a16z Podcast - a16z Podcast: Google I/O -- A Three-Hour Tour (in 30 minutes)

Episode Date: June 26, 2014

The Google I/O keynote was epic in at least one respect, length. For three hours Google laid out the near horizon for all things Google. This included the next version of Android; a new platform for connected watches; Google for your car; yet another Google TV; and a new health platform. Andreessen Horowitz’s Benedict Evans plowed through it all, including what was noticeably absent: Google+ and Google Glass. What the future looks like as the lines between mobile apps and web pages blur, and why Google is the new Microsoft -- in the best possible way.

Welcome to the A16Z podcast. I'm Michael Copeland, and we're here with Benedict Evans, who is digesting three hours of Google I.O. Keynote and then some. Benedict, welcome. Welcome. So, three hours long, really? Yeah, and people started making jokes at about the two-and-a-half-hour mark. My suggestion was that they should get Peter Jackson to produce next year's. It sounds about right. I mean, what Apple does is they actually have two key. So they have the one that everyone knows about, which is two hours, and then they have something called State of the Union where they talk about all the really interesting technical stuff that afternoon. So Apple actually does do four hours as well because there's just so much stuff

going on. But Apple kind of, Google kind of squeezed it all in and, you know, people started to go to sleep towards the end, I think. Gilgan's Island, a three hour ride or journey, whatever it is. So in that three hours, what stood out for you? Let's sort of tick through some of those things and and then dig a little deeper. So I think there's a couple of observations here. One is that it seemed like there was relatively little around Android. And there's lots of nice incremental stuff, but there weren't like major strategic moves or major tent pole features.

And more of the discussion was around the, what you might call the satellites. So the wearable device, the fitness, the car, the TV. And, you know, they announced the next version of Android. blah blah blah blah blah I think the second thing that I thought was interesting was the move a sort of a shift in mood and so there's a pair piece here with with WWDC because obviously WWDC they've had Apple has had this regime change last year they redesigned the OSS it changed the whole management structure this year they had like this enormous blizzard of announcements but one of the the stuff that came through that was a they'd move from a vertical to horizontal integration organization So you have Craig Fedoriga responsible for all the software, for example. And secondly, there was a really big shift in moot. They were much more relaxed, so much more jokey.

All the announcements were about kind of openness and making life easy for developers rather than sort of imposing obligations on them. So all the developers came out of WWDC thinking, wow, this is a different Apple. Right. And this year at I.O., obviously, again, Google's had this change in personnel. They now have SIM running both apps and Android and Chrome. So they've got, again, they've got all the future stuff under one person. And previously, Android was a total black box. They gave you these random numbers every now and then that never quite reconciled with each other.

And they haven't given any statistics at all on Android in nine months. And they've never given any data on Google Play. Right. I mean, they've given app downloads, but they've never given revenue data. And this year, they threw up a shot of annual monthly active users. what they called the active users. So they said for the first time that there were now a billion

active users of Google Android, which doesn't count China and Kindle. And does that square with kind of what used up? Which squared more or less with my model. I think my model was like 1.1 or something. So, you know, it's within the margin of O and it's probably, it's not exactly one billion anyway. But the really interesting thing

was they gave a number for revenue from Google Play of that they paid out $5 billion to developers in the last 12 months and $2 billion in the previous 12 months. so seven billion in two years yeah now but five billion in the last 12 months now Apple said in January that they paid out seven billion in 2030

and if you look at the revenue growth rate the run rate grace rate that means that Apple probably paid out 10 billion in the last 12 months right and there are as it might be 450 million active iOS devices on earth so Apple is doing double the developer revenue and half the number of devices explain that

Well, I mean, it's not actually very surprising at all. In the first hand, that's what everybody in the industry sees. Right. You can talk to any developer, any publisher, with very few exceptions, this is what everyone sees. Secondly, or it's what all of our portfolio companies see this. The second thing is... See, they see that they can make money from iOS. Yeah, I mean, this was the number I had in my head yesterday.

