The Vergecast - Google I/O and the future of Android with Google SVP Hiroshi Lockheimer and Android Director Stephanie Cuthbertson

Episode Date: May 9, 2019

Google's I/O conference in Mountain View, California, the Vergecast crew chats with Hiroshi Lockheimer, SVP at Google for Android, Chrome, Chrome OS, Play, comms and photos, and Stephanie Cuthbertson, director of Android to the show to talk new products such as the Pixel and Nest line, messaging, and of course Android. Subscribe to The Vergecast for free in your favorite podcast app https://pod.link/430333725 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey, everybody, it's Neil Life from the Vergecast. We have a super special episode this week. Dieter and I sat down live with Hiroshi Lockheimer and Steph Kuthbertsin from Google. Hiroshi is the SVP of ChromeOS and Android. Steph is in charge of Android. We are in front of an audience at the Computer History Museum right after Google I.O. We talked about everything Google announced. We talked about the future of Android, future of ChromeOS, all the other stuff.

It was really fun. Check it out. Support for the show comes from Retool. Too many companies run critical operations on duct-taped spreadsheets. Slack workflows, and whatever else they could cobble together. Not because they want to, but because building internal tools means weeks of waiting on someone else's backlog. That's where Retool comes in.

Build custom internal tools just by describing what you need. Proms something like, build me a revenue dashboard on our Salesforce data. And Retool actually builds it on your company's data and your cloud with enterprise security built in. Go to retool.com slash Vergecast. We all need to retool how we build software. What's up, y'all. I'm Skylar Diggins, seven-time WMBA All-Star, Olympic gold medalist, and mom. And I'm Cassidy Hubbard, host and reporter for nearly 20 years covering the biggest names and stories in sports and mom.

And this is Am Mom, a community for athletes, game changers, and moms of all kinds. Dropping May 14th. Tap in with us. Hello, and welcome to our chest, the flagship podcast of Google I.O. No. They didn't leave. I am Nile. I am a friend. Deeter is here. Hello, everybody. This is a very special episode of the Vergecast.

We are actually live at the Computer History Museum. It's day two of Google I.O. I have to say, I love it here. I don't know if anybody in the audience, if you're in your car and you just hear people randomly scream the word Android, it's because we have an audience, and I foolishly told them to do that.

But we're at the Computer History Museum, which is wonderful. Deeter and I walked around earlier. and he made me leave because I didn't want to leave. This place is great, so I encourage everybody to come visit. If you guys are here, you get a chance to tomorrow, come back and look. There's an actual functional, like, first-generation cray supercomputer back there somewhere, and I had, like, a deeply emotional moment.

You shouldn't have an emotional moment with, like, a piece of hardware from the 70s, but I did. Okay, so Dieter, it's Google I.O. It is. Oh, I need to tell the people in their cars one more thing. We have guests. We do. Hiroshi Lockheimer. and Steph Kupfretson from Google are here with us.

We're going to talk about Android a little bit. But first, Deere, let's talk about IO. What happened here? Just a ton. So if you're here, you probably know. So we have a new version of Android that's been out for a while, but there's a new beta, Android Q. Android is a 10th version of Android, which is a big deal.

We have, what else do we have? It's all blanking at me. There's a bunch of stuff in Android Q. There's a big keynote yesterday. They announced a bunch of new assistant features, assistant can now control your life. So the cool thing

about the assistant is they showed up a Dex Generation demo where the assistant can work locally on the device and they can use the thing where it continues to listen to you and they just rattled off commands as fast as they could and the phone just kept up and did it. Right. And the technical achievement there was they

moved the model, the voice recognition model, locally to the phone. Yep. And they shranked it way down. Yeah, they shrunk it way down. And they said it will come to the next pixels. They come to new pixels. Which confirmed Google will make more pixel devices. In case anyone who's confused about that. So that was big assistant news.

They're moving it locally. Unclear whether we'll come to all existing phones or just the new ones. That's very exciting. There's a big focus on privacy here. Sooner up a privacy of Google, wrote an op-ed for the New York Times. I thought our headline was quite clever because we... I mean, he wrote about privacy. but he took some clear shots, I think, specifically Apple.

Yeah, privacy is not a luxury. Privacy is not a luxury good. And he said, in the op-ed, he said at some other places, you shouldn't have to buy an expensive phone or subscribe to a subscription service to have privacy. I think that's going to get unpacked a lot. During the keynote here, I'm sure if you guys watched it, if you're in the audience, there was a plane flying above the keynote.

I don't know who that. It wasn't me. I was in the audience. It wasn't anybody I know. But the plane had a banner that said Google Control is not privacy. And then there was a hashtag. I know what the hashtag was.

I'm not boosting the plane, it's what I'm saying. But that is fundamentally, I think, the big conversation will occur on privacy. Well, and so the privacy conversation in the context of this IO in particular is fascinating because on the one hand, Google is talking about the things it's doing

to protect your privacy, give you options to have your data removed if you want to. Incognito mode is coming to many more other services. But on the flip side, they're also showing off a bunch of stuff that they're able to do with the assistant in particular in their machine learning that you kind of think is enabled by all the data they collect.

So there's a huge emphasis on accessibility, which is normally a snooze, but the features that were shown off were just flat out mind-blowing. There's live caption on Android, which can just transcribe text in real time from any video. We saw a bunch of lens demos where it was able to read and translate text in real time, either spoken or just translate it there. So for people who literally can't read or want to be able to do a different language,

just transformative technology. So there's this very fascinating yin-yang of like Google can do this amazing stuff, but Google is also aware that everyone's freaked out about privacy and they need to balance those things. And that's like I felt that thread running through the whole keynote. Yeah, and I think that's just a tension that we're, we will all explore together on our journey through the world's of technology. But the idea that you should trust one vendor with a lot of your data

because they will do very useful things. I think the way that Sundar referred to it, and everyone at Google is talking about as they want to be very helpful. And I think that requires them to know some things about you. They announced a new feature of Duplex along the same line.

