Pixelated - Chatting with Google at I/O 2026 (with Seang Chau and Dieter Bohn)

Episode Date: May 20, 2026

Welcome to episode 101 of Pixelated, a podcast by 9to5Google. This week, Abner and Damien are joined by Seang Chau and Dieter Bohn of Google to discuss the biggest announcements of I/O 2026. Sponsored by Proton Unlimited: Pixelated listeners can save 30% on an annual subscription to the company's suite of privacy-friendly services by signing up using our link. Thanks to Proton Unlimited for sponsoring the podcast. Subscribe YouTube Podcasts Pocket Casts Spotify Amazon Music Apple Podcasts Overcast Hosts Abner Li Damien Wilde Seang Chau Dieter Bohn Read more Everything Google announced at I/O 2026: Gemini, Search, Android XR, & more ‘Gemini Spark’ is Google’s upcoming AI agent in the Gemini app  Google teases mysterious ‘Android Halo’ at I/O, coming ‘later this year’ Listen to more 9to5 Podcasts The Sideload 9to5Mac Happy Hour Electrek Space Explored Feedback? Drop us a line at [e-mail], leave a comment on the post, or reach out to our producer. And for even more Android discussion, dive into the official 9to5Google forums!

Welcome to Pixelated episode 1001. I'm your host, Will Saddleberg. This week, Damien and Abner are a Google I.O. 2026 talking to two very special guests from Google. Sang Chow, VP of Android, and everyone's favorite Google visionary, Dieter Bone. Heads up that this is an I.O. recording, so this episode's audio quality is just a little different than usual, and contains a couple of minor hiccups. Bear with us, and we'll be back to our typical sound next week. With that said, let's dive into our chat live from Google IO. right after this word from our sponsor, Proton.

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I just want to say this is a very special episode. This is episode 101 of Pixelated. and we have our first guest, two very special guests. One is a crowd favorite. One is very, very, I guess, knowledgeable. She's an understatement on all things Android. You know that we love talking about Android here on Pixelated. I just want to welcome Chiang Chow and Dieter Bone to the podcast.

Thanks for joining me in a very, very hot room here at I.O. Squirled away in the background. Just tell me how you guys have been getting on today the last couple of days leading up to probably the biggest I.O. in a few years, I guess. Yeah, I think we're getting on pretty okay. I was very excited about the keynote. There were some surprises for me in there. But we got to announce so much of our stuff at the Android show that, you know,

I wasn't like sitting and chill. We had Android announcements today for sure. But the sheer volume of it wasn't today. So I got to actually like experience I owe more than I usually do. Yeah, it was great seeing the reaction to the Android show and the things that landed really, really well. Yeah. And then, you know, we had saved Android Halo for today. And I think that to go along with agents, specifically Gemini Spark.

And I thought that that was pretty interesting as well in seeing the reaction. I'm going to jump on the Halo thing a little bit. Like, you've teased this. And I've tried to make some kind of assumptions on this. I know you probably won't be able to tell me this. But like, is this something that you want to do more with Android in general? And obviously in this era of kind of teasing pretensual product announcements, IOS seems like the perfect place to do that because it has a lot of eyes on the price,

but more broadly than, say, Android on its own? Or is that just something that may or may not happen? You know, I think there's a, there's a, there's a couple of things, right? One, you know, we've been talking about how we're transitioning from an operating system to an intelligence system. So we want to make sure that these kind of capabilities, when we're talking about agents, we're talking about proactive functionality, we're talking about those kind of things that helped you doing your workflow

so that you don't have to come to the AI or remember that you have assistance there. and then we can come to you. I think that's where we have to build this kind of functionality in. But the industry is moving so fast. The capabilities are moving so fast. The agents are getting so much better, so much more quickly that we have to be able to react, but also move very, very quickly.

And I think being able to do these releases throughout the year and pre-announcing, it wasn't meant necessary to be just a tease, but we're just saying, hey, look, all this stuff came from. really fast and we want to make sure that we're keeping up with it. I mean, from my perspective, I quite like that there's a dedicated little bit of Android in an IOC keynote that's so focused on AI. But my big kind of question is, is Android now developing to the point where AI is still

so prominent within it that it feels like this brand new thing every year? Is it just going to iterate almost slowly, I guess, like until we get to this point where, I mean, from my perspective, it feels like, and I have a prediction, that Android is German, and vice versa? I think Gemini and our models can be a very nice platform. As you can see, people are building a lot of things on top of it. But I think, you know, applications still have a role in our lives, right? We still use them to get things done.