The Android revenue is something like half of... The Android Arpoo is something like a quarter of iOS Arpoo. And there's a bunch of reasons for this, and you can argue all day about the relative importance. One reason is that Android tends to be, have high market share in lower income countries. One is that it hasn't implemented payment necessarily very well. A lot of those countries, people don't have credit cards, and Google hasn't implemented carrier billing yet. Another reason is that iPhones average $600, an Android phone seemed to average about $250 to $300. So it may well be that people in America with the Galaxy S-5 are spending the same as people with iPhones,

but that's a small percentage of the overall base. You've just got an awful lot of people in there with $100 phones who don't have a credit card who are just screwing up the averages. Another reason is that you get a sort of self-fulfilling effect with developers, that if developers feel there's no money on Android, they'll either won't support it or they'll come to it later or they'll come to it with a different business model

that doesn't require in-app purchase. They might go with an ad-supported model instead of an app purchase model. So they're actually not giving people on Android the opportunity to spend as much. And the flip side of that, of course, is that that then means that people who want that app or want it first or are willing to pay

are more likely to buy an Android because they can't get what they want on iPhone, more likely to buy an iPhone because they can't get it in the first place. So you get this kind of virtuous, vicious circle of, you know, apps, you know, all the revenue kind of get sucked over to iPhone because of this interaction of developers and so on. There's a final observation one could suggest

that, you know, the kind of people who want to buy iPhone, if you're given the choice of an iPhone and Android, different people, what types of people, make a different choice. and maybe the kinds of people who choose Apple's proposition and just more predisposed to spend money on apps and the kinds of people who choose Android. That is to say, maybe iPhone users really do spend more money

than GalaxyS5 users, we don't know. But however you cut this, it means, and I just kind of wrote a quick blog post on sort of Ben Evans.com, it means that there's not so much market share as market shares. Mm-hmm. Explain that for you. So, globally, Apple sells 10% of all the phones on Earth, and Android sells 50% or 60% of all.

on it. So, you know, Apple's got 15 to 20% share in aggregate. But then in America, it's more like 4555. And in San Francisco, it's more like 60, 65 of iPhone. And then in Detroit, it's more like 60, 65% Android. And, you know, I did a little, if you look at somewhere like, if you look at really affluent areas, it's really higher. If you look at emerging markets, then it's all Android, except for very rich people who have iPhones. But then there's very rich people in Brazil. Right. I've got all the money, so they get disproportionate share of spending. If you look at India or Indonesia or any of those kinds of markets,

it's all BlackBerry and Nokia converting very quickly to iPhone. Conversely, interestingly, in China, actually Apple has more like 20 or 30% share, appears to have 20% or 30% share of usage, although much lower share of notional sales of devices. So, you know, where are you? What kind of users are you trying to go for? And then if Apple has two serves of all the revenue, that is to say, 10 billion versus 5 billion,

what are you trying to achieve? Are you trying to achieve massive global reach? Are you trying to monetize that through advertising? Are you Amazon and you just want your app everywhere? Are you producing a beautifully handcrafted game that appeals to a small number of people? And you want people to pay $10 for it? Are you guilt group?

Are you whatever? So, you know, what exactly are you trying to achieve? And I think this is the, you know, the kind of one of the broader points here is we're just entering a world of systemic complexity. there will, you know, it will not be as easier as it was on the web. There will not be one platform. Right.

There will not be one winner, at least not for the next couple of year foreseeable future anyway. And you're just going to have to get used to that. I think changing tech a little bit, and then we'll go on to all the bot, little, the satellite things. There's something that I saw in WWC and sort of kind of expected to see here and kind of, actually kind of didn't see that much. Actually, let me phrase that kind of did. was that you have this kind of divergence in approach and philosophy. That's to say, you know, WWDC was full of cloud, but it was all about cloud as back end to rich native apps.

