This morning at Google I/O, the Android team shared some updates.
It’s hard to believe a little more than two and a half years ago, we were just one device,
launching in one country, on one carrier. Thanks to the ecosystem of manufacturers, developers
and carriers, the platform has grown exponentially. There are now:
100 million activated Android devices
400,000 new
Android devices activated every day
200,000 free and paid applications
available in Android Market
4.5 billion applications installed from
Android Market
Mobile—one OS everywhere Over the past two and a half years, we’ve shipped eight releases of Android and there are
now more than 310 Android devices around the world, of all shapes and sizes. This morning we
talked about our next version of Android, Ice Cream Sandwich. Our goal with Ice Cream Sandwich
is to deliver one operating system that works everywhere, regardless of device. Ice Cream
Sandwich will bring everything you love about Honeycomb
on your tablet to your phone, including the holographic user interface, more multitasking, the
new launcher and richer widgets.
We also launched Music Beta by Google, a new service that
lets you upload your personal music collection to the cloud for streaming to your computer and
Android devices. With the new service, your music and playlists are automatically kept in
sync, so if you create a new playlist on your phone, it’s instantly available on your computer
or tablet. You can use a feature called Instant Mix to create a playlist of songs that go well
together. You can even listen to music when you’re offline: we automatically store your most
recently played music on your Android device and you can choose to make specific albums or
playlists available when you’re not connected. The service is launching in beta today to U.S.
users and is available by invitation.
We’ve also added Movies for rent to
Android Market. You can choose to rent
from thousands of movies starting at $1.99 and have them available across your Android
devices—rent a movie on your home computer, and it’ll be available for viewing on your tablet
or phone. You can rent from Android Market on the web today, and we’ll be rolling out an
update to Verizon XOOM customers beginning today. We’ll start rolling out the update to
Android 2.2 and above devices in the coming weeks.
The Android
ecosystem has been moving really fast over the last two and a half years and rapid iteration
on new and highly-requested features has been a driving force behind Android’s success. But of
course that innovation only matters if it reaches consumers. So today we’re announcing that a
founding team of industry leaders, including many from the Open Handset Alliance, are working
together to adopt guidelines for how quickly devices are updated after a new platform release,
and also for how long they will continue to be updated. The founding partners are Verizon,
HTC, Samsung, Sprint, Sony Ericsson, LG, T-Mobile, Vodafone, Motorola and AT&T, and we
welcome others to join us. To start, we're jointly announcing that new devices from
participating partners will receive the latest Android platform upgrades for 18 months after
the device is first released, as long as the hardware allows...and that's just the beginning.
Stay tuned for more details.
More—extending the platform
beyond mobile From the beginning, Android was designed to extend beyond
the mobile phone. With that in mind, we’ve developed Android Open Accessory to help developers
start building new hardware accessories that will work across all Android devices. We
previewed an initiative called Android@Home, which allows Android apps to discover, connect
and communicate with appliances and devices in your home. We also showed a preview of Project
Tungsten, an Android device for Music Beta to give you more control over music playback within
the Android@Home network.
You can watch the entire Android keynote from
Google I/O on our Google
Developer YouTube Channel shortly. On behalf of the team, we want to thank the
entire Android community of developers, OEMs and carriers who are pushing the platform into
new areas and building great experiences for consumers. Without you, the Android platform
wouldn’t have grown so large in the past two and a half years. We look forward to seeing where
you take it next.
Hugo Barra is Director of
Product Managment for Android.
