Google I/O 2015 Megathread, Android M, Android Pay, Google Photos, Now, Cardboard and more

[AlexGoesHigh]

 

 

Google and Android is everywhere

​Truly the only global overlords of Earth

• Search, Chrome, Android and YouTube have 1 billion users each, Gmail has over 900 million closing the billion fast
• Over 4000 different smartphones designs run Android, that's 8 out of 10 of all smartphones
• Android Auto has 35 partners worldwide including Ford, Audi, Honda, Volkswagen and more, dozens of 2016 cars will ship with Auto
• Wear started with 2 retail devices, there's now 7 different wear devices on sale now, more to come
• Android TV devices are on sale from OEM's like Sony, Razer and Nvidia
• HBO Now is coming to android this summer, full support for Chromcast, that includes iOS too

Android M preview

Six main new features and refinements on the core user experience 

• App Permissions Management

user can now manage each app permission individually and apps will request permissions when they need and not on installation, users can now fully disable certain permissions individually, there's 8 toggles that can be managed, location, camera, microphone, contacts, phone, sms, calendar and sensors.

• Web Experience

developers now have access to chrome custom tab API's allowing them to embed the web browser into the app, and add app features to the in-app browser tab, as an example, open a link on pinterest and the browser no has a pin it button on top, the chrome custom tab also has access to most of the user date that they have on chrome, like saved passwords and autofill

• App Links

Android is smarter with web links, like a twitter link on a email will immediately open twitter instead of asking what to do with it, this is because M is smarter and apps can verify themselves with the server to confirm that link belongs to the app and not other

• Android Pay

This is the full replacement of Google Wallet, it uses NFC and Host Card Emulation, Google says is about simplicity, security and choice, works with all four major CC providers, Visa, Master Cards, American Express and Discover, Android pay will come pre-installed on AT&T, Verizon and T-mobile on new devices, it'll work in 700,000 stores in the US and also for purchasing apps, and in-app purchases on Google play, Android Pay is not limited to M it will work with any device running 4.4 and up that support NFC though Fingerprint support for Pay its limited to M, more information about Pay can be found on the spoiler below

Android Pay will power in-app and tap-to-pay purchases on mobile devices. Google Wallet will stick around, but it will power Play Store purchases outside Android, say on the web, and facilitate peer-to-peer payments you can make through the app and on services like Gmail. Confused? Let the new branding wash over you, and stop worrying so much.
 
The history of Google’s work on mobile payments has always embodied this frustrating mix of promising ambition and confusingly fraught execution. Android smartphones had near field communication (NFC) and card emulation years before the competition. But relationships with the carriers and manufacturers that distribute Android devices kept Google Wallet from realizing its full potential. Google also had a tough time getting major banks and credit cards to participate. That allowed Apple to swoop in late and capture a great deal of momentum in the market, with CEO Tim Cook claiming that it is now larger than all its major competitors combined.
 
Google is hopeful that this will change now that Softcard is dead. The carrier-backed payment effort folded earlier this year, with Google purchasing some of its technology. At the time, Softcard advised all its users to download Google Wallet as a replacement. Those carriers will now simply preinstall Android Pay instead. It remains to be seen if swapping the word "wallet" for "pay" will give Android users the awareness and confidence they need to actually start shopping with their phones in the wild. Google is planning to make merchant's reward programs work with Android Pay, a move it hopes will boost engagement. And it has gotten the major financial players to play ball this time.
 
Google says seven out of ten Android devices are ready for Pay and that 700,000 merchants can accept it in their stores today. Spring, a mobile shopping app that has been beta testing Android Pay, has seen a measurable improvement in business with the "buy button" powered by Android Pay. "The payments are still secure but you can get creative with the design," says CEO Alan Tisch.
 
Spring orders purchased with Android Pay are on average two times larger than regular credit card orders, says Tisch, and customers who placed their first order with Google's payment system are 27% more likely to place another.
 
On phones with fingerprint recognition, users can simply touch to unlock Android Pay. One of the most well known devices with this capability is the Samsung Galaxy S6 and Galaxy Note 4. This bring us to what will likely be a tension between Google, the company, and Android, the open-source operating system. Samsung, the largest maker of Android devices, is building its own version of payments. What happens when I buy the latest Samsung Galaxy from one of the old Softcard carriers? Chances are the Android Pay app might not get top billing, even if it becomes the platform of choice for developers, powering in-app purchases and tap-to-pay in the background.
source: the verge

• Fingerprint Support

With the M release, Fingerprint support will be backed into Android natively, no need for OEM to create special drivers or API's to support a fingerprint sensor, M will standardize that across all of android this will also allow developers take advantage of the feature to support secure logins and the like