Right. Whereas I.O. was all about cloud as cloud, much more. And it was all about the clever stuff that's going on in Chromebook and the clever stuff that's done on Google servers. Now, there was much, much more of that last year. And two of the things we didn't wear, we had like hours and hours hours about Google Plus and all the amazing image processing that Google Plus was going to do for you, which I thought is a really interesting narrative about the massive volume of photographs

and how, who is better place to manage, you know, a thousand photographs a month, Google with this amazing cloud service or Apple with this rich native app, and you can argue it both ways. And arguably Google should be able to do cleverer stuff. But we didn't hear a word about any of that. You didn't hear Google Plus mentioned except, like I think there was once, the one time I actually noticed Google Plus being mentioned, was one of the product manager was saying, and another new feature is you can integrate this with Google Plus

and waited for the applause and there was just dead silence in the room. The only applause line that just went completely hanging. And then Google Glass wasn't mentioned at all at all. So just Google Plus's leader, he left Google. So Google Plus is without a hero perhaps. Google Glass last year was everywhere. I mean, what do you make of these absences, you know? well you know what can you say the stuff that's not there because there's another event coming in a month

but you know Google's been incredibly class on quiet on glass for right years and you know the thing is really you know is gone nowhere um you know we don't we don't know maybe there'll be something will happen maybe it won't but it feels like it was out there was a test it was a test it was a test it didn't work um but you know if you remember previous years there was buzz and there was wave and there were all these other google initiatives and went nowhere there was hangouts remember hangouts true and and google's you know willing to take a flyer on these things yeah exactly i mean i think there's a macro point here that google is the new microsoft and this is the thing that came out really strongly last year and indeed this year is the sort of self-confidence and the ambition to do absolutely everything to become the global

computing platform to be the people who know computer science and will go and build shit right build stuff. There's Andrews and Horowitz, I'm allowed to swear. And that kind of takes us on quite nicely to all of the devices. Yeah, so what was the cool stuff that people were buzzing about or in fact they were? So we had three things. We had Androidware, which has been more or less completely announced before, but we got a full demo of it, which is a platform for a smart watch.

And there's kind of two components to this. And one is it can, well, three components. One is it will out of the box, it will display all the notifications from the apps on your phone without them have to be home to be adjusted at all on your Android phone, obviously. So, you know, you get Android notifications are quite, you know, sophisticated. You can see content from the message. You can get a yes or no, which is what Apple also introduces introducing an iOS 8. So you can look at your phone. It usually tells you've got an email that you can say yes or no. You can do turn-by-turn notifications. You can use Google

now. You can do a bunch of stuff there. Did, did Google build this hardware themselves? Did they contract it out? This is a platform and they're showing three devices, an LG and a Samsung that are available like now ish and then there's a Motorola one with a rather cool circular screen it looks cool if you're actually a developer and it's a watch and you've got about an inch square of screen estate and you've got no idea what size or shape the screen is going to be how the hell you're supposed to optimize your design if you don't even know if the corners are going to be there or not so you've got to optimize for a circular display even though it might be a square display so you've got to ignore whatever it is a third of the screen and assume it might not be

there it's like thanks very much but anyway the motorola one ships in the summer apparently do you want one so do I want it I had this funny feeling being reminded of the iPad demo and there was a moment in the iPad original iPad demo when Steve Jobs was sitting in a corbusier leather armchair on stage um holding an iPad and he was just kind of browsing and he's saying so yeah so I'm just like I'm like browsing the internet and it felt for like this horrible moment it felt totally underwhelming it's like you're just browsing the internet dude There's nothing cool about that. Right.

Which is what, you know, nine and tens of people who are watching the event, said it was just a big iPod touch. What a stupid idea. And so, but my point is, I was sitting watching the demo, and I'm thinking, yeah, so you just said, you just saw what your email was, and that's actually not very exciting at all. Right.

And I think somebody did a mock-up of a, they posted a photo of a mock-up of a smart watch where they just taken a pen and written, you always have email on their wrist. And then somebody else replied, and they took pen and they wrote you should exercise more on their wrist and I don't need a watch

it tells me to exercise more I'm married you know I get out already so you kind of look at it and you think is this like is this the iPad mistake that you kind of looked at it and you didn't understand

how much it changed things and you have to have it in your hand and use it before you'll understand or is it a solution in search of a problem you can certainly build a narrative that says well you shouldn't have to take your phone out of

