Google I/O and the future of Android with Google SVP Hiroshi Lockheimer and Android Director Stephanie Cuthbertson

Google's I/O conference in Mountain View, California, the Vergecast crew chats with Hiroshi Lockheimer, SVP at Google for Android, Chrome, Chrome OS, Play, comms and photos, and Stephanie Cuthbertson, director of Android to the show to talk new products such as the Pixel and Nest line, messaging, and of course Android. Subscribe to The Vergecast for free in your favorite podcast app https://pod.link/430333725 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Nilay Patel?

  Hey everybody, it's Neil from The Vergecast. We have a super special episode this week. Dieter and I sat down live with Hiroshi Lockheimer and Steph Cuthbertson from Google. Hiroshi is the SVP of Chrome OS and Android. Steph is in charge of Android. We are in front of an audience at the Computer History Museum, right after Google I/O. We talked about everything Google announced. We talked about the future of Android, future of Chrome OS, all the other stuff. It was really fun. Check it out.

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• 1:40Nilay Patel?

  Hello, and welcome to The Vergecast, the flagship podcast of Google I/O. Oh! They didn't leave. I am Neil, I'm a friend. Dieter's here. Hello, everybody. This is a very special episode of The Vergecast. We are actually live at the Computer History Museum. It's day two of Google I/O. I have to say, I love it here. I don't know if anybody in the audience... If you're in your car and you just hear people randomly scream the word "Android", it's because we have an audience and I foolishly told them to do that. But we're at the Computer History Museum, which is wonderful. Dieter and I walked around earlier and he made me leave because I didn't want to leave. This place is great, so I encourage everybody to come visit. If you guys are here, you get a chance tomorrow, come back and look.

• 2:23Nilay Patel?

  There's an actual functional, like, first-generation Cray supercomputer back there somewhere, and I had, like, a deeply... Emotional moment. You shouldn't have an emotional moment with a piece of hardware from the 70s, but I did. Okay, so Dieter.

• 2:37Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:37Nilay Patel?

  It's Google I/O.

• 2:38Speaker 03

  It is.

• 2:39Nilay Patel?

  I need to tell the people in their cars one more thing. We have guests.

• 2:41Speaker 03

  We do.

• 2:42Nilay Patel?

  Hiroshi Lockheimer and Steph Cutterson from Google are here with us. They're going to talk about Android in a little bit. But first, Dieter, let's talk about I/O. What happened here?

• 2:50Speaker 03

  Just a ton. So if you're here, you probably know. So we have a new version of Android that's been out for a while, but there's a new beta, Android Q. Android is the 10th version of Android, which is a big deal. We have... What else do we have? It's all blanking on me.

• 3:07Nilay Patel?

  No.

• 3:07Speaker 03

  There's a bunch of stuff in Android Q.

• 3:08Nilay Patel?

  There was a big keynote yesterday. They announced a bunch of new assistant features. Assistant can now control your life.

• 3:16Speaker 03

  So the cool thing about the assistant is they showed off a Dex Generation demo, where the assistant can work locally on the device, and they can use this thing where it continues to listen to you. And they just rattled off commands as fast as they could, and the phone just kept up and did it.

• 3:34Nilay Patel?

  Right. And the technical achievement there was they moved the model, the voice recognition model, locally to the phone.

• 3:39Speaker 03

  Yep. And they shrunk it way down.

• 3:41Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, they shrunk it way down. And they said it will come to the next pixels.

• 3:45Speaker 03

  It'll come to new pixels.

• 3:47Nilay Patel?

  Which confirmed Google will make more Pixel devices, in case anyone is confused about that. So that was big assistant news. They're moving it locally. Unclear whether it will come to all existing phones or just the new ones. That's very exciting. There's a big focus on privacy here. Sundar Pichai of Google wrote an op-ed for the New York Times. I thought our headline was quite clever, because we... I mean, he wrote about privacy. But he took some clear shots, I think, at specifically Apple.

• 4:16Speaker 03

  Yeah. Privacy is not a luxury.

• 4:17Nilay Patel?

  Privacy is not a luxury good. And he said, in the op-ed, he said it, some other places, you shouldn't have to buy an expensive phone or subscribe to a subscription service to have privacy. I think that's going to get unpacked a lot. There was, during the keynote here, I'm sure if you guys watched it, if you're in the audience, there was a plane flying above the keynote. I don't know who that... It wasn't me. I was in the audience, it wasn't anybody I know. But the plane had a banner that said, "Google controls not privacy." And then there was a hashtag, I don't know what the hashtag was. I'm not boosting the plane, that's what I'm saying. But that is fundamentally, I think, the big conversation that will occur on privacy.

• 4:57Speaker 03

  Well, and so the privacy conversation, in the context of this I/O in particular, is fascinating because, on the one hand, Google is talking about the things it's doing to protect your privacy, give you options to have your data removed if you want to.

• 5:11Nilay Patel?

  Ink and Greta mode is coming to many more services.

• 5:13Speaker 03

  But on the flip side, they're also showing off a bunch of stuff that they're able to do, with the assistant in particular, and their machine learning, that you kind of think is enabled by all the data they collect. So, there's a huge emphasis on accessibility, which is normally a snooze, but the features that were shown off were just flat-out mind-blowing. There's live caption on Android, which can just transcribe text in real-time from any video. We saw a bunch of Lens demos where it was able to read and translate text in real-time, either spoken or just translated there. So for people who literally can't read or want to be able to do a different language, just transformative technology. So there's this very fascinating yin-yang of like, "Google can do this amazing stuff,

• 5:57Speaker 03

  but Google is also aware that everyone's freaked out about privacy and they need to balance those things." And I felt that thread running through the whole keynote.

• 6:03Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, and I think that's just a tension that we're all explore together on our journey through the worlds of technology. But the idea that you should trust one vendor with a lot of your data because they will do very useful things, I think the way that Sundar referred to it, and everybody at Google is talking about is they want to be very helpful. And I think that requires them to know some things about you. They announced a new feature of Duplex, along the same line, Google Duplex. Last year, they announced it can make phone calls for people. It did ship. Some people are using it. Now it can use the web for you.

• 6:33Speaker 03

  Well, it can fill out web forms, which, thank you. I like that.

• 6:37Nilay Patel?

  But you can tell the assistant, like, rent you a car, and it'll go and plug in all the data and stuff. I feel like people at Google might rent cars more often than I do. Like, you solve the problems you have. Like, I rent like two cars a year, and I'm never like, "God, if only filling out this form was harder or easier." I just be renting all kinds of cars. No?

• 6:56Speaker 03

  I'm trying to make a Mustang joke here because he only rents Mustangs and I can't get there, so.

• 7:01Nilay Patel?

  I live in New York. I don't have like a lot of opportunities. You can't like, anyway.

• 7:04Speaker 03

  Uh, new hardware. So there's the Google Nest Hub Max.

• 7:08Nilay Patel?

  We should talk about that first.

• 7:09Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 7:09Nilay Patel?

  So you might know Nest. It was a company and then it was a company that was bought by Google.

• 7:14Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 7:14Nilay Patel?

  And then Google reorganized itself into a more confusing company called Alphabet. And then they made Nest another company inside of Alphabet. They were the N.

• 7:22Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 7:24Nilay Patel?

  Sure. This crowd did not go with me on that.

• 7:29Nilay Patel?

  But like they have like Verily, like they're, you know, anyway. Uh, and then they brought them back into Google.

• 7:34Speaker 03

  Yep, but they were running parallel with the other Google. So back into Google in the hardware division, but sort of still just doing Nest stuff.

• 7:41Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 7:41Speaker 03

  Meanwhile, Google's doing Google Home stuff.

• 7:42Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, and then a bunch of Nest people left, it's just fact. And now Nest is fully part of Google and Rick Osterlitz was in charge of it.

• 7:50Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 7:50Nilay Patel?

  And Nest is going to be the brand for home stuff and Pixels the brand for mobile stuff. And there's a, they're rebranding the Google Home Hub to the Nest Hub.

• 8:00Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 8:00Nilay Patel?

  And they put out a new, bigger Home Hub called the Nest Hub Max.

• 8:03Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 8:05Nilay Patel?

  Fucking daughter is named Max and I need the tech industry to stop doing this to me. Uh, it's really, truly annoying.

• 8:12Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 8:13Nilay Patel?

  But it's great. So she can scream her own name. Maybe a timer will begin her end.

• 8:19Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 8:20Nilay Patel?