• Improved Power management and Hardware Support

Lastly the M release will improve power consumption on android again mainly with the introduction of Doze, a new feature that will use the sensors on the device to kill background processes when the in stand by mode though alarms and priority service will still be active, Google is reporting Doze can give up to twice the battery life on the Nexus 9, also M will included native support for USB type C and with comes especial features due to the hardware capabilities, like using the device to charge another device instead of charging itself, so you can share power with your friends

 

• Extras

New minor features include improved word selection, copy and paste (FINALLY) and better, more independent volume controls for alarms apps and music, also easy and faster sharing

 

 

Google says M will be the most polished release of Android ever and the finalized version for Retail and consumer should be available Q3 this year, developers preview are available now for the nexus 5, 6, 9 and player

 

Android Wear

The progress of the platform

 

Google has been taunting wear in I/O with all the features available since the last update as well as the progress the platform has seen since it was launched at last year I/O starting with the features it has introduced with each update

 

 

They were also a lot of pop shoots at the Apple Watch like the watchface not being the default home screen, wear apps can now take advantage of the glance screen function to show information without needing to touch or wake up the watch, like google maps street directions

 

 

Wear has a new launcher and you can draw emoji on it. New apps coming to the platform will also have new features like Spotify being able to use the mic, detect the song and give you the data

 

 

Lastly Wear has over 4000 apps dedicated to the platform

 

 

Internet of Things

Google is getting very serious about the interoperability between devices

 

Google is investing on IoT heavily now, up to the point that they are making their own platform for it, that goes end to end from the IoT device, the cloud, the communication layer and the end user control, one of those being Project Brillo, the OS for the IoT device, its based of android but stripped out of the many unnecessary things a IoT device doesn't need, this also allows it to operate on a wider range of hardware

 

 

The other one is Weave, this is a communication layer for the IoT, its suppose to be common, to the point it lets Brillo, phones and the Internet all talk to each other, Weave is also cross platform so it can work with other platforms such as iOS and it exposes developers API's

 

 

Brillo launches Q3 and Weave in Q4

 

Google Search

This is how and why Google is still the most powerful search engine

 

Everyone knows Google search is, and has been since its inception the most powerful and compressive web search engine since its conceptions over 15 years ago, that's because it has evolve well beyond that just index web pages, Google is using machine learning, neural nets as well as heavy image and sound recognition to provide the answer to every query you can possible think of, and that goes with Google ultimate goal as a company

 

 

Google is using all of these data to improve all of their services, from Translate, to Gmail, to Photos and everything

 

 

Google Now

The assistance its getting much more useful at feeding you data (and also knowing yours)

 

With Android M, Google is expanding Now well beyond as just a page for relevant current information to give you information almost anywhere in Android, from apps to chats, to emails and more, for that it needs three things, context, answers and actions, Now is essentially your personal stalker, it knows stuff without even asking like knowing where your car is parked or a gas station on the way from your Maps GPS or not if it knows your going from work to home and vice versa, Now is also integrating with apps, you can request an Uber, or play your recent playlist, or even buy groceries, and even more on Now, its almost to the point that instead of opening an app, you'll go and do it on Now instead

 

 

Now is getting in your apps too, and this is where it gets interesting, Now on Tap is that, you tap (hold) the home button and Now appears right on top of the app analyzing the content of the app and displaying relevant information or you can search even more relevant information since it know the context of what are you doing, its literally Google Search embedded on everything

 

 

Google Photos

The ultimate cloud storage for the photos and videos of your entire life, all of it free of charge

 

Google Photos just grab, eat and shat on every single personal photo and video cloud solution in the planet, it annihilates them, if you don't mind putting your life in a private cloud, then there's no other product you wouldn't use ever, that's because of several things, it organizes your photos from day to day, month to month, year to year, all of it indexed for your pleasure, but it goes beyond that, it organizes by people, places, events, friends, things, etc, it does by the use of machine learning, its also private, so at least your friends don't know the rest of your life simply browsing your profile. Automatic back up is supported, (duh) and you share the content any preferable way, twitter, facebook, email, and so forth

 

 

it has the classics like albums and collection but you can also tweak the color, contrast, gamma of the photos, and even stitch them together on animations, movies and story, all of it inside the app, all of it in the same place, no multiple apps required

 

 

now here's the kicker, all of this is free, free storage for all your photos and videos, the only restriction is that photos are limited to 16 megapixel and video to 1080p resolution, not bad given that's far more hirgher that the average smartphones photos and videos, content does gets compressed but Google say they are using state of the art compression to reduces artifacts to the minimum, the service is available right now on android, iOS, and the web through photos.google.com

 

Android One, Chromebooks, and the developing market

Google wants everyone in the planet to access its services as well as the web with the lowest entry barrier possible

 