your pocket all the time. And I think they gave a statistic in the event of, let me kind of check my notes, the number of people who, yeah, Android for an average Android user checks their phone 120 times a day. So that's 120 times that you wouldn't have to take your phone out of the pocket. But then I was looking at the interface and it reminded me a lot of my palm pilot 15 years ago of the, of how kind of painful it was to look at stuff that was squeezed on, squeezed onto that screen. Or even more, it reminded me of my feature phones. Like, I had a Lesonee Erickson W880, which is this fantastically beautiful piece of design. It's like a little milled slip of aluminium with this little, little colour screen on it. And it showed like five lines

of text at a time and actually reading anything on it, it was incredibly painful. And I'm looking at this guy reading his email on this tiny little screen and thinking, this is a really crappy experience, actually. Which comes back to the point about, you know, drawing on your wrist, you know, a device that tells you you have new email has zero value, actually. A device that tells you who you've got new email from actually kind of has zero value. A device that lets you read that email, two lines at a time or three lines at a time, has zero value. A device that gives you, but then some of the things are really cool, you know, something that gives you turn-by-turn navigation as you're walking somewhere,

so you're not pulling out your phone and kind of walking down the street looking at your phone, do I turn left here, do I turn right there? Right. You know, some of these things are really valuable but it just feels like it's groping away for absolutely the right use case and we're not quite there yet so then you have cars Google Auto yeah go Google Auto and this is again this isn't terribly new and indeed Apple has has Google has an equivalent product or fairly similar product and the the elemental concept here is you have a device that is replaced every 10 or 15 years made by a company that knows fundamentally nothing about software and you know on screen user interfaces And you have a device that's got a rich touchscreen and software made by people who do understand software and is replaced every two years.

So where should the intelligence be? Right. So probably be in the thing that's replaced every two years. And so you should probably have all the clever stuff in the phone, not in the car. And that makes a lot of sense to me. I mean, on the other hand, I can sort of see why it's quite nice to have GPS in your car without having to have a smartphone with you. But, you know, you do have your smartphone with you everywhere. So that's sort of there.

The challenge is, you know, 10 year replacement cycles. So it's not going to take off. So you did get the sense of, like, for example, in my hoopty Volvo, I will be able to upgrade to Google Auto just because I have a smartphone. Yeah, I think that's really. I feel like generally you're going to have to buy a new car. Right. And at that point, you feel like, well, why don't just get like a sucker and put your phone on the screen?

What, you know, stuff like, you know, data analysis and so on is more interesting, but you can use dongles for that, you know, things like automatic and so on. So, yeah, it's like it's interesting, but it's not that interesting. maybe it's just me, maybe it's because I don't have a car. So, but they did, Google did have health, their version of health care. Yeah, so they have a health thing, which was quite vague, but again, it's an interconnection system for your health devices. It's rather like Apple's Health Kit, and again, we'll see. And then the final thing was the TV, and this is...

This is their... This is the third TV thing. So there was Google TV, which was the most spectacular fiasco. And then there was Chromecast, which is actually a really good product and has done well. I mean, they're selling millions of them, much like the Apple TV. It's like, it's done well. but only you've gone so far. Right.

I have to say millions of people have got them not tens or hundreds of millions of people. And, you know, like the Voku and the Voodoo and the Hulu and all these, they all seem to have two syllable names. Right. I was amusingly this time last year, just about three weeks before Google IO, I wrote a blog post saying that I thought the next Apple TV would be a $50 HDMI dongle. You were wrong. It was $35 or whatever. Yeah, exactly. And he met one of the guys on the question.

Chromecast team and they said, we looked at that. I looked at that and I thought, who leaked to him? It hadn't even remotely occurred to me this because Google would do this. So I did kind of miss part of it. Anyway, there's no prizes for being right in this kind of world. So anyway, so the Chromecast is there. The Chromecast is doing well. The Chromecast has got bumped. There's a bunch of APIs to make it like do all the stuff that it should have had the first time around that they had time to do. Like, you know, you can now mirror your entire phone. You can mirror any app onto Chromecast and there's a bunch of other things like that, which is sensible enough. Google TV, I'm sorry, I should stop playing with my iPhone case.