  These kids are gonna grow up weird. But it has a camera. That's the main thing it has is it's a bigger screen, tenet screen, has a camera at the top. The camera can function as a Nest camera.

• 8:28Speaker 03

  Yep, it can recognize your face, uh, but it does it all locally. Uh, although there's some weirdness where like you scan it on your phone and then it gets stored locally on the device, but somehow your face has to get from the phone to the device.

• 8:38Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 8:39Speaker 03

  Very confusing, but does it all locally. Um, I actually had to correct my hands on because I said it, when it sees your face, it tells Google that you're home. And it's like, well, no, it doesn't do that. It actually only knows it locally that you're home. But if you literally touch a Nest Hub Max, presumably Google would know because like you're interacting with Google data in some way.

• 8:55Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 8:56Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 8:56Nilay Patel?

  Unless you're the sort of person who carries a Nest Hub Max around with you.

• 8:59Speaker 03

  Ooh, it's like a giant battery pack in a Nest Hub Max. That's your phone?

• 9:03Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's how you stick it to the man. You don't know if I'm home.

• 9:08Nilay Patel?

  She was in this very esoteric protest against data collection. Anyhow, so they put a camera at the top of it. I'm actually very conflicted about this camera. We don't have to go into it. There will be more Vergecast where I promise you the conflict will surface. But the switch on the back turns off both the microphone and the camera.

• 9:25Speaker 03

  You can do them one by one in the software.

• 9:27Nilay Patel?

  I don't trust any software.

• 9:29Speaker 03

  Oh, my God.

• 9:30Nilay Patel?

  These people, these coders out here, I don't trust a single one of them. No, but I would prefer to have individual switches or a camera cover. We were sort of told camera covers are inelegant.

• 9:42Speaker 03

  Yeah, they are.

• 9:43Nilay Patel?

  But I'm probably going to buy one because I love that product and I love how it works as a photo frame and having a bigger screen is better. So that's good. So Nest is sort of like part of Google. They're shutting down the works with Nest program.

• 9:54Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 9:55Nilay Patel?

  Big commitment to privacy. You can like read a bunch of Google blog posts about how they're rethinking privacy, what all the sensors will do, all the data they will share. There's a table, like a, it's just a very long table of every home product Google has, all of the sensors it contains and what those sensors do. I think that's great for a person like me and presumably for the people in this audience. I think there's a big question about whether any normal person standing in a Best Buy looking at a Nest home is like, I gotta look at this table. That seems maybe a little asking too much, but I think that's like where we come in, where the people in sort of forums and YouTube videos come in. But that's a big change. And then this piece of hardware.

• 10:35Speaker 03

  This is the Google Pixel 3A.

• 10:38Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 10:39Speaker 03

  And there's also a 3A XL. And I reviewed them and they're great.

• 10:42Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 10:43Speaker 03

  You get a good camera on a $400 phone.

• 10:47Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, and the buttons are cool. All right, we're gonna take a break. We'll be right back.

• 11:33Speaker 01

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• 12:10Nilay Patel?

  We've made everybody wait too long. So let's bring out Hiroshi Lockheimer, who's the SVP at Google for Android and Chrome and so much stuff, and Steph Cutterson, who is the Director of Android. Please applaud. This is your moment.

• 12:29Nilay Patel?

  Welcome.

• 12:30Speaker 04

  Hi, how's it going?

• 12:31Speaker 05

  Hello.

• 12:31Nilay Patel?

  Hello. So let's just start at the very beginning. Explain your roles at Google. What do you do? What's your day like?

• 12:37Speaker 04

  Go ahead.

• 12:38Speaker 05

  I work on Android.

• 12:39Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Nailed it.

• 12:44Speaker 04

  So I'm responsible for Google's consumer platforms and ecosystems. So within the company, my group is known as PNE Platforms and Ecosystems. So that's Android, Chrome, Chrome OS, Google Play, comms.

• 12:59Nilay Patel?

  When you say comms, you mean communications?

• 13:00Speaker 04

  Communications, yes, thank you.

• 13:02Nilay Patel?

  Which stands for messaging?

• 13:03Speaker 04

  Yes, yes.

• 13:04Nilay Patel?

  Messaging apps?

• 13:05Speaker 04

  Yes, yes.

• 13:07Nilay Patel?

  So you do 50 things.

• 13:11Nilay Patel?

  All right. Well, we'll save that for...

• 13:13Speaker 04

  We'll get there, yeah, we'll get there.

• 13:14Nilay Patel?

  I assure you.

• 13:15Speaker 04

  I'm convinced we will get there, yes.

• 13:19Nilay Patel?

  Steph, I want to start. We were hanging out with Steph and Hiroshi earlier. Steph, you said Android Q to you as like a foundational release.

• 13:26Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 13:27Nilay Patel?

  What do you mean by that?

• 13:29Speaker 05

  Two things that I would talk about with Q. One would be security and privacy, and then the other is just innovation. So I think with security and privacy, what you see is just an extension of kind of like a multi-year investment. With Android and the culmination of so many different efforts. Across so many releases, we've been investing in security and privacy. And I think it was a really neat moment for the team to see something like the Gartner quote, where it said, you know, 26 out of 30 categories, Android is rated the highest. We didn't say this on stage, but that makes it significantly above, for instance, other leading operating systems.

• 14:01Speaker 03

  Would you like to name one?

• 14:03Speaker 05

  And I think that--

• 14:05Speaker 03

  Linux on the desktop.

• 14:06Speaker 05

  But I mean, and it's a, it's a bunch of things the teams have worked really hard on. It's authentication, network security, kernel integrity. Those are really important things, and I think the team has put a lot of effort into that. So I think it was a proud moment for us. But when you talk about Android being, Android Q being foundational, I really think also about a set of multi-year initiatives where we're setting up for that in Q. And I think the very best example is mainline. Mainline is a huge technical challenge, a huge technical achievement. It's in order to pull off something like that. So mainline, what you're doing is you're updating individual modules of the OS just as directly as we do it for Google Apps.

• 14:50Speaker 05

  And to do something like that, that means now we can, you know, individually update, for instance, media, which is a very security-sensitive component. To do that requires reworking our release processes, our testing processes, essentially everything about how we build and distribute software. That is foundational. And I think it's cool in two ways. First, from this point forward, we can now update those components back to Q. So in, you know, N plus 2, plus 3, plus 4. It also sets us up to be able to do more of this in the future. I think that's really exciting.

• 15:24Speaker 03

  So the, the thing that I always have to say when there's a new version of Android is like, this thing is amazing, and the vast majority of consumers will enjoy this in like two years. And you've gotten better at that in the past year. I know there's new numbers for how P was updated. So is mainline more about like just getting those security patches out and fixing that, like, will these Android manufacturers actually install the monthly security patch? Or are you hoping down the line, you might be able to like solve some of that, like waiting two years for features?

• 15:55Speaker 05

  I think Mainline is about, it's about an overall strategy about getting people the best of Android quickly. And Mainline is just one piece of that. And I think this would be cool for us both to talk about. So you can see, for instance, with Project Treble, we had 21 devices available with Beta 3 at launch. So that's a direct result of the Treble work. With Mainline, we can now directly update pieces of the OS. So Mainline addresses another piece of it. But it's not the only place. If you think about your experience of the operating system, for, how many people in the room are Android developers? Okay. That's a lot for folks who are listening. And so...

• 16:33Speaker 03

  If you're in your car, pull over and just imagine hands in the air.

• 16:38Speaker 05

  Okay, okay. So for all of us who are developers, you're using Android's APIs, and you've probably noticed that we're more and more making the API surface of Android, Android Jetpack, which is modular, it's updated very frequently. And when you're targeting Jetpack, you can be targeting really, you know, 80 to 90% of all devices. And then another big part of the experience on the phone is the apps on the phone, and those are updating continuously. Now, in some places, they consider all of that like a monolith that's updated once a year. We're really thinking about how do we update everything that people are experiencing on the phone, and that's at different levels. So yes, Mainline is an important part of it, but it's an overall strategy.

• 17:14Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's great. So the other thing about Mainline is it's getting distributed through the Google Play infrastructure. And my understanding is like, you don't go and like, look for an app update in Google Play. It just happens silently, the next time you reboot, it gets applied. Why are you doing it through Google Play instead of like, a whole separate thing that maybe would apply to, I don't know, Amazon Kindles and non-Google Play phones?

• 17:37Speaker 04

  The Mainline code is open source.

• 17:39Speaker 03

  Right.

• 17:40Speaker 04

  And we share that. So even if you don't use our infrastructure, people could be pushing it out.