And so, you know, I don't think that that transition is going to be happening anytime soon where the operating system simply dissolves the way into the model. But I do think the models are getting extremely capable. And one of the things that we try to do and one of the reasons why so much of what we've done in Android is, quote unquote, behind the scenes is because we kind of try to make that technology disappear into the background. Like the user should not have to worry about what's happening where and how it looks like and all these shiny things. But just, you know, things happen and, you know, things that you would like to get done just happen faster. So what do you say in like an ideal world, Android looks more like Chrome, where everything's silently updates in the background. then people don't necessarily need to care

or know what version they're running on. I don't know if I would say that it looks more like Chrome. I think Chrome is a very different interaction model than the applications that are running on your device. A lot of being able to very rapidly switch and get kind of immersive experience as you're either consuming content or getting something done

in a particular creative app or a game or something like that, I think it's still a very different model, especially on a mobile phone form factor versus a sit-down posture of like a laptop. Kind of think of Chrome more as, you know, mouse and keyboard input. A lot of websites are optimized for that. Of course, there's a lot that are optimized for mobile as well, but those tend to be,

and I think people prefer still native applications on their mobile phones as opposed to wrapped websites. I'm going to lead into a little bit there with regards to the future with Google Book and that being part of Android. We saw last week Gemini Intelligence. We're now seeing a lot more Gen UI stuff for interfaces and things like that. Do we kind of, are we in a transition period now where potentially we're going to make the applications to bridge the gap maybe?

Because I know Google Books are brand new phone factor. It is building from what Android can currently do. Do we potentially see Google Books getting into the gap? software from the user themselves rather than expecting potentially companies to come in and do that and make certain software and productivity productivity suites and packages available

is that something that you think you might push users to do more? I think the fact that the Google Books have built on an operating system that's built on the Android technology thing allows us to have a lot more flexibility with respect to how people,

how users get to applications and services. So whether they're developed by a partner or third-party developer or they're designing their own widget as an example, where instead of going to a particular website and hitting a refresh every time they want that infreason, we just do that for them inside a widget, and then they can put that on their space, right? And you can imagine that as there are more areas that we decide

and that we can build a high-quality experience, it could be other places where GenUI, and there was a lot of GenUI that was shown on stage today. that in more and more aspects of the user interface, where they make sense, of course, and where we can build a high quality interface would show up on the device as well. I mean, one of the benefits of Google Book is,

because it's built, the OS is built on the Android technology stack, a bunch of the innovations that we are bringing for other form factors are easier to bring. So we can do create my widget on a Google Book relatively quickly because we can do those innovations, and multiple form factors at once. With regards to the Create My Widget thing, this is kind of a bit more fun question.

Have you seen anyone in your teams, whoever it is who's been testing this out internally or whether that be externally? Have you seen no one made any, like, really cursed widgets? The kind of things, the kind of things are like, why would you want a widget for that? So, I think I can say this. On the watch, one of the things you can, like,

you know, pull into a Create My Widget is like certain health metrics. So you are free to display your heart rate next to anything that you could think of that may or may not spike your heart rate. So you could put it next to a sports team or, you know, whatever, stock price. Yeah. Pryce is a common one. Yeah. So nothing too drastically insane. Just kind of like, I guess it's data-driven, is it?

So I think a lot of people would do it that way. Yeah. I think when people were testing it internally, interusing it, they actually would use it. But we have red teams that will test it for some of the more trickier things. things. But yeah, internally, I think people are really disusing and for things that are going to be most useful. What are you guys currently? I'm guessing you're both testing it right now, right? That'll be obvious, an obvious question. Tell me, tell me the most insane one you've made so far.

Insane, man. It doesn't have to be insane. It can make you sleep boring. I got to be honest with you. Both boring. Yeah. Sorry. Oh, I'm a bit disappointed. I think if I was to do myself making Gen AI widgets, which is something I've... I think I've actually posed this on the podcast before, haven't, I've talked about it. So I don't know if you guys have been listening secretly. We talked about potentially having more, like, kind of,

Gen AI within the actual OS of Android itself. Like maybe you've already done AI icons. I was about to say wallpapers. That was a few years ago. Yeah. I think is widgets just the obvious place to start? Because I guess high-quality widgets, can be few and far between, sadly, I think, on Android.

Well, I think it's a lot about getting information you're looking for to you as more rapidly, right? Because if you're trying to check something, you go to search, you look for something, and you go to that page, and then you're kind of hitting that refresh button and trying to get that data. Now, with the generated widgets, we go to that website for you, create that widget, and then pull that data from that website in order to have it on your widget. So it's actually a really cool technology to be able to do that and have that information surface to you anytime you need it. Yeah, I can definitely see that with sports teams.

