The morning of May 9 is getting closer and closer to this year’s Google I/O conference. From the release of the new operating system Fuchsia at the beginning of the year to the release of the first Android P developer preview on March 9 to the Gmail face change and the New Google Tasks standalone app, The dessert Google has put on the table so far won’t be to everyone’s taste, but at least in terms of numbers, this year’s I/O conference promises to be a feast for Android users and Google fans alike.
Google I/O 2018 will officially kick off at 1:30 am Beijing time on May 9. If you plan to stay up late with your team to watch the live broadcast, here are a few things to watch.
Android P DP2
Android, one version a year, has undoubtedly become one of the main characters at every I/O conference.
In the first developer release of DP1, Android P already offers a new interface design style, slick transition animations, Bluetooth connectivity optimization, multi-camera APIS, support for an irregular “bangs” screen, and many other enhancements and new features. If you haven’t tried DP1 yet, Let’s take a look at what happened before we sent the team.
Google is also scheduled to introduce more Android P-related details and release the second developer preview (DP2) in Keynote on the early morning of May 9. However, based on the various media reports recently, Android P seems to be far from what we saw and felt on the previous DP1.
Last month, in a blog post about DNS for private networks, Google inadvertently released a screen shot of Android P that wasn’t version DP1, and it was clear that Android P was at least testing the new on-screen navigation button.
The new on-screen button replaces the HOME and multitasking buttons with a smaller white button that has a similar look to the iPhone X’s navigation area, while the Back button remains on the left. While this appearance has led many media outlets to speculate that Google will bring a “full screen” gesture feature to Android P that some manufacturers have already done or are currently doing, the team is still playing it safe — after all, the screen buttons still occupy precious screen real estate at the bottom of the screen in the screenshot. It’s not a full screen gesture, is it?
In combination with Chrome Canary’s recent horizontal card-stacked TAB design, 9to5Google sees a big change in the on-screen buttons and multitasking interface for Android P, as well as some pretty realistic concept drawings:
In addition to the description, XDA found more interesting commits in DP1 images and Google commits, including Bluetooth hearing aid support, Doze Wallpaper, Vulkan API 1.1. All of these new features are likely to appear in the upcoming Android P developer preview, but we’ll see.
Material Design 2
We’ll call it Material Design 2 until the official name is confirmed by Google.
Since its release with Android 5.0 Lollipop in 2014, Material Design has been in existence as a Design specification for four years, and its influence has long gone beyond Android phones and Android applications. Material Design can be seen in desktop apps (like Chrome) and even iOS apps.
But over the past four years, mobile devices have evolved so rapidly that the hardware and software ecosystem has changed so much that even Google’s own apps have violated the Design rules so much that they have had to make changes to the Material Design specification.
In 2018, it’s time for a complete overhaul of Material Design.
In February this year, XDA found a commit in Chromium named “The New Google Material Design 2 Standard”, although this commit has since been removed from the public, The submissions were also confirmed to be Google’s preparation for Chrome’s 10th anniversary update, which will be released on September 2nd this year, rather than Material Design 2.
With the release of Android P DP1 in March, Google proved the point in another way. In the first developer preview, Google showed us livelier, bolder colors, more sensitive, natural motion feedback, and more rounded corners. A similar design style can be seen later in Chrome Canary on the desktop, Chrome Beta on mobile, and more recently in Google Tasks and the new Gmail client.
According to Google I/O’s official schedule, in addition to updating and evolving its own specifications, Material Design will further integrate with Flutter, Google’s mobile UI development framework launched at Mobile World Congress this year, for better cross-platform applicability.
Wear OS
As well as Material Design, Google’s smart wearable system Android Wear needs to be updated.
With its natural “approachability,” Android Wear has been a hit with both high-end luxury and fashion geek markets. But as rationality has returned, smartwatch makers have gone through a series of shuffles, and the slow-growing smartwatch market is now dominated by the Apple Watch and Fitbit — neither of which is affiliated with Google.
In mid-March, Google officially changed the name of Android Wear to Wear OS and later sent users updates that included Google Assistant smart recommendations, contextual semantic understanding, and smart home controls.
The name change seems to be a clue, as Wear OS product director Dennis Troper himself says that about a third of Android Wear users are Apple users.