• 17:45Speaker 05

  Absolutely.

• 17:46Speaker 04

  However they want. So we're not precluding that.

• 17:48Speaker 05

  Yeah, in fact, so the packages will all be available, they'll be signed by Google. And so everything about the implementation of Mainline will be available for anyone to use. And then, you know, once you've got them, you have to have some way of distributing them. So I don't know if you have like, a cool distribution technology in your pocket. RSS. We happen to have, you know. See, you're like, I'm gonna need a CDN. I gotta have a way of putting, I need a packaging format, a way of pushing it out. And so, we have to have in play, it's, you know, kinda makes sense to use that. But you could really use it with any distribution and I think it's relatively straightforward for someone to do the same thing as well. In fact, you know, our goal is to get phones updated as rapidly as possible and that's why we've made mainline open source.

• 18:31Nilay Patel?

  Do you ever think about changing the metric? I mean, right there, there's a certain other leading operating system.

• 18:37Speaker 04

  Desktop Linux.

• 18:38Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, Desktop Linux.

• 18:39Speaker 04

  Heard of it.

• 18:39Nilay Patel?

  Every year, they have a huge, the Desktop Linux Spaceship is very popular. But, you know, they're like, okay, all iOS devices are on the latest thing, because they are pushing that yearly update. You guys are doing something much more diffuse, a little harder to grok. Do you ever think about just changing the metric and saying, here's where you're at with Play Services, here's where you're at with mainline updates?

• 19:01Speaker 04

  For sure. I think, you know, the number, the latest number I saw, someone tweeted this yesterday, might have been one of you, probably not, but I don't know why I said that.

• 19:09Nilay Patel?

  I do tweet a lot.

• 19:10Speaker 04

  You do tweet a lot, but usually it's not, you know, anyway.

• 19:13Nilay Patel?

  Wow. Can we, can someone just keep track of how many times Roshi burns me?

• 19:24Speaker 04

  Someone tweeted, you know, "Good job, Google for getting, you know, P to 10%." But PS, the other OS is at 80% at this point. And I feel like that's kind of an apples to, no pun, or pun intended, you know, apples to oranges, apples to androids comparison.

• 19:40Nilay Patel?

  Android isn't a fruit.

• 19:41Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's a tasty treat. Anyway, I do think a more appropriate comparison there may be, for instance, you know, pixel devices and what's the update rate on that? Because really what we're talking about when we talk about Android is a host of, you know, a great ecosystem of devices, not all devices update at the same rate, and the 10% number you're seeing is the aggregate number of that, right? So depending on device classes or manufacturers, you get very different numbers. So that's one area that I think is different, and that 80 versus 10 comparison is a little bit misleading, I think. And then you layer on these different technologies that we're deploying, like mainline or Treble or the app updates. And so I think the story is a lot more complicated and nuanced than 80 versus 10.

• 20:25Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, you really walked into my next question on the tasty treat line. What does the Q stand for?

• 20:32Speaker 04

  Not sure. Not sure. We're stumped a little bit.

• 20:35Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, really?

• 20:35Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah. It's 10 years, you know, so we'll see.

• 20:39Speaker 05

  Yeah, it's a good, I mean, it's the 10th version of Android. I think, you know, Shakespeare says, "What's in a name?" I think we're thinking a lot about, as you think about the 10th version, what's an appropriate name for that?

• 20:50Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 20:51Speaker 05

  It's an interesting reflection. What other questions do you have?

• 20:55Nilay Patel?

  That got super existential. Yeah, truly, what is a name? Dieter was like a semi-odds PhD candidate. We can go there. I don't think that we should.

• 21:05Speaker 05

  What's the next question?

• 21:08Nilay Patel?

  I wasn't expecting you to answer that at all. Went so sideways, I think it's very exciting.

• 21:13Speaker 04

  I'm so used to answering that. And by the way, anytime I tweet, I will guarantee someone responds with a, you know, the whatever cue confirmed, or whatever the next thing is confirmed. So I need to, I need a new shtick, because I think people have kind of labeled me as the name person.

• 21:27Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 21:27Speaker 04

  So yeah, if you could help me out with a new shtick, that'd be great.

• 21:30Nilay Patel?

  Quietly out of dessert options?

• 21:33Nilay Patel?

  I mean, you're gonna run out of the alpha characters soon. So, Seb, I'm actually curious from your perspective on the version thing, right? Because you spend so much time talking to developers.

• 21:40Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 21:41Nilay Patel?

  Being on the latest version, for the end user is like, it depends, right? You have big manufacturers who are shipping end-user features, but it really matters way more for developers to know that they're gonna target what OS they're gonna be on.

• 21:54Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 21:55Nilay Patel?

  Is that actually, is that still a big concern for Android developers? Like, the latest frameworks aren't there for them, or did Play Services solve it?

• 22:00Speaker 05

  I think, I think there's, there's been several developments that have been really valuable. I think, first, for everyone who's using the Play Console today, if you're a developer, you, what you don't want is a set of generic statistics. What you want to know is, what is my user base using? Because device variegation is, you know, pretty intense across regions, across user bases. And so, what's so cool about the Play Console today is you can go in, you can say, okay, I'm Eli, I have this set of users, and they're using this set of devices which have these characteristics, and you can use that to figure out how to target your application. So it's really the type of data that you want.

• 22:35Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 22:35Speaker 05

  So it's great.

• 22:36Nilay Patel?

  And then the other thing we were talking about, in terms of being a foundational release, there is a new class of form factors coming.

• 22:42Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 22:43Nilay Patel?

  We saw, Hiroshi still has a fold, like Samsung won't take it back from him. They sent the cops to Dieter's house.

• 22:50Nilay Patel?

  It was very dramatic.

• 22:51Speaker 04

  That was for a different reason, though.

• 22:53Nilay Patel?

  There's a new class of display technologies coming out. There's a new class of form factors out. Are you aggressively thinking about those now in terms of it being foundational? Or is that your wait-and-see mode?

• 23:05Speaker 04

  For sure. You talked about it a little bit onstage.

• 23:07Speaker 05

  Yeah, I think when I think about innovation, I would think about both form factors, how hardware is innovating, but also software with ML. I think Live Caption that Dieter talked about, it's just incredibly interesting. I take those one at a time. I think with hardware, you've seen just this kind of amazing evolution driven by their hardware manufacturers. If you've ever been to -- we go to Hong Kong every year and meet with all of the OEMs. It's an incredible experience because you just get this sense of the power of that ecosystem, kind of driving forward, all independently innovating. It's kind of incredible. And when you look at all the technologies that are coming out, I really think foldables have the potential to really change how developers work and what kind of things are possible. 5G also.

• 23:51Speaker 05

  Imagine a phone that's now -- the way 5G works is you have these millimeter waves and then multiple parallel connections from the cell tower to the phone. Think about what kind of that low-latency connection, faster connection, makes possible. I think it's opening up a whole new set of scenarios for developers. It's really cool. We're kind of like, wow, I wonder what will happen.

• 24:15Speaker 03

  Are you also supporting 5Gee?

• 24:23Nilay Patel?

  The AT&T police are coming now.

• 24:25Speaker 04

  The cops are on their way. But real quick, sorry, real quick. You wrote about this, I think, Dieter, about the foldable and how, as a user too, that really changes, like changed how I interact with the phone in ways that I didn't expect. Like, I was a lot more mindful about how I used my phone because--

• 24:41Nilay Patel?

  Because it would break.

• 24:46Nilay Patel?

  Seems very obvious. This broken phone changed the way I used it.

• 24:52Speaker 04

  Mine's not broken and I still use it. And it changed it because the screen in front is, for me at least, and I think it was for you based on how you wrote about it.

• 25:00Speaker 03

  It's too small.

• 25:01Speaker 04

  No, but I used it a lot for triage, but then I was a lot more intentional. You know, when I opened the device, I knew, there was a visual wellbeing aspect to it in a way that I didn't really expect, but I thought was kind of cool.

• 25:12Speaker 03

  Okay, so if we're talking about supporting lots of, you know, new form factors, the biggest trend in phones is like the bezels are getting smaller, fewer buttons, and so the next 45 minutes of this podcast will be Dieter has feelings about how you swipe on a screen. So the new gesture thing, you mentioned it on stage, didn't really talk about it. It seems pretty familiar. If you're listening at home, Hiroshi and Safar are looking at each other to figure out who will answer these kind of questions.