Google Duplex. Last year they announced it can make phone calls for people. It did ship some people are using it. Now it can use the web for you. Well, it can fill out web forms, which thank you. I like that.

But you can tell the assistant to rent you a car and I'll like go and like plug in all the data. I do stuff. I feel like people at Google might rent cars more often than I do. Like you like solve the problems you have? Yeah. Like I rent like two cars a year and I'm never like, if only filling out this form was harder or easier,

I'd just be renting all kinds of cars. No? I'm trying to make a Mustang joke here because he only rents Mustangs and I can't get there. I live in New York. I don't have like a lot of opportunities. You can't like, anyway. New hardware.

Yeah. There's the Google Nestub Max. We should talk about that first. Yeah. So you might know Nest. It was a company, and then it was a company that was bought by Google. And then Google reorganized itself into a more confusing company called Alphabet. And then they made NNNN another company inside of Alphabet.

They were the N. Yep. Sure. This crowd did not go with me on that. But they have like verily, like they're, you know, anyway. And then they brought them back into Google. Yep. But they were running parallel with the other Google, so back into Google and the Google

hardware division, but sort of still just doing NEST stuff. I mean, while Google's doing Google Home stuff. Yeah, and then a bunch of NEST people left, which is just fact. And now NEST is fully part of Google and Rick Osterlo is in charge of it. Yep. And NEST is going to be the brand for home stuff and Pixel is the brand

for mobile stuff. And they're rebranding the Google Home Hub to the Nest Hub. And they put out a new bigger home hub called the Nest Hub Max. Yes. My fucking daughter is named Max. I need the tech to stop doing this to me. It's really, truly annoying. But it's great. So she can scream her own name. Maybe a timer will begin or end. These kids are going to grow up weird. But it has a camera.

The main thing it has, it's a bigger screen, tenant screen. It has a camera at the top. The camera can function as an S camera. It can recognize your face, but it does it all locally. Although there's some weirdness where, like, you scan it on your phone and then it gets stored locally on the device, but somehow your face has to get from the phone. to the device? Yeah. Very confusing. But does it all locally. I actually had to correct my hands-on because I said it,

when it sees your face, it tells Google that you're home. And it's like, well, no, it doesn't do that. It actually only knows it locally that you're home. But if you literally touch a Nestub Max, presumably Google would know because, like, you're interacting with Google data in some way. Yeah. Yeah.

Unless you're the sort of person who carries a Nest Home Max around with you. Ooh. Just like a giant battery pack in the NISTMax. It's your phone. Yeah, it's how you stick it to the man. Yeah. You don't know if I'm home. Yeah.

Choosen's very esoteric protest Against data collection Anyhow So they put a camera at the top of it I'm actually very conflicted about this camera We don't have to go into it There will be more Virchcasts where I promised you The conflict will surface but

The switch on the back turns off both the microphone And the camera You can do them as a one by one in the software I don't know I don't trust any software Oh my God These people Coters out here I trust a single one of them

No, but I would prefer to have individual switches or a camera cover. We were sort of told camera covers are ineligent. Yeah, they are. But I'm probably going to buy on because I love that product, and I love how it works as a photo frame, and having a bigger screen is better. So that's good. So Nest is sort of like part of Google. They're shutting down the works with Nest program. Yes.

Big commitment to privacy. You can, like, read a bunch of Google blog posts about how they're rethinking privacy, what all the sensors will do, all the data they will share. There's a table, it's just a very long table of every home product Google has, all of the sensors it contains, and what those sensors do. I think that's great for a person like me and presumably for the people in this audience. I think there's a big question about whether any normal person standing in the Best Buy looking at a nest home is like, I've got to look at this table. That seems maybe a little asking too much, but I think that's where we come in, where the people in sort of forums and YouTube videos come in. But that's a big change. And then this piece of hard work.

This is the Google Pixel 3A. And there's also a 3AXL. And I reviewed them. And they're great. Yeah. You get a good camera on a $400 phone. Yeah. And the buttons are cool.

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So let's bring out Hiroshi Lockheimer, who's the SVP at Google for Android and Chromewell, has so much of stuff, and Steph Kupretzen, who is the director of Android. Please applaud. This is your model. Welcome. Hi, how's it going? Hello. Hello.

So let's just start at the very beginning. explain your roles at Google. What do you do? What's your day like? Go ahead. I work on Android. Yeah. Nailed it.

So I'm responsible for Google's consumer platforms and ecosystems. Within the company, my group is known as P&E platforms and ecosystems. So that's Android, Chrome, Chrome OS, Google Play, Coms. When you say Coms, you mean communications? Communications, yes, thank you. Which stands for messaging. Messaging apps. Yes, yes.

So you do 50 things. All right. Well, we'll save that for me. We'll get there, yeah, we'll get there. I'm convinced we will get there, yes. All right. Well, Steph, I want to start. We were hanging out with stuff in Hiroshi earlier.

Steph, you said Android Q to use as a foundational release. Yeah. What do you mean about? Two things that I would talk about with Q. One, be security and privacy, and then the other is just innovation. So I think with security and privacy, what you see is just an extension of kind of like a multi-year investment with Android. And the culmination of so many different efforts, across so many releases we've been investing in security and privacy. And I think it was a really neat moment for

the team to see something like the Gartner quote. And we said, you know, 26 out of 30 categories, Android is rated the highest. We didn't say this on stage, but that makes it significantly above. For instance, other leading operating systems. Would you like to name one? And I think that... Linux on the desktop. But I mean, it's a bunch of things the teams have worked really hard on. It's authentication, network security, kernel integrity.

