Josh Valcarcel/WIRED
We’re at Google’s big developer conference today, Google I/O 2014. We’re expecting an Android-news heavy show, with lots of announcements about the future of the operating system, including Android in the home, the car, and all sort of other devices. There should also be some news about Chromecast, and we’re expecting lots of looks at how developers can harness the cloud. It’s going to be a big day, so stay tuned.
The show began with an enormous Rube Goldberg device that ran across both physical space and an enormous screen. It was the merger of physical and digital, and extremely complicated. But it gave way to a pleasant all-digital video of a ball bouncing through all sorts of apps, websites, photos and real world experiences. This is about Google everywhere.
Google’s Sundar Pichai welcomed us all, and welcomed the crowd watching globally—including a viewing party in Nigera that’s an all-female developer group. Pichai notes that Android has been growing massively, it now has more than 1 billion global users (which it now calls 30-day actives, indicating they’ve used the device in the past 30 days). These users take 1.5 trillion steps per day and pull their phones out of their pockets 100 billion times per day. Pichai claims that Android now has 62 percent of global market share of tablets. That’s a lot of Android.
There is a new focus on AndroidOne—an emphasis on bringing the next 5 billion people online. AndroidOne is a set of hardware reference platforms for high quality, low-cost smartphones. The software around it is the same software on stock Android (Nexus and Google Play editions) with locally relevant applications. One of the phones Pichai showed, a MicroMax, cost less than $100. The era of the cheap smartphone is upon us.
But it’s time to move forward. So Pichai is giving a preview of the upcoming “L” (Android 5.0) release today. It’s the first time that Google has offered an advanced look at its next generation operating system, and developers will be able to download it. It has a new design, which he brought Matais Duarte, Google’s VP of Design, on stage to talk about the look and feel of that L release.
Duarte asked what if pixels didn’t just have shape, but also depth. The L release will feature something Google is calling material design meant to mimic real world design. Material design is meant to give developers the ability to add the illusion of depth to their design. It looks really nice.
Material features a grid-based layout so that developers can create a design for one device, and easily port it to others with different screen sizes. There’s a unified set of style guidelines for every screen and all devices. It has new animation capabilities that supports things like ripples. There’s a Z component to support elevation — which lets developers add things like realtime shadows.
(There’s a ripple touch effect that radiates out when you hit buttons from the dialer, for example.)
L also streamlines the notifications process. You get instant access to notifications from the lock screen, so that you can act on them without unlocking the phone. The most important ones–prioritizes ones–rise to the top, but you can swipe down on them to expand them. There’s a heads-up notifications feature now too that lets you see a notification and act on it from within an app without stopping what you’re doing–or swipe them away.
But what about lock screens? There’s a new feature called personal unlocking that looks at signals like location, bluetooth and even voiceprint to authenticate a user. It lets you unlock the phone just by swiping, so you don’t have to unlock the phone with a pin code in certain situations. If it can’t see, say, your bluetooth watch, it will prompt for a PIN.
We’ll be updating this page throughout the morning.
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