Google I/O 2017: Empowering developers to build the best experiences across
platforms
By Jason Titus, Vice President, Developer Product
Group
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 livestream, 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.
We have a lot to cover over the next three days. 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 web-page 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 I/O'16 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 livestreamed. 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, and 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.