These are really important things. I think the team has put a lot of effort into that, so I think it was a proud moment for us. But when you talk about Android being, Android Q being foundational, I really think also about a set of multi-year initiatives where we're setting up for that in Q. And I think the very best thing, example is mainline. Mainline is a huge technical challenge, a huge technical achievement.

It's in order to pull off something like that. So mainline, what you're doing is you're updating individual modules of the OS as directly as we do it for Google apps. And to do something like that, that means now we can individually update, for instance, media, which is a very security-sensitive component. To do that requires reworking our release processes, our testing processes. Essentially everything about how we build and distribute software, that is foundational. And I think it's cool in two ways. First, from this point forward, we can now update those components back to Q. So in, you know, N plus two, plus three, plus four, it also sets us up to be able to do more of this in the future. I think that's really exciting. So the thing that I always

have to say when there's a new version of Android is like, this thing is amazing and the vast majority of consumers will enjoy this in like two years. And you've gotten better at that in the past year. I know there's new numbers for how P was updated. So is Mainline more about like just getting those security patches out and fixing that like, will these Android manufacturers actually install the monthly security patch? Or are you hoping down the line you might be able to like solve some of that like waiting two years for features?

I think Mainline is about, it's about an overall strategy about getting people the best of Android quickly. And Mainline is just one piece of that. And I think this would be cool for us both to talk about. So you can see, for instance, with Project Trouble, we had 21 devices available with Beta 3 at launch. So that's a direct result of the Troublework. With Mainline, we can now directly update pieces of the OS. So Mainline addresses another piece of it. But it's not the only place. If you think about your experience of the operating system, for how many people in the room are Android developers? Okay. That's a lot for Coke Zero. listening. And so for... I like it. If you're in your car, pull over and just imagine hands in the air.

Okay, okay. So for all of us who are developers, you're using Android's APIs, and you probably notice that we're more and more making the API surface of Android, Android Jetpack, which is modular. It's updated very frequently. And when you're targeting jetpack, you can be targeting really, you know, 80 to 90% of all devices. And then another big part of the experience on the phone is the apps on the phone, and those are updating continuously. Now, In some places, they consider all of that like a monolith that's updated once a year. We're really thinking about how do we update everything that people are experiencing on the phone and that's at different levels.

So yes, mainline is an important part of it, but it's an overall strategy. No, that's great. So the other thing about Mainline is it's getting distributed through the Google Play infrastructure. And my understanding is like you don't go and look for an app update in Google Play. It happens silently the next time you reboot it gets applied. Why are you doing it through Google Play instead of like a whole? whole separate thing that maybe would apply to, I don't know, Amazon Kindles and non-Google Play phones?

The mainline code is open source. Open source. Right. So even if you don't use our infrastructure, people could be pushing it out. Okay. Absolutely. How do they want? So we're not precluding that.

Right. Yeah. In fact, so the packages will all be available. They'll be signed by Google. And so everything about the implementation of Mainline will be available for anyone to use. And then, you know, once you've got to be available. got them, you have to have some way of distributing them. So I don't know if you have like a cool distribution technology in your pocket.

RSS. We happen to have, you know, you're like, I'm going to need a CDN, I got to have a way of putting, I need a packaging format, a way of pushing it out. And so we have to have in play, it's kind of makes sense to use that. But you could really use it with any distribution and I think it's relatively straightforward for someone to do the same thing as well. In fact, you know, our goal is to get phones updated as rapidly as possible and that's why we've made mainline open source.

Do you ever think about changing the metric? I mean, right there, there's a certain other leading operating system. Desktop Linux. Yeah, desktop Linux. Every year they have a huge, the desktop Linux spaceship is very popular. But, you know, they're like, okay, all iOS devices are on the latest thing because they are pushing that yearly update. You guys are doing something much more diffuse, a little harder to grok.

Do you ever think about just changing the metric and saying, here's a rate out with play services, here's where we are with Mainland Updates. For sure. I think the latest number I saw, someone tweeted this yesterday, might have been one of you. Probably not. But I don't know why I said that. I do tweet a lot. You do tweet a lot. But usually it's not, you know, anyway. Wow.

Can we, can someone just keep track on how many times Hiroshi burns me? Someone tweeted, you know, good job Google for getting, you know, P to 10% Yeah. But PS, the other OS is at 80% at this point. And I feel like that's kind of an Apple's to, no pun intended, you know, Apple's to Orange's, Apple's to Android's comparison. Yeah, Android isn't it fruit? It's a tasty treat.

All right. Anyway, I do think a more appropriate comparison there may be, for instance, you know, pixel devices and what's the update rate on that. Because really what we're talking about when we talk about Android is a host of, you know, a great ecosystem of devices. Not all devices update at the same rate. And the 10% number you're seeing is the aggregate number of that, right? So depending on device classes or manufacturers, you get very different numbers.

So that's one area that I think is different, and that 80 versus 10 comparison is a little bit misleading, I think. And then you layer on these different technologies that we're deploying like Mainline or Treble or the app updates. And so I think the story is a lot more complicated and nuanced than 80 versus 10. Yeah, you really walked in to my next question on that Tasty Treat Line. What does the Q stand for? Not sure.

Not sure. We're stumped a little bit. Yeah, really? Yeah, yeah. It's 10 years, you know, so we'll see. Yeah, it's a good time. I mean, it's the 10th version of Android. I think, you know, Shakespeare says what's in a name?

I think we're thinking a lot about, as you think about the 10th version, what's an appropriate name for that? Yeah. It's an interesting reflection. What other questions do you have? That got super existential. Yeah, well, truly, what is the name? There was like a semi-a-a-a-th PhD candidate. If we can go there, I don't think that we should.

What's the next question? I wasn't expecting you to answer that at all. Went so sideways. I'm just so used to answering that. And by the way, anytime I tweet, I will guarantee someone responds with a, you know, whatever, cue confirmed or whatever the next thing is confirmed. So I need to, I need a new schick because I think people have kind of labeled me as the name person. So yeah, if you could help me out with a new stick.