• 25:39Speaker 05

  I was just gonna figure out, I was gonna see if Hiroshi was gonna pull out one of his Post-Its. So Hiroshi has a list of Post-Its of all the questions that Dieter's gonna ask.

• 25:47Speaker 04

  I should explain this. It's kind of like a magician trick. You know, you see a magician and they already know what number you're gonna pick, so they're like, so I figured I would write a bunch of Post-Its, knowing what questions, Dieter didn't tell me what questions he's gonna ask.

• 26:00Speaker 05

  We definitely had gesture apps, so point for us.

• 26:06Speaker 03

  That is a gigantic stack. If you're listening to this later, it is a giant stack of Post-Its that look like they belong on a yarn wall. It's a lot, alright.

• 26:15Speaker 04

  It's been in my pocket all day. Update rates, we have that already, we covered that. Let's see, we'll get to that one later, I'm sure, so I won't tell you. Mainline, we talked about that.

• 26:25Speaker 03

  Oh my god.

• 26:26Speaker 04

  Yeah, hold on, hold on. I wrote down Palm WebOS, I'm sure you'll ask about that later.

• 26:32Speaker 03

  Oh man!

• 26:33Speaker 04

  Anyway, I have some more, so we'll go through those later. Jester.

• 26:38Speaker 03

  Jester.

• 26:39Nilay Patel?

  We should just let them do the show.

• 26:43Speaker 05

  I feel like we got a point when Dieter asked for just to know.

• 26:45Speaker 03

  So in P, you sort of like, it seemed like there you were conflicted about whether or not it was a good idea to swipe around to do stuff, to get around on the OS.

• 26:54Speaker 05

  I sense you're conflicted.

• 26:55Speaker 03

  I was. And then in Q, it's like, okay, no, this just works in a very familiar way to, in a way that another operating system that I'm just going to say the iPhone works. Also, I think it's very similar to how Huawei does it. There is, where's a card?

• 27:11Speaker 03

  How did you come to the decision to change up the gesture interface again?

• 27:17Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 27:17Speaker 03

  And go to this?

• 27:18Speaker 05

  Seriously, it's actually, it's a very good question. So, display technology's been evolving a lot recently, and it's been opening up more pixels on screen. I think that's really exciting. You're seeing large screens, especially with notches now evolving edge-to-edge glass. And especially as you look at the devices with edge-to-edge glass, users want to be able to take advantage of all that screen real estate. And like, yes, the industry is innovating, we definitely looked at that. There's a lot of innovation also happening in apps, doing interesting gesture nav systems. But ultimately, the big driver for us in the OS is looking at what users want. And so we did a lot of studies of different gesture navigation models. We also considered what people like in Android. So, all of you who are Android users, on average, Android users use the back button about 100 times a day.

• 28:04Speaker 05

  So that's like, a really important concept to keep in there. And so the gesture nav system that we built is just based on looking at the best of those concepts and what users found the, allowed them to maximize that edge-to-edge glass.

• 28:16Speaker 03

  But like, take me into like, the room.

• 28:19Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 28:19Speaker 03

  It's like Android Q, meeting one. I don't know how these meetings work, but I'm assuming there's the first meeting about Q, and you're like, okay, we're gonna, we put out these gestures in P, we're gonna, we're gonna iterate them in Q.

• 28:31Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 28:31Speaker 03

  At any point, did someone raise their hand and be like, um?

• 28:36Nilay Patel?

  They did this at the spaceship? Like, because it is remarkably similar to the iPhone. Is that you want to get, drive a bunch of iPhone switchers and to keep it familiar? Is it, this is just where the industry is? Is it, this is just the best idea?

• 28:50Speaker 05

  I think in general, for most OS decisions, it comes down to looking at what do users want. And I think with gesture navigation, there's a lot of different opinions. And really, we can go back to user feedback.

• 29:03Speaker 04

  And as Steph pointed out, 100 times, people do back on Android. I mean, back does not exist on desktop Linux, as you know. And so, you know, there are pretty meaningful differences. I mean, we live in a very different sort of, the system is different.

• 29:16Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 29:17Speaker 04

  By the way, one thing I just wanted to add, you know, we added, as you pointed out, we added gestures in P. That was partly because also, you know, when we meet with these OEMs, our partners, we're getting a lot of feedback saying, look, we're innovating on the screen, we're getting higher, you know, ratio of any screen to device, and they want to maximize it. You know, so that was also, they're a proxy for user feedback as well, right? Because they're making these devices. So we take all those sort of factors into consideration.

• 29:43Nilay Patel?

  But do you think UI, like metaphors collapse over time? This is something, you know, early smartphones, there's all kinds of crazy stuff happening on the screen. They have sort of coalesced into a single set of behaviors. Gestures are really new, except for WebOS, RIP. He's so proud of himself, Dr. Palm over here. But like, gestures are really new, it feels like they're starting to coalesce. Is that something that you guys see and think about? Or is that just the industry takes you where it's taking you?

• 30:10Speaker 04

  We do think, I don't know if I'm answering your question directly, which probably translation means no, but we do think some consistency around gestures, I'm talking within Android now, because there's many different gesture modes based on manufacturer within Android, right? And we do think some consistency there is important for users, but also for developers as well. So that is something we are actively working with the OEMs on, to make sure that we sort of converge on a consistent way that the system behaves.

• 30:39Nilay Patel?

  When you say actively working with the OEMs, are you really saying we're making everybody use these gestures so that Android phones are consistent and there's not 50 different ways to navigate on the Android phone, depending on which one you buy?

• 30:50Speaker 04

  It's a little, our relationships with OEMs are a little more nuanced than, you know, we just tell them what to do, as you probably imagine. You know, they have their own ideas, certain OEMs have more ideas than others.

• 31:01Speaker 03

  [laughter]

• 31:04Speaker 04

  That's a statement of fact. So, we work with them, you know, when we hear their feedback, we do value these partnerships, right? Android without partners, whether they're OEMs, or operators, or app developers, were nothing. So, we do value these partners, and we talk about this a lot, and we have healthy debates, sometimes unhealthy debates, too. And in terms of the gestures, we're out there just really trying to make sure that they understand from a developer's perspective.

• 31:33Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 31:34Speaker 04

  I think that's where they really value our input, because they understand we're sort of helping shepherd this ecosystem of developers, and that's sort of one of the expertise that we bring to the table. So, from that angle, certainly, we're talking to them a lot about this right now.

• 31:46Speaker 03

  So, as long as you're talking about working with OEMs, I actually have like a two-parter for both of you. So, you work with a bunch of external OEMs, you also work with an OEM across the hall that makes the Pixel.

• 31:57Speaker 04

  Different building.

• 31:58Speaker 03

  Different building. And then on the software side, you're making Android, and then there's also this thing called Google Assistant that is slowly taking over everything everywhere. It's like the Borg. And it's doing more and more stuff inside Android. And so, how, when you're creating a new version of Android and you're working with Android, how do you work with the Pixel team, on the one hand, and how do you work with, you know, the Assistant team, but more generally like the other parts of Google that are making software that like want to be like a first-class citizen on Android? How do you navigate those things?

• 32:31Speaker 04

  Yeah, maybe I can start, and Steph, please jump in. I would say almost a constitutional aspect of Android is we, from a platform perspective, the Android platform, we don't favor any developer over any other, right? So, that includes Google. And, as you know, it's open source, so you can see if we're doing that or not, right? If you see it, if Google in the Android open source, please let me know, because that's not really supposed to happen. Now, I'm probably going to get a bunch of emails from people saying, "Ah, it's not the way." But that's really, conceptually, that's not really what we're about. We are about an open platform that is not favoring any one company over another. So, that's at the Android level. So, even at the manufacturer level, right? We work with, you know, my team at least, because we don't represent the Pixel team. That's, as you pointed out, that's Rick's team, that's a separate group.

• 33:18Speaker 04

  We treat them like an OEM, just like we treat Samsung, or LG, or Huawei, or et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And so we do keep sort of those firewalls in place, and the OEMs are fairly satisfied with that. They understand that's how the system works. They share secrets with us. We don't share those secrets with anyone else, and that's how that system works. And in terms of first-party app developers, you know, first-party app teams, they use our APIs, and they give us feedback. We also get feedback. Maybe you can talk about the feedback mechanism you have with, you know, the third-party developers as well.