Yes, it exists. So that is a big one for me because my sports team, the Google widgets doesn't always work because they're so low down the English football pyramid, as it were, that I don't think it's on anybody's radar. The other thing about the creating my widget that I've experienced is, you know, I set my home screen once and then I like don't change it for a year, right? I am about so. But with Create My Widget, like I'm now using my home screen more.

I'm like creating widgets, oh, I don't need this anymore, get rid of it, and then like make another screen that's like for this set of information and that set of information. And so I actually find myself moving away from like, oh, this is just like a curated space that shows my wallpaper and my calendar widget and nothing else into a thing that's actually useful as more than just like where is my folder for my like, you know, you know, music icons or whatever. Yeah, yeah. I guess, I guess in terms of interactivity, is that something as well that you start to see a lot, people doing more because I always find that static widgets are something that I'm like, do I need this or do I need something that I'm going to be interacting with and opening an application instead? Yeah. Like foldables are a good example.

I have the pixel tempera fold and I kind of feel like there's maybe a lack of high quality foldable widgets apart from those maybe the first party ones. Is that something that obviously we didn't get to see it in the Android show? Is that something that can be a little bit more, I guess, tailored to that form factor? You know, because the widgets that we create are resizable. I don't know if we actually ended up. Yeah, we show just a little basic resized. You can specify what you'd like to see.

It figures out how to lay it out, puts the little icons in here and there for you. But then it's fully resizable. So you should be able to configure it for the sizes, it's by that you have whether to foldable or slate. And I guess the other thing I'll add is, you know, these are carrying on watches and phones. Yeah, foldables. tablets, Google books, Auto.

Auto is a big one, actually. And so, you know, the layouts and the shapes and the iconography that we're going to be able to do, we're going to want to make sure that it works well across all those form factors. And so there doesn't need to be a specific focus on just a foldable form factor because we're making these things adaptive across

screen sizes. And foldables will just benefit from that by dint of being in that spectrum. You mentioned Android Auto. I'm a huge fan of Android. Auto. I love the silo experience that you have in a vehicle and I understand that like, and I kind of love that you guys have been paying attention to that this year. Have you seen people utilising the way? I don't know personally how I'd use widgets in my car,

but I guess once I get them and have them available, I can play around with it. And also, you guys tend to show in demos the landscape orientation of Android Auto and I'm a portrait orientation vehicle, I have a Volvo. Is that something that you can showcase a little bit more with portrait orientation, Android, or a little bit more? I also have a Volvo with a portion of orientation, so I will, I will advocate. People like sure it happens. Yeah.

Good. Because I like, as much as I like, I love to see in the widget integration and stuff like that in the Android show demos. I was like, how is this going to look on my screen? Because my screen looks completely different to everything that tends to be out there. And I guess, I guess in the real world, I'm kind of. of intrigued to how I will use them, but I guess everyone uses them differently, right? Have you seen any cool utilizations of widgets in vehicles so far?

I haven't gotten on to the dog food for this one, actually, yet. So I haven't had a chance to test it myself. I mean, I imagine I'm going to, I mean, you've already got like your ETAs on your maps and stuff, but there, I don't know, there might be some widgets I might use for, like, stores that are on my commute and, like, maybe they're opening and closing hours. So I can swipe over, like, oh, I can make it to the, this, you know, I can go by chicken on the way home or whatever. That's something I might try, but I got to experiment with it. And that's the other thing about creating my widget is it's, it's caused me to be more experimental, not just with my home screen and with what widgets I can make, but also like with Gemini, actually.

Like I'm, as the models improve and as I'm using it more, I am trying things with it that I wouldn't have even six months ago. Oh, yeah. And it's opening up new things I can do with my devices that I never would have considered before. Yeah, the interesting thing about CREMEA, maybe I shouldn't call this out. But, you know, it's mostly open. You get to ask for whatever you want. You brought up wallpaper and you brought up icons. We don't let you just create whatever you want.