Google TV, well, there were two basic problems with the first Google TV. The first was it kind of presumed you wanted to use a QWERTY keyboard to navigate and a mouse to interact with your screen. It was basically Android plugged into a not into a TV screen. It was Android formula phone plugged into a TV screen. And that was just a terrible experience. And Sony made this kind of bizarre handheld QWERTY keyboard. It was just dumb.

Oh, right. And Logitech got in on it. Yeah, Logite got lost an enormous amount of money. that's like hundreds of millions of dollars writing off of inventory. So that was the first problem. And so Google have now got a thing which actually has an interface that like makes sense 10 feet away and is controlled from your phone. So they've kind of kind of solved that. The second problem was kind of two problems or three problems.

It was really two problems. And so they've come up with a story around games and the story around having Google play and having movies. So it's basically just like, well, you get on Apple TV or Hulu or voodoo box or whatever it is. It's fine. These things are kind of a commodity at this point. But the problem with all of these things, the problem with the Kindle Fire, with the Apple TV, all of this stuff is that they all don't have the same content.

That is to say they all have marginally interesting content and stuff that isn't the stuff you absolutely have to have. Right. So they don't have a... And to the extent that they do, you only have it if you're a cable subscriber anyway. So you've already got it. So you can have HBO on your Apple TV,

but only if you already signed up this pay Comcast to $150 a month. Right. And the fantasy that everybody has is that they could just pay Comcast $30 a month and not have to buy and then pay their $50 dollars in the whole amount and have an al-a-car product. And of course, the nobody, absolutely nobody in the entirety of the TV industry

has any interest at all in letting you do that. Right. That's to say everybody hates the structure of the US cable and US TV industry, except the US TV industry who are kind of perfectly happy with it. Right. So you look at this thing and I mean this is kind of my kind of

standard narrative around all these devices is you look at this thing and it's a beautiful thing and a beautiful interface that you switch away from to get to your cable box so you can watch the stuff you actually want to watch. To be clear, would they describe today or unveiled, if that's the right word, it was just the platform. Yeah, it's the platform and more software. And the partnerships with the TV companies. Yeah. And the comment that they made on stage, which is exactly the same comment that they made when they launched original one, is something along the lines of, it's fantastic. We've got all these partners. of the TV ecosystem involved, they have no television companies involved.

Right. That is to say they have nobody who makes anything you want to watch any more than very proliferally involved in this. Now, that's not quite true. So they've mentioned partnerships with a couple of the IPTV cable television providers in France. So I think SFR and Buiq, who have quite substantial pay TV, pay TV operations are going to use this. But, you know, there's no Comcast, there's no ABC, there's no Fox,

there's no HBO, you know, there's not. there's no there's no you will not this will not change your experience watching madman and this won't change your google tv experience dramatically unless perhaps you live in france it sounds like yeah exactly or if you live in france or the uk if you live anywhere that doesn't have this very unique market structure where everybody has cable everybody pays a huge amount of money right have to pay a huge amount of money to get anything at all that you want to watch nowhere else in the world or no one else in the world that i can think of off the top of my head has that market structure

Right. So, you know, in the UK, you know, the BBC makes all of it stuff available for free online on any device. And so do all the other TV channels. And if you're a Sky subscriber, which is half the population, more or less, then, yeah, you can have the Sky have these apps and you can put them on any device and, you know, do whatever you want with it. So it's really only the US that you have this totally locked up gridlock system. And so this is kind of the point that if you were to say to me, I'm going to disrupt the mobile business, I would say to you with what spectrum. And if you have no answer to that, then I'm not interested. And in the same sense, if you say to me, I'm going to disrupt the TV business, then I will say, well, with what content?

Right. He's going to make content available to you on your platform. And until you can answer that question, you are basically poking around in the Netflix, Amazon Prime, Blockbuster, reruns, movie, second one, you know, you're pushed out down the exploitation chain, which is the industry term for it. You can't use this beautiful new interface instead of your cable boxes interface. to watch last night's episode of girls, last night's episode of whatever it is. So there's that kind of block. It's like, it's great, but.