Quietly out of dessert options. I mean, you're going to run out of the alpha characters too. So, Seth, I'm actually curious from your perspective on the version thing, right? Because you spend so much time talking to developers. Being on the latest version, for the end user is like, it depends, right? You have big manufacturers who are shipping end user features, but it really matters way more for developers to know that they're going to target what OS they're going to be on. Is that actually still a big concern for,

Android developers, like the latest frameworks aren't there for them, or do PlayServices solve it? I think there's been several developments that have been really valuable. I think first, for everyone who's using the Play Console today, if you're a developer, what you don't want is a set of generic statistics. What you want to know is, what is my user base using? Because device variegation is pretty intense across regions, across user bases. And so what's so cool about the Play Console today is you can go in, you can say, okay,

I, Nelai, I have this set of users, and they're using this set of devices which have these characteristics, and you can use that to figure out how to target your application. So it's really the type of data that you want. Yeah. So that's great. And then the other thing we were talking about in terms of being a foundational release, there is a new class of form factors coming. Yeah. We saw, Hiroshi still has a fold. Like Samsung won't take it back from him. They sent the cops to Dieter's house. It was very dramatic. That was for a different reason. Yeah.

But there's a new class of display technologies coming out. There's a new class of form factors out. Are you aggressively thinking about those now in terms of it being foundational, or is that your way in C-mo? For sure. You talked about it a little bit on stage even. Yeah, I think when I think about

innovation, I would think about both form factors, how hardware's innovating, but also software with ML. I think live caption that Dieter talked about. It's just incredibly interesting. I take those one at a time. I think, you know, with hardware, you've seen just this kind of amazing evolution driven by the hardware manufacturers. If you've ever been to, we go to Hong Kong every year and meet with all of the OEMs,

it's incredible experience because you just get this sense of the power of that ecosystem kind of driving forward, all independently innovating. It's kind of incredible. And when you look at all the technologies that are coming out, I really think, you know, foldables have the potential to really change how developers work and what kind of things are possible. 5G also. I mean, imagine a fast. phone that's now, the way 5G works, you have these millimeter waves and then multiple parallel connections from the cell tower to the phone. Think about what kind of low, that low latency connection, you know, faster connection makes possible. I think it's opening up a whole new set

of scenarios for developers. And it's really cool. We're kind of like, wow, I wonder what will happen. Are you also supporting 5GE? Like the 18T police are coming now. The cops are on their way. But real quick, sorry, real quick. You wrote about this, I think, Dieter, about the foldable and how, as a user, too, that really changes, like, changed how I interact with the phone in ways that I didn't expect. Like, I was a lot more mindful about how I used my phone because it would break. It seems very obvious.

This broken phone changed the way I used it. Mine's not broken and I still use it. And it changed it because the screen in front is, for me at least, and I think it was for you, based on how you wrote about it. It's too small. No, but I used a lot for triage, but then I was a lot more intentional. You know, when I opened the device, I knew there was a digital well-being aspect to it in a way that I didn't really expect. But I thought was kind of cool. Okay, so if we're talking about supporting lots of new form factors, the biggest trend in phones is the bells are getting smaller, fewer buttons.

And so the next 45 minutes of this podcast will be Dieter has feelings about how. how you swipe on a screen. So the new gesture thing, you mentioned it on stage, didn't really talk about it. It seems pretty familiar. If you're listening at home, Hiroshi and stuff are looking at each other to figure out who will answer these set of questions.

I was just going to figure out, I was going to see Horathe was going to pull out one of his post-its. So Hiroshi has a list of post-its of all the questions that Dieter's going to ask. I should explain this. It's kind of like a magician trick. You see a musician and they already know what number you're going to pick.

So I figured I would write a bunch of post-its knowing what questions. Dieter didn't tell me what questions he's going to ask. We definitely had gesture nab. So point for us. What is a gigantic stack? It's a magic trick. We'll see this later. It is a giant stack of post-its that look like they belong on a yarn wall.

It's a lot. It's been in my pocket all day. Update rates. We have that already. Let's see. We'll get to that one later, I'm sure. So I won't tell you. Main line we talked about that.

Oh my God. Yeah. Hold on, hold on. I wrote down Palm WebOS. I'm sure you'll ask about that later. Oh, man. Anyway, I have some more. So we'll go through those later. Yeah.

Gestures. Just let them do the show. I feel like we got a point when Dieter asked for just to know. So in P, you sort of like, it seemed like there, you were conflicted about whether or not it was a good idea to swipe around, to do stuff, to get around on the OS. I sense you're conflicted.

I was. And in Q, it's like, OK, no, this just works in a very familiar way in a way that another operating system that I'm just going to say the iPhone works. Also, I think it's very similar to how Huawei does it. There is. Where's a card? You're actually.

How did you come to the decision to change up the gesture interface again and go to this? Seriously, it's actually, it's a very good question. So display technology has been evolving a lot recently. and it's been opening up more pixels on screen. I think that's really exciting. You're seeing large screens, especially with notches now evolving edge-to-edge glass. And especially as you look at the devices with edge-to-edge glass,

users want to be able to take advantage of all that screen real estate. And, yes, the industry is innovating. We definitely looked at that. There's a lot of innovation also happening in apps doing interesting gesture-nav systems. But ultimately, the big driver for us in the OS is looking at what users want. And so we did a lot of studies of different gesture navigation. models. We also considered what people like in Android. So all of you who are Android users, on average, Android users use the back button about 100 times a day. So that's like a really

important concept to keep in there. And so the gesture now system that we built is just based on looking at the best of those concepts and what users found the, uh, allowed them to maximize that edge to edge glass. But like take me into like the room. Yeah. It's like Android Q meeting one. I'm just, I don't know how these meetings work. But I'm just, um, I'm assuming there's the first meeting about Q, and you're like, okay, we're gonna, we put out these gestures in P, we're gonna, we're gonna iterate them in Q.