There's a picker, right? We keep it putting the arrow. And even our automations from earlier this year, when we launched it with Galaxy S-26 and Pixel 10, and we constrained it to certain applications. But as the models are getting better, as we are making sure that from a safety, privacy, data, security, all of those things, we're starting to expand it more and more and you're going to be able to have a lot more capability

when you're talking about cross-app automation, cross-app data retrieval and taking data from this application and using it over here, it becomes really useful, especially in the auto-use case. Yeah, I can definitely see that. I think having that safety-sided mentality makes the most sense. I think without dropping car play in it,

I don't think the carplay experiences is nicely siloed to the vehicle. It feels very much like an extension of the phone, even though it kind of should be and shouldn't be at the same time. I want to ask one more question related to I.O. What announcements that you have seen today that maybe you weren't aware of ahead of I.O.

Have you been most interested in outside of your usual remit in this kind of Android sort space? So mine is universal cart. I was not aware that was coming. And I think it's going to solve a real pain point for me that I'd like, it's one of those things. I was like, oh, actually this is great. Like I've got carts on other, you know, stores and then I'll like save it for later,

blah, blah, blah, blah. But I'm, you know, I have a constant set of things that I'm like ambiently shopping for, but not like actively shopping for. There's sometimes when I like, I know I want to buy this specific thing. I go to the store. I buy it. I go to the website and I buy it. But like I my personal failing is I keep looking for like the ideal bag for me.

Yes. Yes is your bag. And so having a universal cart where like I just sort of like have a bunch of bags that I'm considering in there and it will be able to tell me, oh, there's a sale on this one or oh, you can get a deal on this one or, you know, whatever. Like the idea of having a cart that works across multiple stores and that can actually reason on the things in the cart. They show the example of like your PC parts aren't compatible or whatever. I think that could end up being really, really useful. I don't want to like, I haven't used it yet, so I don't want to like, I don't know, hallucinate ideas of what the thing can do before I've actually used it.

But I can see the potential there and I'm really excited about it. Yeah, I think I'm kind of the bad, I'm on a bad guy. Yeah, I do like the universe of car, but if you want a different answer as well. So last year, for me, it was very clearly flow. That was very, very cool. This year, great upgrades to flow, but Picks is quite interesting. Google Picks because I have young kids and I'm terrible at making signs, flyers, these kinds of just that kind of content, right?

And so it's something that helps me create all of that much, much easier as a Google product that uses all the information that I already have. Like, that's fantastic. Yeah. Now, if you want to talk about stuff that we like had some ideas that we're coming, like out of everything at I know, I think for me is probably spark. That's like going to be like the most, but like, yes, what we didn't know was coming.

and that was, yeah. We knew that it was coming. We've both been using it. It's amazing. Yeah. Nice. I'm excited to switch. Try a lot of these services.

I guess we have a lot to look forward to in the next three, four, five, maybe six months. I know you guys love saying summer or coming later this year. And I mean, at risk of putting you, putting pressure on you guys, when do you think maybe later this before September? We might see some of these features, Gemini Intelligence and things like that, and coming to Dubai. Oh yeah, I think we said summer. You should be able to figure out why summer. Yeah. But yeah, we fully expect these Gemini intelligence features,

some of them to be available where they can be here. Yeah, and just to be clear, see, I just said some of them. Like, we're going to be rolling these things out as they're ready over the course of the year. And so, you know, not everything will be, like, dropping on like the very first Gemini intelligence device date. So we're taking the time to make sure we get everything right. Safety, privacy, security, all those are very important. So we just need to make sure.

And of course, the quality bar. If it only works like half the time or even 80% of the time, that's just not good enough. People stop using it. Then you shot your shot and that's it. Yeah. I'm excited to try Rambler because I'm the kind of person. Yeah, we can't end on that down note.

Like, Rambers break. It is great. Everybody then switches to Rambler. Ambler just won't that switchbacker. Yeah, I'm really looking forward to trying that because I'm the kind of person who will, I'm sure you've done it before. And I think in your example on the, in the Android show, it was like a shopping list. Yeah. I'm so bad at like remembering something or it may be something that, oh, I've quickly checked in the cupboard and I know that it's not there. And I'm excited to be able to test that. And I know my partner will get really, really annoyed, don't know if you're doing it. And be like, why have you sent me a huge block of text? And it's already bad enough as it is. But getting rid of those homes and ours is going to be fantastic for me. I don't know if you had any other questions happening before we wrap up. But. But I'm, it's a very hot room, guys. We've put Deter and sharing through this, and we are melting. So thanks very much for joining us. I'm going to say thank you guys.

It's been a pleasure. It's been a short one. And hopefully we'll speak to again on the podcast in the future, maybe. Looking forward to it. Thanks, David. Thanks. Thanks for listening to Pixelated, a 9 to 5 Google podcast. If you enjoyed the show, we ask that you rate and review it on the podcast platform of your choice

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