• 33:49Speaker 05

  Yeah, and it's really the same for first-party. So, for instance, if you take a look at the privacy settings that you and I looked at earlier, one of the things you'll notice is you can now go in and see sensitive resources like camera. And in that, we're treating what we call first-party developers. Google apps and non-Google apps are treated exactly the same. Same for the location controls we treated there. They're treated the same. Same for the location reminders, they're treated the same. So, I think what Hiroshi said is exactly right. Android's open source, it's AOSP, and we think of it as a platform on which many, many apps build. Some of those apps are built in buildings closer to us and some further away.

• 34:26Speaker 03

  Sure. I believe all of that, but I also believe that as long as you're using a Google Play version of an Android phone, it seems like more and more, like, doing that without the Google Assistant being around is hard. Like, you know, voice interaction is becoming more important. I don't know, like, when I plug a new phone into my car for Android Auto, I have to make sure I, like, drive outside of my garage where I don't have internet, and then park, and then wait for the assistants to talk to the internet to have Android Auto to work. It just seems like the line between Android and sort of Google Assistant stuff is, for me, getting fuzzier.

• 35:01Speaker 04

  Hmm.

• 35:02Speaker 03

  Yeah. That's just me?

• 35:04Speaker 04

  If you're, if you could see what we're, the blank stares, I guess, would be the caption right now.

• 35:08Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 35:09Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. So you guys never talk to the assistants here?

• 35:11Speaker 03

  No, we do. Of course, we do talk to them. So we'll...

• 35:15Speaker 04

  Not what we said.

• 35:16Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 35:17Speaker 04

  We do talk to the assistant team, but we talk to a lot of app developers.

• 35:20Nilay Patel?

  Sure, sure.

• 35:20Speaker 04

  Third parties.

• 35:21Nilay Patel?

  Do you think about the assistant as a core feature, like system-level feature of like the Play Android? Or is it like another app that runs on top of your operating system?

• 35:31Speaker 05

  So as Hiroshi talked about, so Android is AOSP code and the assistant is outside of AOSP.

• 35:37Nilay Patel?

  Okay. So that's part of the like the Play stack?

• 35:40Speaker 05

  Yes, and when things are outside of AOSP, they're pluggable on Android. So you could have one assistant or another assistant, just like you could have other types of components that are plugged into Android.

• 35:51Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. So I think this kind of like leads into the big set of questions around what is happening with Android like around the world. So in Europe, the EU said you have to unbundle Android from Play and Chrome and this other search. That has resulted in something I think is deeply funny, which is a browser ballot in Android, which is like a very...

• 36:09Speaker 04

  Browser and search engine ballot, two ballots.

• 36:11Nilay Patel?

  Two ballots. Two ballots. Voting is great, democracy is cool. But you had to like engineer this stuff. Do you think about like the competition aspect as you're like building? Like, do your product managers think like, "The Europeans will be mad at us if we like make this more integrated"? Or do you have the lawyers look at it later? Like, how does that work?

• 36:31Speaker 04

  Yeah, we, in general, when, whether product managers or designers or engineers are developing, their job is not to think about competition law, you know? So their job is to think about how to delight the user and so on. And as I mentioned earlier, our philosophy really is fundamentally, it's an open platform. We're not favoring any company over another. So that's kind of in our DNA, I would say. You know, that's, we take pride in that. And just to give you an example, a lot of, if you go to the Play Store and look at the top application, you know, category, wide category lists, you know, they're not necessarily, in many cases, in fact, guaranteed, not from Google. They're from, in some cases, our competitors, you know, broader Google competitors, right? And that's okay.

• 37:14Speaker 04

  That is kind of the idea behind Android, is that we're enabling this platform where you, as a user, get to use whatever app you want to use and set a lot of defaults the way you want to do, in many cases, above and beyond any other platform like desktop Linux lets you, lets you do. I'm gonna just use that continually now from now on.

• 37:33Nilay Patel?

  I'm just letting you know the desktop Linux people are gonna be super mad at you.

• 37:35Speaker 04

  I know, I'm so sorry. I love desktop Linux.

• 37:37Nilay Patel?

  There's 400 of them left and they have ideas.

• 37:42Speaker 06

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• 39:16Speaker 07

  Hey, Neela, I thank you for those kind words. As you know, my weekly segment is called "The Year of the Linux Desktop" with a delightful plot twist brought to you by Christopher Nolan. We all knew that 2019 was going to be the year of the Linux desktop, but now it turns out there's a twist. It's basically that it's Windows, that Linux is sort of like a DLL now. You install Linux and then you install WinRAR. I think that's what it's called. Is it WinRAR, WinZip? One of those freeware or shareware un-compression softwares. You know what I'm talking about.

• 40:01Speaker 07

  It's the year of the Linux desktop. Let's give it up. Good job, Microsoft. Thank you for bringing Linux across the line. I will also note that this is basically what Microsoft is doing to Windows is the same way that Google is trying to get Linux onto the Chromebook despite the fact that the Chromebook is based on Linux, which basically means Linux is so dangerous that you must sandbox it, but it's so powerful that you must include it.

• 40:35Speaker 07

  Yeah, thank you for having me.

• 40:37Speaker 04

  We should, by the way, I do have it posted on ChromeOS. We should talk about ChromeOS, where desktop Linux is important.

• 40:42Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 40:45Speaker 04

  So we need a new.

• 40:46Nilay Patel?

  You're the biggest vendor of desktop Linux on the planet.

• 40:52Nilay Patel?

  I'm basically asking, like, is that EU ruling where you unbundled it, you're going to charge for the operating system in Europe now, is that really, like, has that altered your dynamic? Has it altered your roadmaps?

• 41:02Speaker 04

  Not from a product perspective, no. You know, we think we've, just to begin with, we feel like we've built a platform and an operating system and a system that's very open, more open than others. We think we've created a lot of help, created a lot of jobs and opportunities in Europe and so on. So fundamentally, we don't really necessarily agree with the decision, but of course, we respect the decision and we comply, and we're also appealing, by the way.

• 41:23Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 41:24Speaker 04

  So.

• 41:24Nilay Patel?

  That's important.

• 41:26Speaker 04

  So, you know, does it change our plans? No, because we feel like our plans all along have been pretty solid on this front. So yeah, we don't, we don't really have engineers or product people thinking about this stuff.

• 41:39Nilay Patel?

  All right, let me ask you one more question on bundling and integration. Actually, it comes from Twitter. Ali Basely, I think that's how I pronounce it. He asks, when are you going to make a carbon copy of iMessage and just actually win?

• 41:51Speaker 04

  You perked up, Dieter perked up.

• 41:53Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, take the post-it, put it out.

• 41:54Speaker 04

  I do have a, I do have a post-it. I put RCS comma rant.

• 41:58Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 42:03Nilay Patel?

  I mean, look.

• 42:09Speaker 03

  The number of tweets I've gotten about this Pixel 3A saying, "This thing looks great. I want to buy it. I don't want to buy an expensive phone, but then I'd have to become a green bubble, and so I'm sad." The amount of work that you have to do to get carriers who, last time I checked, aren't the nicest, best people who have your best interests in mind, all agree on a messaging standard, which, by the way, is not encrypted and it should be. It's very frustrating to sort of watch that sort of happen where on desktop Linux, you get a clean, secure, easy to use, easily discoverable messaging system.

• 42:46Nilay Patel?

  We're going to confuse so many people with this desktop Linux thing. That is not true of desktop Linux. You get IRC.

• 42:55Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 42:56Nilay Patel?

  IRC is great. On iOS, you get iMessage.

• 43:00Speaker 03

  Yeah, okay.

• 43:01Nilay Patel?

  Just to be clear.

• 43:03Speaker 03

  I've asked you a million times why you don't just make an iMessage clone. I suspect I know what the answer is. So like, I guess the better question is, one, answer the first one. Two, how are you thinking about that messaging strategy and working with all those carriers to make RCS happen, given how slow it is, how painful it is, how the end state isn't encrypted, and it's probably not going to be as easy to use as iMessage is on iOS?

• 43:31Speaker 04

  When you say iMessage clone, you mean, because their protocol, as far as I know, is not open.

• 43:36Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 43:37Speaker 04

  So you're saying, literally build something like iMessage, but doesn't connect to iMessage.

• 43:40Speaker 03

  Well, I'll just, I'm going to sum up my friend Dieter into one thing. iMessage lock-in is the thing that prevents switching in this country. Yep. Right? By far. In America, yeah. We get yelled at this about all the time. We're specifically talking about the US.