Google knows well that in the third world and developing regions, the access to a computer is not easy or cheap, they know there's people in the world a smartphone is the only computer they own, and that is not cheap, this is why the Android One initiative is taking place and has expanded since its introduction last year, the program objective is too provide affordable hardware to the masses that is up to date, and able to access the web efficiently, they are doing that by partnering with OEM's to provide the hardware and tuning its services for access on slow connections as well as offline that extend to Youtube, Maps and Chrome to store web pages on the phone for a short period of time. Chromebooks are also gaining traction on schools due to being cheaper that Windows laptops and running just a browser that does the essential stuff, all of this is to connect the next billion users to the web, but most importantly connect them to Google

 

 

Developer Tools

More toys to play and create with, ohh and also make money with

 

I/O is a developer conference so not talking about development would be kind of dumb, but here's the good stuff, Android Studio 1.3 preview will be faster with a new memory profiler, also it now supports C/C++ so you can leave the rubbishness of Java behind and get more performance. The web app toolkit Polymer is hitting version 1.0 today, and they are introducing a new tool called Cloud Test Lab, this a cloud environment to test apps on different hardware, it supports the top 20 Android phones on launch and more to come, it will be available soon™. apps are now indexed on mobile Search and is being tested now for iOS, developers can now use Chrome to push OS notifications on both iOS and Android. AdSense is also getting some developer love, we now get adds with a install button to skip the store and get the spam directly by accident (-.-) again iOS and Android. Developers can now experiment with their Play Store listing to test different versions of their app, like different icons, description and more, Google Analytics will index all this data and provide what changes where better that others, they also get to set up Developer listing with all their Play Store content, there's also improvement to the Play Store itself with more search adjustments and a Family corner that curates apps and content that's suitable for kids, lastly games now have content ratings embed in their page

 

 

Google Cardboard

Virtual Reality for the masses

 

New design now fits 6" smartphones and their SDK now supports iOS, also fully redesigned to be easier to build and fits a button that works with all smartphones, previous design did not. Google is introducing Expeditions, this is a project that use Cardboard to tech kids places around the world (also the stars), the teacher has a tablet controller that gives all Cardboard devices in the class a stereoscopic view of a place, which the can look at in a 360° degree view. Lastly Google shown the hardware and software required to record all of these VR places, its called Jump, its a three part set that consist of a camera rig, a software assembler to stitch all these images and a player to view these images, the plans for the rig will be open source and can be built using any material and any camera set up, available in the summer, GoPro will sell a jump kit ready for the Hero 4 soon, the next part, the assembler, grabs all the images from the cameras, stitches it together and fixes it, compensates color correction, brightness, artifact it does everything, the assembler requires a lot of computational power, so it has to run on server and it will be available in the summer to a select few, no word for a public release, lastly the player, it already exist, YouTube will soon support Stereoscopic 3D soon, around Summer time

 

 

Closing In

Self driving cars and Project Loon

 

Lastly Google talked about self driving cars and Project Loon. Self driving cars are getting tested and tested and tested, they already have a million miles on record driving autonomously and they should be driving around their HQ in the public soon. Loon is also showing progress, balloons can now live over 100 days in the air and provide a 10Mbps connections (that's 5 times faster that yours truly here ;_;), they also have a coverage of about the size of Rhode Island, current prototypes are deployed in New Zealand, with the partnership of local carriers

 

 

Source: The Verge live blog and the keynote video above

Edited May 29, 2015 by AlexGoesHigh

[MrRavens]

Thanks

[givingtnt]

oh nice.

[givingtnt]

the countdown was epic

[Dietrichw]

hehehe "Android Pay" lol

[werto165]

 2x longer stand by is good. Now on tap is pretty cool, contextual understanding is going to be something cool if it works. Unlimited google photos storage

what?? (upto 16MP phots and 1080p video)

[Castdeath97]

So are we finally getting iOS like standby in android, if this truns out true that would be dope.

[thexzenon]

Android M won't be as exciting as Lollipop, but at least it might be good.

 

That Google Now feature (now on tap or however it's called) looks really nice. I wonder how it's going to work in something like a group of 6-7 people on WhatsApp  :lol:

[qwertywarrior]

"app permissions management"

 

FRIGGEN FINNALY

this was promised for 5.0

[TwistedDictator]

    One of the big parts of Android M is a redesigned apps permissions system. Users will be able to approve or deny security permissions, such as camera or location access, on a case by case basis. There are only eight categories of permissions available to apps now, and the apps will ask for them as they need them. That's different from how Android current works, which asks users to approve all permissions at once when the app is installed. It's also very similar to how Apple has handle app permissions in iOS for years. Apps will not have to ask for permissions with every update, either.

    For Android M, Google is also revamping the web browsing experience with its Chrome browser. A new feature called "Chrome Custom Tabs" lets developers insert webviews directly in their apps, giving them the full power of Chrome without having to force the user to switch apps. Chrome features like automatic sign-in, saved passwords, autofill, and multi-process security are all now available to app developers within their apps.