Right. And so that was it. So we talked about watches and cars and... So did you, as you, you know, WWDC was a couple weeks ago. IOS going on for the next couple days, but, you know, most of what we're going to hear about and see was announced today.

Does it change your view of the world vis-a-vis those two companies, Apple and Google, do you have any sense of momentum? You talked a little bit about mood. So there's a thing to talk about here, which I think is very interesting, which is if you look at all of the stuff that they did in Android, a lot of it is about blowing the lines between what an app is and what a website is and how you move between the two. and then like two hours later they tell you that you will now be able to run Android apps on your Chromebook which on one level is completely surreal you know it's like why would you buy particularly like

the Chromebook pixel the joke was you could buy a MacBook Pro that for less money that runs Chrome and all your other apps why are you buying a Chromebook right particularly like a $300 Chromebook makes sense a Chromebook pixel made no sense still and so it's like Okay, so now you can buy a device that runs Chrome and, like, apps are designed to be run on smartphones. Like, why would you not just, like, buy, why wouldn't you buy a Windows or a Mac? Right. And install Chrome on it. Wouldn't that make more sense?

And, but that's, I say, that's like the obvious example. The more interesting reaction is to say, okay, so we're running Davlik slash what's the new runtime art. I can't remember. You're running Android native apps. Right. inside the Chrome platform. And you're showing it to me on a laptop. And you've also shown me a whole set of technologies

for breaking apart the differences between apps and web pages and letting you link between the two. What do we think Android is going to be in five years' time? What software do we think is going to be running on that device? What is it going to mean to say an app versus a web page? how much are those different different differentiation is going to get broken apart, especially with another five years of Moore's Law, changing a lot of these kind of performance questions.

Because, you know, right now you probably couldn't, you probably couldn't do that Android app within Chrome on a smartphone chip today. Right. But in five years' time. So I think that's the kind of strategic pointer. Where are you going to take what it means to say, I installed an app? Where do you address that?

kind of binary problem of is the app there or not? Do you run it again? How do you get people to run the app that they installed a month ago and have forgotten about? All of this sort of, this kind of Berlin wall that you have between the web and native code is fading away. Right. And you saw this completely the other way from Apple where they're breaking apart the app into notifications and keyboards and extensions. Obviously, you've had keyboards and actionable notifications and Android for a while. Extensions, you haven't had an Android, you have intense, but then intensely differently.

But so you've got people poking away. It's like they're not done yet. This quite, you know, they spent the last six or seven years going from the original iPhone and adding all the stuff that kind of needed to be there, both Apple and Android. And now it's like, okay, what are we doing in the next seven years? And that's going in very, very different direction.

I mean, you, I've heard you talk about this before, where you say that the richness and complexity and, you know, sheer beauty of the mobile world far outstrips that of sort of the browser-based world. I'm sure I'd talk about beauty. I just think there's this, that what the smartphone did was unbundle the internet from the web amongst many other things. And, you know, it bundled up lots of physical devices like hammers and music players and so on into one device.

But in software, in any kind of internet terms, everything was in the web. Right. And now everything is in two or three or four dozen different apps. And then you've got WeChat bundling everything up into an app again. So it's kind of turtles all the way down. It's like WeChat is like the solution to having lots of silos is we've made one big silo. Lots of put lots of little tiny tiny silos inside it, which I'm not sure how much sense that makes that outside of China. But then you have this kind of moving target because as Apple and Google sit and iterate and drive that experience forward,

what can we do that we'll make this better? What can we do that will make this work well for our users? And the answer is not, well, we'll delete the app store and we'll remove the ability to run native code and we'll turn it back into a web browser. That's this sort of bizarre fantasy that somehow everything will go back to being HML and links and the URLs, and that will be like the kind of the three pillars

of the internet again, which is the way it was before. It's like we are going, we've had this massive unbundling and bundling is getting more and more complex and sophisticated. And it's all going to get bundled back up again at some point in some way in like five years. Well, Benedict, I was going to ask you about England's pathetic performance in the World Cup, but... I didn't actually know the match was happening into the day. You were focused more on the future of what our experience in mobile and the Internet will look like. So we appreciate that.