• 43:54Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. There's WhatsApp, whatever, like, fine, and they're interoperable, and you can see in other markets like China, that leads to more switching, it leads to more hardware diversity. These are all like, good things for consumers. Here, there is absolutely iMessage lock-in. Surely that bothers you. RCS does not appear to be a great head-up competitor to iMessage. You've launched, I think, you probably know the number better than I do, is it 35, 80 messaging clients? Are you going to coalesce that down and say, "Okay, Google's going to do something better that's wider, that is more horizontally adopted, so we can ease the switching cost"?

• 44:28Speaker 04

  Can I give you a brief history of RCS? Which is actually, so, you know, I'm going to...

• 44:33Nilay Patel?

  Can I derail this podcast? People are driving, they'll follow.

• 44:39Speaker 04

  I'll make it really interesting, and I'll make it really brief. And actually, the full history of RCS is, I learned recently, is a lot longer than this, and a lot deeper than this, but I'll give you our involvement in RCS. A number of years ago, we were at MWC, this is like four years ago or so, the GSMA said, you know, we have this thing called RCS that we've been trying for a while, it hasn't really worked. Android, you can really help us here because you're the platform provider. Please help us. And we thought about it, and we realized, actually, this is really good because SMS, as many of you know, you know, is a 30-year-old technology or something. That is like the default messaging solution for Android. That's, that's a little strange, and we just want to modernize the platform. So, we've now been working on RCS for many years.

• 45:21Speaker 04

  We've created a client, we've helped sort of shepherd the standards along as well so that we have this thing called universal profile where, where actually RCS can be interoperable between carriers and countries, which I know it sounds obvious, but wasn't the case up until recently. And we're actually seeing some success, not in the US. I know your point is in the US. But outside of the US, RCS is definitely happening, the carriers are behind it, and things are moving along. The US is tricky, for sure. And so, we're having conversations with, you know, our colleagues at the operators to figure out how we can move this forward. I'll be honest, and I've mentioned this to them, so I'm not, it's not like breaking news, I'm a little bit frustrated at the pace of this.

• 46:03Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 46:03Speaker 04

  It needs to get better, and then we can, you know, deploy this and evolve the standards as we go along as well. You pointed out some shortcomings of the standard, and we can address those things as well.

• 46:12Speaker 03

  Do you think, is RCS robust enough where if it, if someone wanted to make it encrypted by default, that that, it's capable of doing that?

• 46:18Speaker 04

  I'm sure we can evolve the standard to handle these cases. And also, I should also-

• 46:22Speaker 03

  I'm taking that as a yes.

• 46:23Speaker 04

  Yeah. And I should also, I should also point out, you know, on Phi, for instance, RCS, you know, works, and, and, you know, I use it a lot, and it's great. You know, so we want to, we want to get this out there. We need the help of the carriers, for sure, the American ones, and, and, you know, we're in touch with them.

• 46:42Nilay Patel?

  How many more messaging apps will Google launch this year?

• 46:45Speaker 04

  Zero.

• 46:47Nilay Patel?

  But this is like, there's a reason I'm making a joke. Like, you've taken several cuts at it. They...some succeed, some do not, some disappear into the ether and never to be heard from again. Are you gonna try again, or is RCS the bet?

• 47:04Speaker 04

  We're working on RCS.

• 47:05Nilay Patel?

  And you're gonna evolve the standard?

• 47:07Speaker 04

  That's our goal, yeah.

• 47:10Nilay Patel?

  Do you think that that is enough to sort of drive the sort of like lower switching cost behavior that you need to grow Android adoption in the US?

• 47:18Speaker 04

  I don't know. Let's say there was a, as you called it, an iMessage clone. Still the same question. Is that enough to, you know, overcome the switching cost? Right? If you're, if the assertion is iMessage is a form of lock-in and people don't want to be a green bubble, well, even if Android had an iMessage clone, I assume in that scenario, those iMessage clone users are green bubbles. Right? So we still have the same switching issue to deal with. Right? So that feels like across a number of things. You know, we just have to make sure that, to the extent that people want to switch platforms, we make it as easy as possible for them to do so.

• 47:52Nilay Patel?

  So, I want to ask you, so that's the US. I want to ask you internationally, your Android serves two and a half billion devices. There are other huge ecosystems that you have to build for. You know, Sunar and Sage yesterday said like, "We make things for everyone." How do you address that enormous diversity of platforms, of price points, of hardware specs, of use cases, of honestly just different economies? Like, as your architect in Q, you say it's foundational. What are the next steps you need to get to those other markets?

• 48:23Speaker 05

  You know, I might answer that by talking about how we work with the developer community. So Android's developer community is just amazingly diverse, especially because people are building apps all over the world. And so what we do is we have an advisory board of developers who help us essentially figure out what's the vision of the product. And it's a group of people who are, you know, we select them because they're insightful. Folks, you know, like, I know we joke a lot, but like, Dieter has a lot of amazing feedback. We try to pick out...

• 48:52Nilay Patel?

  It's not true.

• 48:54Speaker 04

  I was wondering where you're going, because you were looking at Dieter when you said "insightful" and even pointed at him. So I was like, "Wow, okay."

• 49:02Speaker 05

  We try to find a set of people who are really insightful and can give us great feedback, but also who are representative of the audience that we're building for. So developers who are building really massive apps, but also developers who are relatively new to Android. And we look at folks who represent the different, all the different aspects that we care about. Folks in the United States, India, like across different countries. And that group of people, we bring them together once a year. We come together in person and we have just this amazing conversation about, look, what are the things you've liked best? What are the things you're most frustrated about? Here's a list of potential investments. You vote, tell us what you want us to work on. And the whole, you know, huge chunks of the engineering team are there and it's just kind of an incredible conversation for us.

• 49:46Speaker 03

  What other things have you?

• 49:47Speaker 04

  No, I was just gonna say, Steph is describing literally the roadmapping process for that part of Android, right? Literally, that's how she does her job with her team. For instance, Kotlin came about in large part because of this type of process that you went through.

• 50:00Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah. I mean Kotlin is a fantastic example of an idea, the community voted it up and said, "Look, we really want you to adopt this language." And I remember I went and wrote code in Kotlin and thought, "Well, I see why. This is amazing."

• 50:13Speaker 03

  Okay. Talking nerdy developer things. Verge fundamentally believes that we speak to a broad audience of people that are, they don't know everything, but they're smart enough to understand a lot of stuff. So I'm gonna say some words and then tell me what's new with it. So Jetpack.

• 50:28Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 50:29Speaker 03

  What's new in Jetpack?

• 50:31Speaker 05

  There are three big things that are new in Jetpack this year. Overall, what you're seeing with Jetpack is just an expansion of this API surface area that's designed to make it easy to write apps on Android. But three big things. First, the CameraX libraries. The problem that's designed to solve is, look, you're using the camera, but the camera's behaving differently on all these different phones. It makes it really hard to do development. And CameraX makes it so a developer can write and call those APIs and they'll behave uniformly across devices. Huge time savings. The second thing is, there is a, just a set of improvements, a core set of components we call architecture components. Just a bunch of Stuff you've got to do as a developer that we make easier.

• 51:14Speaker 05

  It's like managing background tasks and stuff like that. The third big thing we announced, I was just down in the sandbox, is Jetpack Compose. This is really cool stuff. So this is the, it's a new reactive UI toolkit that we just open sourced yesterday. And we're going to be developing it in the open. What you can do with Jetpack Compose is it's a, so our UI toolkit is now, it's 12 years old. It was state of the art 12 years ago. That was a long time ago. And since then, the way of doing UI development has evolved, especially if you look at the web, there's just been some phenomenal ideas in development. And so what we're doing is taking the best new ideas in reactive programming, combining those with Kotlin. So that's what developers basically said, "Look, I want you to build something that

• 51:56Speaker 05

  is, takes the advantage of these new, new concepts, takes advantage of the new language, and then I want you to integrate it so it works seamlessly with the code I already have." That's Jetpack Compose.

• 52:06Speaker 03

  Okay, Scope Storage.

• 52:08Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 52:09Speaker 03

  What is, what's going on with Scope Storage? I'm very confused by this. It was, an app can only look at its own storage and then it opened up a little bit, so what's going on with storage in Android Q?

• 52:18Speaker 05

  That's a great question. I mean, you have to be tracking closely to have caught that.

• 52:22Speaker 03

  Have you met my friend Dieter?