 

    "M Preview available for developers today"

    Google is promising a lot with M, and if you've been following the progress of Android for a while, it's a lot of stuff you've probably heard before. Hopefully this time around Google hits the right stride between new features and stability that make for a truly exceptional mobile platform. The company is also introducing a number of new platforms and systems that tie in to Android and work with Android devices, such as the Brillo internet of things platform and the new Now on Tap search features.

Way more info at source.

In my opinion L was a success especially on the LG G2 with 1% battery only going every hour. Source had more information...

It seems that Google promises better battery life and efficiency with every new version of Android, and of course, Android M is no different. M will bring a new feature called Doze, which lets the system manage background processes better. It relies on motion detection to determine when someone is using a device, and shuts down processes when activity hasn't been detected for a period of time. Burke says that this has extended the standby time of the Nexus 9 tablet by up to two times over Android Lollipop.

[snowComet]

Cloud test lab is cool, I like it...

but do we know what those top 20 phones are?

[SimplisticX2]

Now that they have figured out the permission system, they need to find a way to get updates out faster on all makers and carriers. 

[werto165]

Now on tap is the only thing that looks interesting to me to be honest. Also longer standby is always good.

[PhilBoisvert]

The change to Android L had a lot of problem for a lot of people. Their was a lot of crash I think

[MrRavens]

*claps*

[geforceftw]

Full USB type C support, App permissions redesigned. Now if the memory problem will be fixed I'll be happy. This looks good so far. The only thing im looking forward to right now, is USB type C.

[Mew]

*OMG X IZ COPYING Y APP PERMISSION* -what a google fanboy would do

Me- it's good to see Google finally doing app permissions right however, as someone pointed out over at Anandtech, this only being available to apps newly developed with the new sdk and only available to Android M means that adoption for developers would be very low.

[Victorious Secret]

Thanks @AlexGoesHigh, threads like this make more sense than the dozens of crap posts whenever there is a major event. 

[cubercaleb]

"Google says that Android M, which is debuting as a prerelease version today with a full release later this year"

 

Now, I'm no expert or anything, but I am pretty good at translating Google Speak to plain English. Granted, this translation might not be 100% correct but here you go.

 

"Instead of focusing on getting Android L installed on as many devices we can, we decided to work on the next version of Android, Android M will be available to a very small number of phones anytime between the end of this year and sometime after the next "release" of Android. Of course, if you device is a Nexus 6, similar to the Nexus 7 2013, half of you may not even receive this update. We are selective about who gets it and when. Sincerely, fuck you - Google"

 

As I said it's a rough translation, so If I missed something let me know.

[AlexGoesHigh]

Thanks @AlexGoesHigh, threads like this make more sense than the dozens of crap posts whenever there is a major event. 

ikr, i'm in the process of organizing everything, they said so much stuff that i couldn't keep up live and manage the OP at the same time, so watched it then i'm organizing, it will take me a while

[Victorious Secret]

ikr, i'm in the process of organizing everything, they said so much stuff that i couldn't keep up live and manage the OP at the same time, so watched it then i'm organizing, it will take me a while

 

I've done this a few times for the Apple events, its hard but its worth it to keep discussion in one area and avoid flooding the forum. 

[Nineshadow]

"Google says that Android M, which is debuting as a prerelease version today with a full release later this year"

 

Now, I'm no expert or anything, but I am pretty good at translating Google Speak to plain English. Granted, this translation might not be 100% correct but here you go.

 

"Instead of focusing on getting Android L installed on as many devices we can, we decided to work on the next version of Android, Android M will be available to a very small number of phones anytime between the end of this year and sometime after the next "release" of Android. Of course, if you device is a Nexus 6, similar to the Nexus 7 2013, half of you may not even receive this update. We are selective about who gets it and when. Sincerely, fuck you - Google"

 

As I said it's a rough translation, so If I missed something let me know.

Not really. Google simply doesn't care about whether other devices out there get the latest version of Android.

They just release it , fix issues and then go to the next one.

 

That's how Google's been doing it pretty much forever now.

[Thony]

"over 4000 smartphone run android, that's 8 out of 10 of all smartphones"

Does it mean "smartphone MODELS" (Htc one M8,M9, SE Z1,2,3, Ssung S3 etc) ???

Because otherwise it makes no sense

[Victorious Secret]

"over 4000 smartphone run android, that's 8 out of 10 of all smartphones"

Does it mean "smartphone MODELS" (Htc one M8,M9, SE Z1,2,3, Ssung S3 etc) ???

Because otherwise it makes no sense

 

what they mean is "4000 models run Android, but we only give a shit about the dozen that get released each year from high profile manufacturers and then we truly only given updates to around half of those dozen past a year"

[qwertywarrior]

ok as far as i can tell

Android M fixes many bugs and new Chrome stuff and privacy

am i correct ?