Yeah. At any point did someone raise their hand and be like, they did this at the spaceship? Because it is remarkably similar to the iPhone. Is that you wanna drive a bunch of iPhone switchers and to keep it familiar? Is it, this is just where the industry is? Is it, this is just the best idea?

I think in general for most, OS decisions that comes down to looking at what do users want. I think with gesture navigation, there's a lot of different opinions. And really, we go back to user feedback. And as Steph pointed out, 100 times people do back on Android. Back does not exist on desktop Linux, as you know. And so there are pretty meaningful differences. I mean, we live in a very different, sort of, the system is different.

By the way, one thing I just wanted to add, you know, we added, as you pointed out, we added gestures in P, that was partly because also, you know, when we meet with these OEMs, our partners, getting a lot of feedback saying, look, we're innovating on the screen, we're getting higher, you know, ratio of any screen to device, and they want to maximize it. You know, so that was also, they're a proxy for user feedback as well, right? Because they're making these devices. So we take all those sort of factors into consideration. But do you think, like metaphors collapse over time?

This is something, you know, early smartphones, there's all kinds of crazy stuff happening on the screen. I mean, they have sort of coalesced into a single set of behaviors. Gestors are really new, except for WebOS, RIP. He's so proud of himself. Dr. Palm over here. But like gestures are really new. It feels like they're starting to coalesce. Is that something that you guys see and think about,

or is that just the industry takes you where it's taking you? We do think, I don't know if I'm answering your question directly, which probably translation means no. But we do think some consistency around gestures, I'm talking within Android now, because there's many different gesture modes based on manufacture within Android, right? And we do think some consistency there is important for users, but also for developers as well. So that is something we are actively working with the OEMs on to make sure that we sort of converge on a consistent way that the system behaves. When you say actively working with the OEMs, are you really saying we're making everybody use these gestures so that Android phones are consistent,

and there's not 50 different ways to navigate it on the Android phone depending on which one you buy? It's a little, our relationships with OEMs are a little more nuanced than, you know, we just tell them what to do, as you probably imagine. You know, they have their own ideas. Certain OEMs have more ideas than others. That's a statement of fact. So we work with them. You know, when we hear their feedback, we do value these partnerships, right? Android without partners, whether they're at OEMs or operators or app developers, we're not.

So we do value these partners and we talk about this a lot and we have healthy debates, sometimes unhealthy debates too. And in terms of the gestures, we're out there just really trying to make sure that they understand from a developer's perspective. I think that's where they really value our input because we understand we're sort of helping shepherd this ecosystem of developers and that's sort of one of the expertise that we bring to the table. So from that angle, certainly we're talking to them a lot about this right now.

So as long as you're talking about working with OEMs, I actually have like two-parter for both of you. So you work with a bunch of external OEMs. You also work with an OEM across the hall that makes a pixel. Different building. Different building. And then on the software side, you're making Android. And then there's also this thing called Google Assistant that is slowly taking over everything everywhere. It's like the Borg. And it's doing more and more stuff inside Android. And so how, when you're creating a new version of Android and you're working with Android. How do you work with the Pixel team on the one hand, and how do you work with, you know, the assistant team, but more generally like the other parts of Google that are

making software that, like, want to be like a first-class citizen on Android? How do you navigate those things? Yeah, maybe I can start and stuff. Please jump in. I would say almost a constitutional aspect of Android is we, from a platform perspective, the Android platform, we don't favor any developer over any other, right? So that includes Google. And as you know, it's open source, so you can see if we're doing that or not, right? If you see it, if Google in the Android open source, please let me know, because that's not really supposed to happen. Now I'm probably going to get a bunch of emails from people saying, ah, that's probably

conceptually that's not really what we're about. We are about an open platform that is not favoring anyone company over another. So that's at the Android level. So even at the manufacturer level, right, we work with, you know, my team at least, because we don't represent the pixel team. That's, as you pointed out, that's Rick's team. that's a separate group, we treat them like an OEM, just like we treat Samsung or LG or Huawei or et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And so we do keep sort of those firewalls in place,

and the OEMs are fairly satisfied with that. They understand that's how the system works. They share secrets with us. We don't share those secrets with anyone else, and that's how that system works. And in terms of first-party app developers, you know, first-party app teams, they use our APIs and they give us feedback. We also get feedback. Maybe you can talk about the feedback mechanism you have with, you know, the third-party developers as well. Yeah, and it's really the same for first party. So, for instance, if you take a look at the privacy settings that you and I looked at earlier, one of the things you'll notice is you can now go in and see sensitive resources like camera. And in that we're treating what we call

first-party developers, Google apps and non-Google apps are treated exactly the same. Same for the location controls we treated, they're treated the same. Same for the location reminders, they're treated the same. So I think what Hiroshi said is exactly right. Android It's open source, it's AOSP, and we think of it as a platform on which many apps build. Some of those apps are built in buildings closer to us and some further away. Sure, I believe all of that. But I also believe that as long as you're using a Google Play version of an Android phone, it seems like more and more like doing that without the Google Assistant being around is hard.

Like, you know, voice interaction is becoming more important. I don't know. When I plug a new phone into my car for Android Auto, I have to make sure I drive outside of my garage where I don't have internet and then park and then wait for the assistants to talk to the internet to move Android Auto to work. It just seems like the line between Android

and sort of Google Assistant stuff is for me getting fuzzier. Yeah. That's just me. If you could see what were, the blank stairs, I guess we'd get a caption right now. Okay. Yeah.

So you guys never talk to the assistant team. No, we do. Of course, we do talk to it. Not what we said. We do talk to the assistant team, but we talk to a lot of app developers. Sure, sure. Do you think about the assistant as a core feature, like system-level feature of, like, the Play Android, or is it like another app that runs on top of your operating system?