With that in mind, a separate smart platform might also mean that Wear OS watches can finally stand shoulder to shoulder with devices like Google Home, Chrome Book and even Google Pixel, To be a Powered by Google wearable hardware product rather than an Android derivative of Powered by Android.
Google Assistant
For Google, whose slogan is “AI First,” Google Assistant is perhaps its biggest piece of meat outside of Android — the one that many see as a possible rival to Amazon’s Alexa next door, “Tap Cortana,” the intelligent voice assistant, is the entire line of Google Home hardware that Google has launched since entering the hardware market.
But what a lot of people don’t know, or haven’t realized yet, is that Google Assistant has taken over quite a bit of the hardware landscape in a very short time, especially in the smart home space.
In a blog post in early March, Michele Turner, Google’s director of smart Home ecology, pointed out that Google Assistant is now available on more than 5,000 smart home devices, From logitech Harmony smart remote control to Nest Hello doorbell to August’s smart door lock, Google Assistant has fully penetrated the smart home market in less than three months (only 1,500 smart home devices were available in January).
This I/O conference is sure to see a further “expansion” of Google Assistant. Ahead of mobile World Congress, Google has announced plans for This year’s Google Assistant, which will support 30 languages and cover 95% of eligible Android devices by the end of the year. Routines and location-based reminders are fully supported.
But will “eligible devices” include Chinese-language Android devices? My team thinks it’s still a little close.
Google Lens
Google Lens, which combines its image recognition efforts, has received lukewarm feedback from the market, from last year’s I/O conference announcement to the exclusive use of the Pixel 2 to the launch of Google Photos on every Android and iOS device.
For one thing, Lens has limited usage and appeal, which can only be used to identify the content of Photos in Google Photos. For another, even with Google Assistant’s camera viewfinder, Google Lens falls short in both accuracy and recognition.
Thankfully, Google’s good friend LG gave us a heads up: Google Lens is getting an update.
When the G7 ThinQ was unveiled earlier this month, LG released an official media document detailing many of the new phone’s features. The G7 ThinQ will be “one of the first phones to use the new Google Lens feature,” according to LG in its section on AI physics. Users will only need to tap the AI physics button on the side of the phone twice in quick succession. You can quickly open Google Lens to view.
LG didn’t give much detail beyond the quick button call to Google Lens, but tomorrow morning’s I/O conference should find out if Google Lens can be a great addition to Google Assistant through AI and computer vision.
RCS Chat
For the same budget, in the Android camp we can buy a camera as good as a card camera, a “flagship killer” whose performance is so powerful that it hardly “kills the background”, or a standard standard for the appearance of industrial design that is always out of the ordinary…
But let’s face it, we’ll never buy iMessage’s instant messaging experience on Android. While Google has introduced a number of messaging apps over the years to compensate for this lack, none of them have died (like Allo, which lasted only a month).
While iMessage is a sticky feature for some iOS users, Android users have to find another way through third-party apps.
Since Android 8.0, Google has been trying to end the fragmentation of the Android operating system with Project Treble, and this year they are trying to solve the fragmentation of Android’s native messaging apps in a similar way. Instead of trying to reinvent the wheel, Google is trying to leverage the power of global carriers with a converged communication service called Chat.
According to an exclusive report by The Verge, Chat will directly replace The SMS app on Android devices, giving users an Imessage-like messaging experience that allows users to send rich media messages directly from mobile data when network conditions permit.
Perhaps to prevent Chat from suffering the same fate as Allo or Spaces, Google hired Anil Sabharwal to lead the Chat project. Anil Sabharwal was the man who took the idea of photo backup out of Google+ and turned it into Google Photos, which has now become one of Google’s most successful software services.
According to GSMA statistics, 55 telecom operators, 11 Oems and two major operating system developers (Google and Microsoft) have joined the RCS converged communication common configuration. Anil Sabharwal has been working on Chat for six months. What will Chat end up being? We may learn more at the I/O conference tomorrow morning.
Besides…
Of course, as an annual event for Google and all Google fans, this year’s I/O is far more exciting than the six points mentioned above.
We’ve also seen Google Play Music and YouTube Music streaming service YoTube Remix, an upcoming beta version of Fushcia, the official launch of a new “.app “domain, and more. If you’re afraid of missing the main points or running out of time to watch the live broadcast, we’ll be the first to put together a review of Keynote content as we’ve done in previous years, so stay tuned.