Empowering developers to build the best experiences across platforms
It’s great to be in our backyard again for Google I/O to connect with developers around the world. The 7,200 attendees at Shoreline Amphitheatre, millions of viewers on the live stream, and thousand of developers at local I/O Extended events across 80+ countries heard about our efforts to make the lives of developers easier—allowing them to focus on the problems they’re trying to solve by minimizing the pain points of building a product.
Earlier this morning, our CEO Sundar Pichai talked about our various billion-user platforms. Whether it’s Android or Chrome or the mobile web, our success would not have been possible without the developer community. And during our Developer Keynote, we covered our heavy investments in tools and services for developers who build on our platforms every day.
Let's take a closer look at the major developer news at I/O so far:
Platforms that connect developers to billions of users around the world
Android O Developer Preview 2—Get a look at the next release of Android O focused on fluid experiences that make Android even more useful, and our efforts to optimize battery life, startup time, graphic rendering time, and stability. Early adopters can opt in to the Android O Beta Program at android.com/beta and run Android O now.
Project Treble—Last week, we also introduced a new Android framework designed to help reduce the time and effort it takes device makers to upgrade a phone to a new version of Android, starting with Android O.
Android Go—We’re optimizing Android to run smoothly on entry-level devices, starting with the O release. We’re also designing Google apps to use less memory, storage space, and mobile data, including apps such as YouTube Go, Chrome, and Gboard.
Kotlin—Android is officially supporting the Kotlin programming language, in addition to the Java language and C++. Kotlin is a brilliantly designed, mature, production-ready language that we believe will make Android development faster and more fun.
Android Studio 3.0 Canary—Our new preview includes three major features to accelerate development flow: a new suite of app performance profiling tools to quickly diagnose performance issues, support for the Kotlin programming language, and increased Gradle build speeds for large sized app projects.
Mobile web—AMP and Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) are re-defining modern mobile web development. AMP gets content in front of users fast and PWAs deliver app-focused experiences that are reliable, fast and engaging. We're seeing success stories from all around the world—travel company Wego has rolled out a successful AMP based PWA and Forbes has seen user engagement double since launching a PWA. If you're wondering how good your current web experience is, you can use Lighthouse—an automated tool for measuring webpage quality. Be sure to tune in this afternoon for the Mobile Web: State of the Union talk to hear more about building rich mobile web experiences.
Infrastructure and services to take mobile apps and the web to the next level
Firebase—At last year’s I/O, we expanded Firebase to a full mobile development platform with products to help you build your app and grow your business. Over a million developers now use Firebase, and we’re doubling down on our efforts to simplify more every-day developer challenges. We’re giving more insights to understand app performance through Firebase Performance Monitoring, introducing integration between Hosting and Cloud Functions, adding support for Phone Number Authentication, and continuing to improve Analytics in a number of ways. We've also started open sourcing our SDKs.
Mobile web developer certifications—At least year’s I/O we launched the Associate Android Developer Certification. This year, we’re adding two new certifications for web developers: the Mobile Sites Certification and the Mobile Web Specialist Certification.
Powerful tools to acquire and engage new users; grow successful businesses
Google Play Console—We announced several powerful, new features and reports in the Play Console to help developers improve their app’s performance, manage releases with confidence, reach a global audience, and grow their business. The Play Console also has a new name, to reflect its broadened business uses, and a fresh look to make it easier to get things done.
Android Instant Apps—We opened Android Instant Apps, a new way to run Android apps without requiring installation, to all developers. Now anyone can build and publish an instant app. There are also more than 50 new experiences available for users to try out from a variety of brands, such as Jet, New York Times, Vimeo and Zillow.
Payments, Monetization & Ads—We introduced a Google Payment API that enables developers to give their customers the ability to pay in apps and online with credit or debit cards saved to their Google Account. New AdMob integration with Google Analytics for Firebase helps them monetize efficiently and updates to Universal Apps Campaigns will help them grow their user base.
New interfaces to push the limits of what’s possible
Actions on Google for the Google Assistant—We brought Actions on Google to phones, introduced new features and functionality, improved our SDK and more. We also launched the Actions Console, a new developer console that helps developers work as a team, and collect data on app usage, performance and user discovery patterns. This new console is integrated with the Firebase and Google Cloud consoles.
VR and AR at Google—We’ll have more to share on the latest Daydream platform features and developer tools during our “VR and AR at Google” session tomorrow (May 18) at 9:30 AM PT in the Amphitheatre and on the livestream.
It's important to us that developers are successful. In addition to building products that help solve developer challenges, we’re on the ground in over 130 countries, growing and expanding the developer community through programs such as Women Techmakers & Google Developer Groups (GDGs). We’re also investing in training programs like Google Developers Certification and courses through Udacity and other partners to help developers deepen their technical capability. We’re also excited to announce two large multi-product developer events, Google Developer Days, which are planned for Europe (September 2017 in Krakow, Poland) and India (December 2017 in Bangalore, India). If you are interested to find out more, sign up for updates on g.co/gdd2017.
During Google I/O, attendees and viewers have an opportunity to dive deep into a number of these areas with 14 content tracks and 140+ breakout sessions—covering Android to Assistant to VR—and all live streamed. We’ve also launched over 70 codelabs to get developers up and running with our latest APIs today.
Whether it’s Android, Chrome, Play, VR/AR, the Cloud, or the mobile web, we’re constantly investing in the platforms that connect developers to billions of users around the world. Thank you to the continued support and feedback from the developer community.