• 52:25Speaker 05

  So what Dieter's talking about is, in Q, what we've been doing is steadily improving the platform but also responding to feedback. We look really carefully at developer feedback in each of the betas, and that's why we beta early and often. And in beta 1 and beta 2, we got a lot of fantastic developer feedback where developers said, "Look, I understand why you're making these changes, but they're impacting me." And they said, "Look, can you please think about doing this in X and Y different way?" And it was fantastic feedback. The engineering team talked a lot about it and said, "Yeah, we can do that." And so that's what the 2.5 releases.

• 53:03Speaker 03

  Okay. Last one, and this one's like really, really technical, and either one of you can answer, and I think I need to like, you need to explain what it is and what it's for, and why people should be paying attention to it. And that's Fuchsia.

• 53:15Speaker 04

  So I do, I do have a Fuchsia car.

• 53:22Speaker 04

  Was that just a whole slow build to that? Applause, thank you for that. But what Peter probably doesn't realize is I have a how to spell Fuchsia card. Because Fuchsia is impossible to spell. Have you noticed that? I even misspelled it. Yeah, there's an H in there. So what is Fuchsia? That's the question, I believe. This wasn't just about my cards, right? My magic trick. So Fuchsia is an operating system. You know, Google has a lot of open source projects and proprietary projects too. But the open source ones are the ones that you see. And Fuchsia is one of them. And we're looking at what a new take on an operating system could be like. And so I know out there, people are getting pretty excited, saying, oh, this is the new Android, or this is the new Chrome OS, or this is the new whatever, you know, insert your favorite product name is.

• 54:07Speaker 04

  And Fuchsia is really not about that. Fuchsia is about just pushing the state of the art in terms of operating systems and things that we learn from Fuchsia, we can incorporate in other products or not. And also, targeting, you know, I would say, different form factors. You know, Android works really well on phones and, you know, in the context of Chrome OS as a runtime for apps there, or et cetera, et cetera. There's a lot of form factors, TV, wearables, et cetera. But Fuchsia may, you know, may be optimized for certain other form factors as well. So we're experimenting.

• 54:36Nilay Patel?

  Certain other form factors.

• 54:38Speaker 04

  You guys are like twins. That's cute.

• 54:40Nilay Patel?

  Oh, good. We're interchangeable as usual. Certain other form factors, you say?

• 54:43Speaker 04

  Well, you know, think about, you know, dedicated devices, right? Things that may not be a phone. You know, right now, everyone assumes like Fuchsia is for phones. What if it's not? What if it's, you know, could be used for other things?

• 54:53Nilay Patel?

  Certain other devices?

• 54:54Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 54:55Nilay Patel?

  I see where this is going. So actually, let me take this. Because I don't. He only has three. It's going to no answer. You only have three posts that's left. I want to try to hit them all. So we actually have a question here. I'm being made to say these words. Noodle Shack. On Twitter asks, "When are we getting a decent Android tablet?" Which I think is really related to Fuchsia and Chrome OS, two things you're also responsible for. Seems like Chrome OS and Android coming together a little bit more. Chrome OS is kind of the preferred operating system for these larger screen displays. Is that the future of the tablet? Is there a big Google tablet future ahead of you?

• 55:37Speaker 04

  I would say we're experimenting. There's still many Android tablets out there and still being sold. And with the Pixel Slate, we've tried what Chrome OS's take on tablets could be like. That's a detachable, I guess, but it is certainly in tablet mode as well. So we're experimenting. You talked about how Chrome OS and Android are coming together. I kind of characterized it somewhat differently, by the way. They're both successful operating systems targeting very different use cases, and we share technologies. So, as an example, in Chrome OS, the way updates work. Pixel uses now that technology to do auto updates in the background and so on. That's a Chrome OS thing that Pixel has taken.

• 56:19Speaker 04

  In the reverse direction, the ability to run Android apps. That's something that Chrome OS has adopted from the Android side. So that's kind of how we're doing it, sharing technologies in both directions. I don't know if you would call that like coming together. I would often get asked the question of, "When are they going to merge?" And that's certainly not how we're thinking about it.

• 56:35Nilay Patel?

  Do you think that the future of desktop Linux? But you don't make a proper desktop computer, right? You make Pixelbooks, you make phones, but very few people are shipping tower computers running Chrome OS or shipping 27-inch all-in-ones running Chrome OS. Do you have an ambition to capture that part of the market as well and have these be like primary desktop workstations?

• 56:58Speaker 04

  And when you say desktop Linux, you literally mean desktop Linux.

• 57:01Nilay Patel?

  I literally mean desktop Linux.

• 57:02Speaker 04

  Just to disambiguate a little bit. Yeah, I actually think Chrome OS has a lot of advantages. It's been built recently, so it has advantages around security. The security regime for the system, I think, is great. The updateability, the statelessness. All these things, I think, make Chrome OS ideal for the next generation of desktop -- I'll call it desktop computing, but it could be laptops, too. Those things aren't going away. And I think a number of years ago, people predicted tablets would take over and people wouldn't buy PCs anymore, and I don't think that's happened. And certainly, I don't think that's going to happen. And I think Chrome OS has a very Interesting play there, for sure. So we're investing a lot in that space, absolutely.

• 57:44Speaker 03

  But do you think that's going to capture share from Windows, from the Mac?

• 57:47Speaker 04

  Well, Chromeless is actually, you know, growing in a relatively stagnant to, well, I guess stagnant market. You know, it's actually growing. It's the, I would say, the only platform that's growing in that, in that market. I think Q4 of last year was over 20%. So it's growing considerably, and we plan to continue that and even more.

• 58:07Speaker 03

  Do you think people are ever going to live in like a full Google ecosystem, the way that you can live in a full Apple ecosystem? Like, you don't have another kind of PC, you just have a bunch of Google stuff and operating systems?

• 58:20Speaker 04

  I guess I already lived that life, and I think a lot of people already do live that, live that life. You know, I use a Chromebook, very productive on that, as productive as I, I personally can ever be. Usually looking at Dieter's tweets, but...

• 58:34Speaker 03

  They're very distracting.

• 58:35Speaker 04

  No, they're very good, they're very good.

• 58:37Speaker 03

  Just reply, get back to work from time to time, that would help me out. I'm just here to be dunked on.

• 58:43Nilay Patel?

  Okay, I, Steph, I have two more questions from Twitter, and then I want to end on some big stuff, and then we want to look to the future.

• 58:49Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 58:50Nilay Patel?

  These are very, very granular questions. I hope you're ready for this. Bray asks, "Where did the screen recorder go in Android Q Beta 3?"

• 59:00Nilay Patel?

  He just like took it away.

• 59:01Speaker 04

  I don't know. Did it go somewhere?

• 59:03Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, the screen recorder feature's gone.

• 59:04Speaker 03

  The, the context here is on, on iOS, there's a, there's a built-in screen recorder, so you can like record a little video of what your screen is doing. And on Android, you've had to use third-party apps to do it, and it, the, some of them, like, they work pretty well, but they're also like, they require a lot of like knowledge to understand what the frame rates and stuff does. And so, we saw some early signs in Beta 1 and 2, I think at least 2, that you were thinking about maybe putting a screen recorder into Android, and, maybe it's going away. And so, like, is, is there a screen recorder coming to Android, and if not, is it hard, or do you just think they're bad?

• 59:39Speaker 04

  I don't know the answer to that.

• 59:41Speaker 05

  It sounds like, if I understand the question, you were looking at Beta 1 and Beta 2 and thought we were going to build a screen recorder and now...

• 59:49Speaker 03

  There's like a thing that's like...

• 59:50Speaker 04

  It was there.

• 59:50Speaker 03

  It was there, yeah.

• 59:52Nilay Patel?

  And it's gone in 3. This is the Vergecast audience, they were paying attention.

• 59:57Speaker 05

  I, I mean, we're always experimenting and evolving all the way through the betas, so...

• 1:00:04Nilay Patel?

  So it's coming back. Okay, and then I'm gonna try to not butcher this name. But Siri Tembo said, you actually said, you were mentioned 5G earlier, they say. 5G seems like a natural application for RCS and other communications technologies. Are you gonna like, push to get there with 5G as you, as a carrier's role there? Is that a natural inflection point?

• 1:00:25Speaker 04

  For RCS specifically? No, where RCS is independent of, you know, whether it's 4G or 5G. So we're, we're pushing ahead on, on RCS right now.

• 1:00:33Nilay Patel?

  Okay. All right, so I have a very serious question to ask. You guys are both senior executives at Google. We've been talking a lot about the culture of how you build stuff, how inclusive the company wants to be. There is protests happening at Google about the culture of the company. There is a letter today from the people who organized the lockout requesting that the company appoint some like, outside investigators into the culture of the company. How does that impact you? Are you thinking about that every day? Are you working on it?