And there will be more where this came from as you digested I.O. Yeah, I'm going to have to watch the whole thing again at least like once and maybe twice because it was the same thing after WWDC. I think we did the podcast and it's like I didn't even mention cloud drive or something. So I'd actually have to sit and look at the notes. Is there other stuff that I haven't mentioned that they announced? You know, they updated Chromecast, there's Apple TV, there's Android Auto, there's Android Ware, there's a developer preview of the next photo.

Oh yeah, it's like, well, here you are. So I didn't mention Android 1. So there is now a reference platform to do cheap $100 phones that retains much. greater degree of Google control. So a minimum hardware requirement, but at under $100 retail, keeping all the software up to date. And where does this

I mean, I thought we had that already, but where does this show up and why does Google want to do that? Now it's much more under Google control. The other thing that I think, I mean, I'll just, I'll just throw this in as another sidebar and then we should kind of go. The other thing that I thought was very interesting

is the Android fragmentation conversation. And Apple really likes to talk about this for obvious reasons. Right. You know, they control the platform, so they don't, they don't have a software fragmentation problem for practical purposes. A little bit of hardware fragmentation, but not really. And they also talked about malware, and Sundar was very explicitly taking on those two points, and I think with some justice. So, and there's two pieces to this. The first is that Google has moved all of its own APIs or a lot of its own stuff out of, and I

use that in a deliberately vague and untechnical sense. They moved a lot of their stuff out of the firmware where you were dependent on your OEM and your mobile operator to put something together and they generally didn't bother because they didn't bother, they weren't able to do it for a whole bunch of perfectly legitimate reasons generally. So you had your phone, and your phone never got updated after you bought it.

Right. That's all been moved into a software layer that lives in the app store and they can get updated automatically over the air. Oh, that's great. Well, that's good news for consumers. And so this is called Google Play Services. Google Play Services ships a new version every six weeks.

93% of the devices that are hitting Google Play are on the latest version. So effectively, 93% of the devices that are being actively used and going online have the latest version of Google Play Services. And Google has started putting all their bug fixes into that. So their heart bleed fix. All of their stuff goes into that. So from one perspective, the fragmentation problem, the software and the operating system fragmentation problem, the software and the operating system fragmentation problem is kind of much less important

than people still like to talk about. It's kind of overstated, I think. And particularly from Google's perspective, they roll out some cool new thing. It's on every Android phone. They don't have to wait for you to buy a new phone in 18 months' time with a new version on it. So their new service, their new Maps API,

their new this or their cloud service API, whatever it is that they want developers to use, will be on every phone. It's done. However, you have got a range of devices out there selling from anything from $50 to $600. Right. And so you've got different hardware out there.

Yeah, and very different hardware out there. And some stuff will just not run on some of these things. I've seen data suggesting that the number of Android devices that have Bluetooth LE in Southeast Asia is about 25%. So that's the thing. One of Apple's tent toll features, IBEacon will not work on three quarters of the Android phones in South East Asia. It's just not the hardware. isn't there to do it.

And when you then talk to game developers, you talk to people who've tried to build video apps, anything that actually needs to talk to device drivers and expect some kind of consistent response like, what is the camera aperture, please? And you get a different response on two different versions, on two Samsung Galaxy S-5s that were sold in different countries.

Right. And so the hardware fragmentation, both because of the function of the price, but just, you know, general is still really significant. And so therefore, you could say that Google, that Android fragmentation is both massively overstated and massively understated, depending on what you're trying to do. But should not?

So if you want Google now or you're building an app that uses the latest Android Maps API, there is effectively, but almost no fragmentation. If you want to make a cool video chat app, you've got a really serious problem. Right, right. work consistently across Android devices, it will take you twice as long or three times as it did to code it on iOS. But maybe you don't care because you're just shooting for that whatever, top third that will run it. But this comes back to your, um, to that revenue number. Exactly. So here you are with, um, the total pot of money to go for on Android is half what it is

on iOS. You have to get four times the users on Android to get the same RP. You, get on iOS and you have development costs that depending on what you're trying to do are either the same or two or three or four times bigger. Well, we will unravel this further as you dig it into it more and as always, thank you Benedict. Thank you.