So as Hiroshi talked about, so Android is AOSP code, and the assistant is outside of AOSP. Okay. So that's part of the play stack. Yes, and when things are outside of AOSP, they're, plugable on Android, so you could have one assistant or another assistant, just like you could have other types of components that are plugged into Android. Yeah. So I think this kind of leads into the big set of questions around what is happening with Android,

like around the world. So in Europe, the EU said you have to unbundle Android from Play and Chrome and that's other search. That has resulted in something I think is deeply funny, which is a browser ballot in Android, which is like a very nice. Browser and search engine ballot. Two ballots. Two ballots.

Voting is great, democracy's cool. But you had to engineer this stuff. Do you think about the competition aspect as you're building, do your product managers think, like, the Europeans will be mad at us if we, like, make this more integrated, or do you have the lawyers look at it later? Like, how does that work? Yeah, in general, when whether product managers or designers

or engineers are developing, their job is not to think about competition law. So their job is to think about how to delight the user and so on. And as I mentioned earlier, our philosophy really is fundamentally, it's an open platform. We're not favoring any company over another. So that's kind of in our DNA, I would say. You know, we take pride in that. And just to give you an example, a lot of the, if you go to the Play Store and look at the top application, you know, wide category lists, you know, they're not necessarily, in many cases, in fact, guaranteed,

not from Google, they're from, in some cases, our competitors, you know, broader Google competitors, right? And that's okay. That is kind of the idea behind Android is that we're enabling this platform where you as a user get to use whatever app you want to use and set a lot of defaults the way you want to do. In many cases, above and beyond any other platform like desktop Linux lets you do.

I'm going to just use that continually now from now on. I just thought you know the desktop Linux people are going to go super mad at you. I know. I'm so sorry. I love desktop Linux. There's 400 of them left and they have ideas. Support for this show comes from Whatnot. Whether you're selling online or out of a storefront, you already know the challenge. You're simply hoping for people to find your listing or waiting for them to walk in. But What Not flips that.

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now my weekly segment is called the year of the Linux desktop with a delightful plot twist brought to you by Christopher Nolan. We all knew that 2019 was going to be the year of the Linux desktop, but now it turns out there's a twist. It's basically that it's Windows that Linux is sort of like a DLL now. You install Linux and then you install Linux and then you you install WinRRR. I think that's what it's called. Is it WinRRR, WNZIP? One of those freeware or shareware uncompression softwares. You know what I'm talking about. It's the year the Linux desktop. Let's give it up. Good job, Microsoft. Thank you for bringing Linux across the line. I will also note that this is basically what Microsoft is doing to Windows is the same way that Google is trying to get Linux.

onto the Chromebook, despite the fact that the Chromebook is based on Linux, which basically means Linux is so dangerous that you must sandbox it, but it's so powerful that you must include it. Yeah, thank you for having me. We should, by the way, I do have it posted on Chrome OS. We should talk about ChromeOS where desktop Linux is important.

Yeah, okay. So we need a new name. You know, the biggest vendor of desktop Linux on the planet. I'm basically asking, like, is that EU ruling where you unbundled it, you're going to charge for the operating system in Europe now? Is that really, like, has that altered your dynamic? Has it altered your roadmaps? Not from a product perspective, no. You know, we think we've, just to begin with, we feel like we've built a platform in an operating system and a system that's very open, more open than others.

We think we've created a lot of help, create a lot of jobs and opportunities in Europe and so on. So fundamentally, we don't really necessarily agree with the decision, but of course we really, respect the decision and we comply and we're also appealing, by the way. So. That's important. Yeah. So, you know, does it change our plans? No, because we feel like our plans all along have been pretty solid on this front.

So, yeah, we don't really have engineers or product people thinking about this stuff. All right. Let me ask you one more question about bundling and integration. Actually comes from Twitter. Ali Basley, I think that's how I pronounce it. He asks, when are you going to make a carbon copy of I message and just to actually win. You perked, Dieter's perked up.

Yeah, take their post it, put it out. I do have a post it. I do have a post it. I put RCS comma, rant. Yeah. I mean, look. The number of tweets I've gotten about this Pixel 3A saying, this thing looks great. I want to buy it. I don't want to buy an expensive phone,

but that I'd have to become a green bubble, and so I'm sad. The amount of work that you have to do to get carriers who, last time I checked, aren't the nicest best people who have your best interest in mind, all agree on a messaging standard, which, by the way, is not encrypted and it should be. It's very frustrating to sort of watch that sort of happen where on desktop Linux, you just, you get a clean, secure, easy to use, easily discoverable messaging system. We're going to confuse so many people with this desktop Linux thing.

That is not true of this supplement. You get IRC. IRC is great. On iOS, you get IMessage. Just to be clear. I've asked you a million times why you don't just make an IMessage clone. I suspect I know what the answer is. So I guess the better question is, one, answer the first one.

Two, how are you thinking about that messaging strategy? strategy and working with all those carriers to make RCS happen, given how slow it is, how painful it is, how the end state isn't encrypted, and it's probably not going to be easily as easy to use as iMessage as an IOS. When you say IMessage clone, you mean, because their protocol, as far as I know, is not open. So you're saying literally build something like IMessage but doesn't connect to IMessage. I'll just describe, I'm going to sum up my friend Dieter to one thing. IMessage lock-in is the thing that prevents switching in this country. Yeah, right? In America, yeah.

We get yelled at this about all the time. We're specifically talking about the U.S. Yeah, everyone, there's WhatsApp, whatever, like, fine, and they're interoperable. And you can see in other markets like China that leads to more switching, it leads to more hardware diversity. These are all, like, good things for consumers. Here we, there is absolutely IMessage lock-in. Surely that bothers you. RCS does not appear to be a great head-up competitor to I-Message.

