It’s been a huge day for Google and android fans with all the announcements at this year’s Google I/O. From Android L to Material Design to Android Auto, Wear, and TV, there is a LOT going on to cover … so here are some important key takeouts.
Android One
They kicked things off by introducing the Android One program, which has been set up to provide hardware and software guidelines to create a unified Android experience for Android smartphone manufacturers targeting developing markets. Device makers will need to adhere to these guidelines if they wish to attain official ‘Android One’ status.
The first devices will be arriving in India, from manufacturers like Micromax and Karbonn and will start from less than $100.
Android L & Material Design
The next iteration of Android is more than just an aesthetic overhaul; it is mostly a functional one. Android L serves as a platform that works uniformly across multiple devices of any size or kind – whether that device is in your car’s dashboard, phone, watch, or chromebook, Android L will support cross functionality across the board.
This is in part due to what Google calls “Material Design”. Google’s new mission has been summarised as follows:
“We worked together — Android, Chrome and across all of Google — to craft one consistent vision for mobile, desktop and beyond.” – Sundar Pichai, Senior Vice President
UI elements have been made much more colourful and flatter. Apps will take colour cues from elements and render colours accordingly. The fonts have been redesigned as well … but the most important aspect of Material Design is that creating an android app makes it incredibly easy to port over to tablets and chrome.
Project Volta: More Battery Juice
Android phones generally suffer from poor battery life. Although manufacturers do their best to circumvent these issues with their own implementations of battery optimisation, Google’s taken on the challenge with its Project Volta to address these issues in stock Android.
Developers have are now able to measure which activities have the most impact on the battery life. Job scheduling has been redesigned to optimise how often the phone or tablet needs to “wake up” to run a task, and tasks can be scheduled to run only when on battery. The new battery saver mode can be used to clock down the CPU, limit the screen refresh rate and switch off background data.
Android Auto
The Android platform is coming to cars. And this isn’t limited to the highest-end cars that Apple is supporting at the moment with CarPlay (although CarPlay will be available in other cars as well). Android Auto has opened its SDK and has the support of the Open Automotive Alliance, allowing a substantial number of manufacturers the ability to support Android Auto. To see which manufacturers are supporting it, head to the Android Auto site and scroll all the way down for the list.
Android Wear
For a while now the world has been discussing wearable technologies. And while Samsung and other manufacturers have created some form of wearable technology, it isn’t there yet. Android Wear is about to change that now.
The aim of Android Wear is to help you at any given moment without giving you distractions from your real life outside the screen. Quick swipes allow for Google Cards navigations which show minimal, important data. If you’re jogging, it shows your heart rate. If you’re walking, it shows reminders and directions and a step counter. If you’re listening to music, it gives you quick controls. Tapping once turns on voice controls.
Thankfully, they’ve also linked in the “Ok Google” hot word to create notes, reminders, alarms, calls and more. Additionally, Material Design works just as well on this platform. When a user installs an app from the Play Store on their phone, a smartwatch version also gets installed in the wearable device, so the features are immediately synced.
Android TV
All-in-one entertainment is now here from Google, in the form of Android TV, which allows users to watch live TV or streaming content, and simultaneously use the search interface to grab cast information and related YouTube clips, like trailers and “making of”, if available. Android TV works with the remote, a D-pad as well as the smartwatch.
Plus, with PlayStore synchronization, users can play games on the big screen from their smartphones, as well as mirror any phone content, similarly to ChromeCast.
Chromecast
A new Chromecast update allows you to not need to be on the same wireless network to cast content. Users can search for in-range devices and connect via cloud.
Google Fit
Fitness apps are becoming a standard across platforms, and Google just previewed the Google Fit platform – a multi-OS API for fitness apps. Similar to the recently announced HealthKit by Apple at WWDC14, Google Fit is also an aggregator of sorts, allowing users to keep all their health and fitness data in one place.
Overall, there were some interesting announcements made in the I/O, not the least of them being Material Design, which we can hope will work as fluidly and beautifully as Google has demo-ed. We’ll wait for that.
