It’s that time of year again. Google kicked off day one of I/O, its three day developer-oriented product and platform innovations showcase, at San Francisco’s Moscone Center West on Wednesday. While there weren’t any skydiving or BMX antics to marvel at this time around, the big G did deliver some news that are likely to get tongues wagging.
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All Access
As has been rumoured, Google today announced a subscription music service to go up against established players like Spotify and Rdio. It’s called Google Play Music All Access and is priced at US$9.99 per month — users that sign up before the end of June can get the service for two bucks less. There’s clever a recommendation engine and listeners can create radio stations based on tracks, but unlike traditional set playlists, it allows users to delete and re-order upcoming tracks.
All Access looks like it’s going to be a compelling service when taking into account Google’s existing music locker service.
Samsung Galaxy S4 with stock Android
While the hardware announcements today were slim as expected, Google did announce the availability of a Samsung Galaxy S4 with stock Android. Is this the first step to Google offering stock Android on non-Nexus devices? We’ll have to wait and see, but in the meanwhile an unlocked — that includes the bootloader — 16GB LTE S4 will become available to US customers on AT&T and T-Mobile through the Google Play store.
Play
Speaking of the Google Play store, Google will be rolling out a cosmetic update and a feature focus on recommendations. The update is coming to Google Play on all platforms with apps first and will roll out to books, movies, magazines and music later. Additionally, the store will do a better job at surfacing apps tailored for tablets.
Google is also using the Play Store to make inroads into the education sector. The announcement that Google is launching Google Play for Education was met with great applause from the crowd of developers in attendance. Google is making it easy for schools to purchase and deploy apps across multiple devices in schools. It’s a massive opportunity for developers and a great incentive to boost educational content.
Android
Developers listened as VP Product Management Android, Hugo Barra outlined new additions to Android which has now seen 900 million activations and 48 billion app installs. According to Barra revenue on Android is now 2.5 times what it was a year ago, globally.
Google has opened new Google Play APIs that will go along way towards ensuring consistent experiences for apps built on the platform, even if handset manufacturers lag behind pushing out newer versions of their operating systems. The APIs allow apps to have the latest updates from Google even if the underlying operating system is outdated.
There’s a new location API with faster and more lightweight location locking, geofencing capabilities — functions can be triggered when users enter or leave an area — and activity recognition — developers can make use of the API’s ability to recognise whether a user is walking, cycling or driving.
Android users can look forward to signing in once and being automatically signed in on other platforms — think about signing in on a PC and your Nexus 4 simultaneously.
One of the biggest changes to the Google Cloud Messaging API, which now reportedly pushes about 17 billion notifications a day, is that it now offers synchronised notifications — Android users can look forward to dismissing a notification on one device and having it auto-dismiss on other devices.
Developers were thrilled to discover that Google will now allow their apps to save game states across multiple devices. Thanks to updates to Google Play game services, Android users will soon be able to, for example, finish a level on a phone and pick up the next level on a tablet. Google is also making it easier for developers to implement achievements, leader boards and multi-player into their games.
Android games are about to get a lot better.
To tie it all together Google released a shiny new IDE called Android Studio, which should make developing Android apps more streamlined. New additions to Google’s developer console will make it easier for developers to offer beta versions to groups and to do staged rollouts. It also offers optimisation tips, referral tracking, revenue graphs, usage metrics and most intriguingly app translation services — for a fee developers can can get translation from translation vendors; text strings will be translated by human translators and sent back in about a week.
Chrome
Google’s other big developer platform, Chrome, wasn’t left out in the cold. Sundar Pichai, SVP Android, Chrome, Apps revealed that Chrome now has 750 million active users per month — it’s the most popular browser in the world. Pichai spoke about using Chrome to push the mobile web forward.
WebGL is coming to Chrome on mobile, so we can expect to see desktop-grade media experiences on smaller screens. Google also showed off a data compression proxy for Chrome that uses its own image format (WebP) and video codec (VP9) to reduce the amount of data that gets sent to mobile devices — which is easier on data plans and saves on battery power.
If you’ve ever tediously filled in payment information on a mobile device, you’ll be happy to learn that Google has been working on a new auto-complete spec to make it easier.
For its Chrome finally, Google showed of five different instances of Chrome keeping in sync using Google’s Compute Engine.
Google+
Google+, traditionally bit of a snooze-fest, was a surprisingly compelling piece of today’s keynote. Google+ will offer a new multi-column design — think Pinterest — and Hangouts now becomes an uber-messaging service incorporating text, photos and video across different devices and platforms, in a conversation view for posterity — it’s Google’s panacea to it’s disparate chat applications.
Google is also touting new storage and image processing features to attract more users to Google+. Users can now store 15GB of pictures at full resolution and it does some mindblowing stuff to surface your best pictures — if you’ve ever come back with hundreds of pictures after a holiday, you’ll appreciate this. It detects blur, duplicates, bad exposure, landmarks, happy emotions (smiles), aesthetics — Google analysed “good” pictures to understand what people find beautiful — and affinity (family ties). It also offers an auto enhance feature to make pictures look better and some other gimmicks like erm, an auto-gif maker.
Search
So how about Google’s bread and butter? The search giant is continuing to build on Knowledge Graph to evolve conversational search — search that for example, understands context, respects your location and anticipates information you might look for next. Conversational search is coming to desktops and laptops through Chrome and will feature Hotwords — Chrome can listen for a key phrase like “OK, Google” to search hands-free.
Search will do more to show flight information, trip plans, restaurant reservations, shipping information and vacation photos right in your search results. You can now even send an email directly from the search bar. New cards are also coming to Google Now. They include geofenced reminders — reminders at the right place at the right time — as well as cards for music, TV, video, transit and books.
Google’s search demo was extremely slick. Search is very much still the heart and soul of Google.
Maps
Finally, Google showed off a new UI and feature set for Google Maps. By the way, 200 countries are now on Google Maps, that includes North Korea.
The mobile version of Maps now has integrated offers from brands based on your location and Google’s new universal rating scale will give you a better idea of what’s worth doing and seeing — Google is also introducing a new “Explore” feature which highlights interesting attractions and places.
Navigation now has live incident alerts and features dynamic rerouting.
In general Maps are going to become more personalised, with an overall improved user experience. Google has perfected the art and by the end of the presentation it was just plain showing off — it revealed a new type of user generated Street View to capture the inside of buildings. The feature stitches together pictures people uploaded to Google.