You've launched, I think you probably know the number better than I do. Is it 35, 80, messaging clients? Are you going to coalesce that down and say, okay, Google's going to do something better that's wider that is more horizontally adopted so we can ease the switching cost? Can I give you a brief history of RCS? Which is actually, so, you know, I'm going to. Can I derail this podcast? People are driving. They'll fall asleep.

I'll make it really interesting and I'll make it really brief. And actually the full history of RCS is, I learned recently, is a lot longer than this and a lot deeper than this. but I'll give you our involvement in RCS. A number of years ago, we were at MWC, this is like four years ago or so, the GSM said, you know, we have this thing called RCS that we've been trying for a while, it hasn't really worked,

Android, you can really help us here because you're the platform provider, please help us. And we thought about it, and we realized, actually this is really good because SMS, as many of you know, there's a 30-year-old technology or something, that is like the default messaging solution for Android.

That's a little strange, and we just want to modernize the platform. So we've now been working on RCS for many years. We've created a client. We've helped sort of shepherd the standards along as well so that we have this thing called Universal Profile where actually RCS can be interoperable between carriers and countries,

which I know it sounds obvious, but wasn't the case up until recently. And we're actually seeing some success not in the U.S. I know your point is in the U.S. But outside of the U.S., RCS is definitely happening. The carriers are behind it, and things are moving along. The U.S. is tricky, for sure.

And so we're having conversations with, you know, our colleagues and the operators to figure out how we can move this forward. I'll be honest, and I've mentioned this to them, so it's not like breaking news. I'm a little bit frustrated at the pace of this. It needs to get better. And then we can, you know, deploy this and evolve the standards

as we go along as well. You pointed out some shortcomings of the standard, and we can address those things as well. Do you think, is RCS robust enough where if someone wanted to make it encrypted by D. you felt that it's capable of doing that? I'm sure we can evolve the standard to handle these cases. And I should also-

I'm taking that as a yes. Yeah. And I should also point out, you know, on FI for instance, RCS works and I use it a lot and it's great. So we want to get this out there. We need the help of the carriers for sure, the American ones. And we're in touch with them. How many more messaging apps at Google launch this year?

Zero. Except for... I mean, but this is like, there's a reason I'm making a joke. Like, you've taken several cuts at it. They, some succeed, some do not. Some disappear into the ether never to be heard from again. Are you gonna try again or is RCS the bet? We're working on RCS.

And you're gonna evolve the standard. That's our goal, yeah. Okay. Do you think that that is enough to sort of drive the sort of like lower switching cost behavior that you need to grow, to grow? grow Android adoption in the US? I don't know. Let's say there was, as you called it, an iMessage clone.

Still the same question. Is that enough to overcome the switching cost? If the assertion is, IMessage is a form of lock-in, and people don't want to be a green bubble, well, even if Android had an iMessage clone, I assume in that scenario, those I message clone users are green bubbles. So we still have the same switching issue to deal with.

So that feels like across a number of things, We just have to make sure that to the extent that people want to switch platforms, we make it as easy as possible for them to do so. So if I want to ask you, so that's the US, I want to ask you internationally. Android serves with 2.5 billion devices. There are other huge ecosystems that you have to build for. You know, Sunar and say yesterday I said, like, we make things for everyone. How do you address that enormous diversity of platforms, of price points, of hardware specs,

of use cases, of honestly just different economies. Like as your architect in Q you say it's foundational, what are the next steps you need to get to those other markets? You know, I might answer that by talking about how we work with a developer community. So Android's developer community is just amazingly diverse, especially because people are building apps all over the world.

And so what we do is we have an advisory board of developers who help us essentially figure out what's the vision of the product. And it's a group of people who are, you know, We select them because they're insightful. Folks, you know, like, I know we joke a lot, but like, Dieter has a lot of amazing feedback. We try to pick out.

It's not true. Okay. I was wondering where you're going, because you were looking at Deeter when you said insightful and even pointed at him. So I was like, wow, okay. We try to find a set of people who are really insightful and can give us great feedback,

but also who are representative of the audience that we're building for. So developers who are building really massive apps, but also developers who are really relatively new to Android. And we look at folks who represent the different, all the different aspects that we care about, folks in the United States, India, like across different countries, and that group of people, we bring them together once a year. We come together in person, and we have just this amazing conversation about, look, what are the things you like best?

What are the things you're the most frustrated about? Here's a list of potential investments. You vote. Tell us what you want us to work on. And the whole, you know, huge chunks of the engineering team are there, and it's just kind of an incredible conversation for us. No, I was just going to say, Steph is describing literally the road mapping process for that part of Android, right? Like literally that's how she does her job with her team,

and for instance, Kotlin came about in large part because of this type of process that you went through. Yeah, yeah. I mean, Kotlin is a fantastic example of an idea, the community voted it up and said, look, we really want you to adopt this language. And I remember I went and wrote code in Kotlin and thought,

well, I see why. This is amazing. Okay, talking nerdy developer things. Yeah, yeah. Virge finally believes that we speak to a broad audience of people that are, they don't know everything, but they're smart enough to understand a lot of stuff. So I'm going to say some words and then tell me what's new with it. So Jetpack. Yes.

What's new in Jetpack? There are three big things that are new in Jetpack this year. Overall, what you're seeing with Jetpack is just an expansion of this API surface area that's designed to make it easy to write apps on Android. But three big things. First, the Camera X libraries. The problem that's designed to solve is, look, you're using the camera, but the camera is behaving differently on all these different phones.

It makes it really hard to do development. And CameraX makes it so a developer can write and call those APIs and they'll behave uniformly across devices. Huge time savings. The second thing is there is just a set of improvements and core set of components we call architecture components. Just a bunch of stuff you've got to do as a developer. that we make easier.

It's like managing background tasks and stuff like that. The third big thing we announced, I was just down in the sandbox, is Jetpack Compose. This is really cool stuff. So this is the, it's a new reactive UI toolkit that we just open sourced yesterday, and we're going to be developing it in the open.