• 1:00:57Speaker 04

  Yeah, so I haven't read that letter specifically, so I won't comment on that, on that letter. But talking about this generally, this topic that you brought up, I think it's really important that we're having these conversations, you know? And, and I think as a company, we're always striving to do better and understanding, you know, it's a workplace, right? So we want people to be productive. And, and if things are getting in the way of their productivity because of these cultural issues, we have to address them. And so I think you've seen, Google, for instance, has taken steps. Maybe not as many as these organizers want, but have, have taken steps. And I think the company will continue to do so. But otherwise, you know, in specifics of this letter, I don't, I actually don't know. So I shouldn't, you know, I shouldn't make stuff up.

• 1:01:39Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, that's a probably good idea. But is it something that you talk about here at SVP of Google? Is it something that you were talking about in your leadership meetings?

• 1:01:45Speaker 04

  Yes, absolutely. We talk about it, you know, within the company, absolutely, yeah.

• 1:01:50Nilay Patel?

  Okay.

• 1:01:51Speaker 03

  What are the posted notes that I didn't get?

• 1:01:53Speaker 04

  I have one that I wish you would do, which is, I just wrote, I just wrote huh.

• 1:01:57Nilay Patel?

  Do you just take requests?

• 1:01:59Speaker 04

  I just have a huh, just rant.

• 1:02:01Nilay Patel?

  Wow.

• 1:02:01Speaker 04

  Where I didn't, you know, I didn't, you know, I just figured, you know, it's, I have another one. Q is incremental, iterative. I guess you covered that.

• 1:02:07Speaker 03

  I did say it felt incremental, the, the distinction between it being foundational and like, people say incremental and I actually think incremental is fine. But we talked about at the top is it does really feel like you're setting up for like the next, I don't know, 10 years, but the next four or five years. How often do you feel like when you're making a new version that you're going to release that you need to swing for the fences and like, do you try and aim for like a TikTok strategy like we're going to do bug fixes and a couple of fan favorites and then next year we're going to do the big stuff?

• 1:02:38Speaker 05

  I think it's, I mean, I don't think we really designed that way. I think what you find at different points as you evolve, there are different inflections and some of those you kick off and they take several years. So I think, let me give you two great examples. I think what you're seeing happen with machine learning with live caption, that's just unbelievable. The idea that you can now take what was like a 2 gigahertz finite state transducer running in the cloud and now it fits on, you know, it fits on like this phone and 80 megs. Like that's just unbelievable technological achievement. And I think more interesting is what it makes possible.

• 1:03:17Speaker 05

  And so I think the, that seeds of that set up really in P with adaptive brightness, adaptive battery, but in live caption you see ML, oh, it's actually, it's captioning our conversation. Your phone has no signal.

• 1:03:35Speaker 03

  Oh my god. Your phone has no signal.

• 1:03:38Speaker 05

  So I feel like what's happening with ML and you know, really what's amazing too is how you can do that in such a privacy sensitive way and the new ways that the OS can help you. I think that's just transformational. I think if you look at digital wellbeing, you see something that's kind of at a different phase in its iteration where the work on digital wellbeing last year was really amazing. And to be able to talk about stats in the keynote, like, look, you know, people who are using this reduced their nighttime use by 27%. That's pretty amazing. And you see us continuing to work on that because that's a multi-year investment for us. So I think what you're seeing is it's not that one release is big and one is small. It's that in each release that we're kicking off, you know, different major initiatives and those extend over time. We're really trying to think about initiatives in a long-term way.

• 1:04:25Nilay Patel?

  How do you measure that stat? That 27% stat?

• 1:04:29Speaker 05

  Oh, it's a good question. We defined nighttime usage as between 11:00 PM and 8:00 AM and then we looked at the phone usage within that time period.

• 1:04:39Nilay Patel?

  So I think this leads to like the last big privacy thing, which is Google does collect a lot of data. You obviously know when people are using their phones and not, and they've got the setting turned on.

• 1:04:48Speaker 04

  That's based on an opt-in, obviously.

• 1:04:49Speaker 05

  Oh, yeah. No, that was just a user study where users.

• 1:04:51Nilay Patel?

  Oh, it was a user study, okay. Well, great. No further questions. No, but you guys, I mean, this is a big theme of this I/O is privacy. You build an operating system that no one pays for, right? Like, at least here, maybe in Europe now, you gotta like pay a dollar or euro or something, some number. But, you know, it's a free operating system. There is a lot of, I would say, uncertainty and confusion around the core business model, regardless of what you, Google says, like, people think you sell their data. How do you think about that as you're architecting Android for privacy? Is that becomes more and more of a focus? Is that something that you, like, your team talks about? Like, this is gonna be a privacy feature or is it kind of baked into everything?

• 1:05:34Speaker 05

  I think all, privacy and security is foundational. I think you start from, you start from that frame. I think, actually, live caption's another great example. You kind of start from the idea that, look, everyone should always be in control of their data and who they share it with. And I think you really see that with, the location controls are a great example. It make it very easy now to understand what you're sharing, and even if you've forgotten, we'll remind you, because we want to make sure that we're following your intention.

• 1:06:04Speaker 04

  You know how earlier you were asking if we have engineers and product people thinking about European competition stuff?

• 1:06:11Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:12Speaker 04

  As opposed to that, privacy, absolutely, security, absolutely, we do want our product people and engineers and designers to be thinking about it. In fact, they do, right? This is, and Steph was saying earlier, it is sort of a foundational part of how we think about it.

• 1:06:24Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Okay. We're, we're over time. I can see the Google people like. I've been typing time on my screen for you to. Oh, I don't look at your screen. Oh, okay, great. No. I do. I actually stare at your screen all the time. Neither one of those things is good. But let's end, I just want to end. This is a big I/O. You've announced a bunch of stuff.

• 1:06:42Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:06:43Nilay Patel?

  You've been talking to a lot of developers and people, and us, rather unfortunately, for a few days.

• 1:06:49Speaker 04

  It's been fun. It's been fun.

• 1:06:50Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Thank you, Hiroshi. I appreciate your support.

• 1:06:54Nilay Patel?

  What is... Give me the, like, the next big vision. Like, where do you want this to go? Like, what are the behaviors you want to see people... What are the things you want to see people build using the tools that you're giving them?

• 1:07:04Speaker 05

  I...

• 1:07:06Speaker 04

  That's a pretty big question. You know, I think...

• 1:07:08Nilay Patel?

  I'm trying to end on some hope.

• 1:07:09Speaker 04

  Yeah, no, no. We talked... I think we talked about... I'm excited about how form factors are going to evolve. We talked a little bit about the foldables, but that's one example, right? There could be others. How the network is going to evolve, whether that's 5G, 5Gee, or 6G, or 7G, or whatever it is. And how, you know, if you think to... It wasn't that long ago. Like, there are a lot of things that we do on phones today that we just wouldn't have imagined. At least I didn't imagine, even just a few years ago, the things that I do on my phones today. And so what are the next generation of things that can be done on your phone, or I should call it "device," right? Because it may not be a phone. I think that's pretty exciting. And how do we unleash the creativity and, you know, innovation in developers through our platform? Those are the kinds of things that we think about.

• 1:07:52Speaker 05

  Yep. And at the same time, we want it to happen in a healthy way. That's why I think we're thinking a lot about digital wellbeing. Because I think 10 years ago, you know, would you have imagined that people be spending so much time on their phones? And so now that we're in that present, we want to help people kind of find that balance.

• 1:08:06Nilay Patel?

  Great. Well, thank you, guys, so much for joining us.

• 1:08:08Speaker 04

  Thank you so much.

• 1:08:08Nilay Patel?

  It's been really great. Do a round of applause for Hiroshi and the staff.

• 1:08:14Nilay Patel?

  I think we got to all the cards.

• 1:08:16Speaker 04

  You did. You did.

• 1:08:18Nilay Patel?

  Except for a "ha!?" rant. So stay tuned for Vergecast after hours with Dieter and Hiroshi just going at each other. That'll be at the bar. Thank you to our wonderful audience. You guys were lovely. No one just randomly screamed the word "Android," which is both, like, great and also, like, slightly disappointing. So let's do it now. There it is. Thank you to everybody for listening. Thank you to the Computer History Museum for having us. It's been lovely here. Rock and roll.

• 1:08:43Speaker 04

  All.

• 1:08:44Nilay Patel?

  Promo code. There it is. You got it.

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