime.
What’s the absolute worst part of the Internet? Reasonable folks may disagree, but most would say keeping track of an endless string passwords ranks somewhere at the top. Nobody, of course, can remember a unique password for the dozens of sites we each sign into each day, so we end up using the same one over and over again. But as recent breaches of high-profile websites like LinkedIn and Gawker show, this practice makes us increasingly vulnerable to hackers who can find valuable passwords for our bank accounts and email by breaking into other, less secure sites. (VIDEO: How Silicon Valley Is Hollowing Out the Economy (and Stealing From You to Boot) This is why a consortium of tech companies, including PayPal and Google, have joined together to dream up the future of passwords. And the future, according to this FIDO Alliance (which stands for Fast Identity Online) is to have no passwords at all. “Passwords are just not working terribly well anymore,” says Michael Barrett, Chief Information Security Officer of PayPal and President of FIDO. “And they’re starting to impede the development of the Internet ecosystem.” A recent study released by Nok Nok shows just how bad many of us are at protecting our online identities. On average, it says, an Internet user has 6.5 passwords, and they share one password between 3.9 websites. Furthermore, ever-growing computer power is causing even safe passwords to be vulnerable. According to a report released earlier this year from consulting firm Deloitte, more than 90% of user-generated passwords are “vulnerable to hacking.” Reads the report: “Most organizations keep usernames and passwords in a master file. That file is hashed: a piece of software encrypts both the username and password together. Nobody in the organization can see a password in its unencrypted form . . . So far, so secure. However, master files are often stolen or leaked. A hashed file is not immediately useful to a hacker, but various kinds of software and hardware . . . can decrypt the master file and at least some of
Sebastian Rodriguez waited in line 90 minutes to be the first person at Google I/O to get the Google Chromebook Pixel, the premium laptop given to all conference attendees today.
Rodriguez is a a software engineer with Thales, a data security company. He humored us and did an “unboxing” of his new Pixel. He was hoping to get Google Glass as were most of the people we talked to at the event but he said the Pixel will be fine around the house.
We caught up with a few other people today at the Moscone Center who were happily walking out with their new machines. One woman plans to give the Pixel to her six-year-old daughter. A man from the Philippines said he was hoping for an Android. Another attendee said he wants to use the Pixel to develop apps.
Nonetheless, these attendees are pretty lucky to get such a sleek machine. Here’s Frederic Lardinois’ review from earlier this year.
SAN FRANCISCO, CA—Google wants your applications and data on its servers. At the Google I/O conference today, Google’s Cloud Platform team introduced new public services and tweaks to existing services based on the compute and data storage infrastructure that supports Google’s search engine and other applications.
Urs Hölzle, Google’s senior vice president of technical infrastructure, unveiled the changes during a developer session on the Google Cloud Platform. The change that got the most applause from the developer audience was the expansion of Google’s App Engine service to support applications written in the PHP scripting language. Google’s announcement that it would be opening up its Cloud Datastore to applications running anywhere—not just in Google’s cloud—got love from the audience too.
All of the changes make Google’s public services much more competitive and directly comparable to Amazon Web Services and other public cloud infrastructure providers, and open up Google’s infrastructure to a much larger audience. With tight integration into Android development tools and the rest of Google’s ecosystem, the services could help Google become more of a one-stop shop for mobile and web app developers.
Today’s three-hour-long Google I/O keynote came with plenty of announcements, but the company mostly assured us that it is focused on building frameworks that can benefit developers and consumers.
We saw a more unified company that needed three hours in one session to get their message across. Breaking today’s keynote up into two days would have disrupted the momentum coming out of a company that closed the day at an all-time high on the stock market. Key areas of the business saw updates, all relaying the important foundation necessary to move Google forward over the next 10 years.
From search to maps, everything is getting a new coat of paint, a new polished experience and a focus from every team within the company. The only announcement that didn’t fit into a “category” was its new music subscription service. Some are calling it a Spotify-killer, but to us, it seemed like a necessary and inevitable announcement.
That’s great news for developers, showing that consumers really care. To make their apps better, Google introduced a new tool called the Android Studio, which makes developing in multiple languages and for multiple screen sizes easier than ever.
The takeaway is that Android is massive, is giving Apple a run for its money and all developers should consider building apps on its platform first, rather than second.
Chrome
That little project that Google worked on, you know…the browser? It’s the No. 1 browser in the world, to the tune of 750 million active users, and Google isn’t afraid to tell you all about it. Oh, it’s also a platform upon which to build apps, so developers should be doing that too.
The takeaway is that if you’re building apps on the web, people love Chrome and Chrome offers all of the open tools you need to build gorgeous things.
Google+
Whether you think that Google+ is a Facebook competitor or not, the 41 features introduced today will get your attention. The stream itself, which now has 190 million monthly active users, is now three-columned and has interactive animations all over the place. Google says that the stream was flat, so it needed a fresh take.
Not a photographer, but chat with your friends a lot? GTalk, Talk, Google Chat or whatever you’ve been referring to it is gone. Hangouts is in, and it’s an app for iOS, Android and the desktop. It has video and text chats, complete with emoji and presence. We’re just glad that they didn’t call it Babel, which was the real internal name for the project.
The takeaway here is that Google knows that you want to talk to your friends and family. It thinks that if it can integrate features to facilitate your communication from anywhere — at your desk or on your phone or tablet — they have you covered.
The takeaway here is that Google wants even more of your searches, but would rather you sit back and relax while performing them. There’s no need to think about how to get the best search result, simply ask a question.
Maps
Getting the gist yet? Google is refreshing all the things to make them easier to use, develop for and discuss with your Mom and Dad. Speaking of Mom and Dad, they probably use Google Maps to get just about everywhere.
The takeaway here is that Google Maps has been a force for almost 10 years. It was time to make the product more user friendly, helping you discover new places and not just get from point A to point B.
All in all, it was a solid day for Google. There were even fighting robots. The future is bright for Google; the foundation for everything has been (re)laid out. Unification.
We’ll be here for the rest of the week, hanging out with developers and listening to some roundtable discussions. If you want to watch the full keynote, have a gander here:
Google’s stock price came close to its 52-week high on the first day of Google I/O today, hitting $915 per share at close. In comparison, Apple today dropped 15 points to close at $428 per share, 277 points off its 52-week high.
This morning, Google stock jumped to $909 per share from its opening price of $895 when Co-Founder Larry Page hit the stage at around 11:45. It is now trading at $916.50 in after-hours trading. One analyst I talked to attributed the increase to Google’s announcement of its “all access” streaming service and the rotation out of hardware makers such as Apple and HP.
The difference between Google and Apple’s share price is a barometer of the tech landscape. Google is a data company. Apple is more about design, creating beautiful devices.
The difference is evident here at Google I/O. Google has built its infrastructure to manage more data than arguably any company in the world. It uses ths data to provide services that it highlighted today in its keynote. This includes its Google Translate APIs and the next generation of its Google Maps. The iPhone will always be elegant. As my colleague Josh Constine points out, the beauty of a device is just not as important, as the entire world becomes a fabric of data objects.