What you can do with Jetpack Compose is it's a, so our UI toolkit, it's now, it's 12 years old. It was state of the art 12 years ago. That was a long time ago. And since then, the way of doing UI development has evolved, especially if you look at the web, there's just been some phenomenal ideas in development. And so what we're doing is taking the best new ideas in reactive programming, combining those

with Kotlin. So that's what developers basically said, look, I want you to build something that takes the advantage of these new concepts, takes advantage of the new language, and then I want you to integrate it so it works seamlessly with the code I already have. That's Shepak Compose. Okay. Scope storage. Yes.

What's going on with Scopes? I'm very confused by this. It was, an app can only look at its own storage and then you open it up a little bit. So what's going on with storage in Android Q? That's a great question. I mean, you have to be tracking closely to have caught that. You met my friend, Deter.

So what Deter's talking about is in Q, what we've been doing is steadily improving the platform but also responding to feedback. We look really carefully at developer feedback in each of the betas, and that's why we beta early and early and And in beta 1 and beta 2, we got a lot of fantastic developer feedback where developers said, look, I understand why you're making these changes, but they're impacting me.

And they said, look, can you please think about doing this in X and Y different way? And it was fantastic feedback. The engineering team talked a lot about it and said, yeah, we can do that. And so that's what the 2.5 releases. Okay. Last one, and this one's like really, really technical, and either one you can answer. And I think I need, like, you need to explain what it is and what it is. it's for and why people should be paying attention to it.

And that's Fuchsia. So I do have a Fuchsia card. Was that just a whole slow build to that? Applaus, thank you for that. Thank you for that. But what Deter probably doesn't realize is I have a how to spell fuchsia card because fuchsia is impossible to spell. Have you noticed that?

I even misspelled it, yeah, there's an H in there. So what is Fuchsia? That's the question I believe. This wasn't just about my cards, right? It's my magic trick. So Fuchsia is an operating system. You know, Google has a lot of open source projects and proprietary projects too, but the open source ones are the ones that you see.

And Fuchsia is one of them. And we're looking at what a new take on an operating system could be like. And so I know out there people are getting pretty excited saying, oh, this is the new Android or this is the new Chrome OS or this is the new whatever, insert your favorite product name is. And Fuchsia is really not about that. FUSHA is about just pushing the state of the art in terms of operating systems and things that we learn from FISA we can incorporate in other products or not. And also targeting, I would say, different form factors.

You know, Android works really well on phones and, you know, in the context of Chrome OS as a runtime for apps there or et cetera, et cetera. There's a lot of form fact, TV, wearables, et cetera. But FUSHA may, you know, may be optimized for certain other form factors as well. So we're experimenting. Certain other fun factors. You guys are like twins. That's cute. Oh, good.

We're interchangeable as usual. Certain other form factors, you say. Well, you know, think about, you know, dedicated devices, right? Things that may not be a phone. You know, right now everyone assumes, like, Fuchsas for phones. Yeah. What if it's not?

What if it's, you know, could be used for other things? Certain other devices. Yeah. I see where this is going. So actually, let me take this. Because I don't. He only has three. It's going to no answer.

Okay. You only have three posts that's left, and I want to try to hit them all. So we actually have a question here. I'm being made to say these words. Noodle Shack on Twitter asks, when are we getting a decent, that's what he said. When are we getting a decent Android tablet, which I think is really related to Fuchsia and ChromeOS,

two things you're also responsible for. It seems like ChromeOS and Android coming together a little bit more. ChromeOS is kind of the preferred operating system for these larger screen displays. Is that the future of the tablet? Is there a big Google tablet future ahead of you? I would say we're experimenting. you know, there's still many Android tablets out there

and still being sold. And, you know, with the pixel slate, we've tried what a ChromeOS's take on tablets could be like. That's a detachable, I guess, but it is certainly in tablet mode as well. So we're experimenting. You know, you talked about how ChromeOS and Android are coming together. I kind of characterized it somewhat differently, by the way.

They're both successful operating systems targeting very different use cases, and we share technologies. So, as an example, in Chrome OS, the way updates work. You know, that pixel uses now that technology to do auto updates in the background and so on. That's a ChromeOS thing that Pixel has taken. In the reverse direction, the ability to run Android apps. That's something that Chrome OS is adopted from the Android site.

So that's kind of how we're doing, you know, sharing technologies in both directions. I don't know if you would call that, like, coming together. I would often get asked the question of, when are they going to merge? And that's certainly not how we're thinking about it. Do you think that the future of desktop Linux? But you don't make a proper desktop computer, right? You make pixel books, you make phones, but very few people are like shipping tower computers running Chrome OS

or shipping 27-inch all-on-one's running ChromeOS. Do you have an ambition to capture that part of the market as well and have these be like primary desktop workstations? And when you say desktop Linux, you literally mean desktop Linux, right? I literally, just to disambiguate a little bit. Yeah, I actually think ChromeOS has a lot of advantages. You know, it's been built recently, so it has advantages around security. The security regime for the system, I think, is great.

The updatability, the statelessness. All these things, I think, make ChromeOS ideal for the next generation of desktop. I'll call it desktop computing, but it could be laptops, too. You know, those things aren't going away. And, you know, I think a number of years ago people predicted tablets would take over. and people wouldn't buy PCs anymore, and I don't think that's happened. You know, and certainly I don't think that's going to happen.

And I think ChromeOS has a very interesting play there for sure. So we're investing a lot in that space, absolutely. But do you think that's going to capture share from Windows, from the Mac? Well, ChromeLess is actually, you know, growing in a relatively stagnant to, well, I guess stagnant market. You know, it's actually growing. It's the, I would say, the only platform that's growing in that market. I think Q4 of last year was over 20 percent.

So it's growing considerably, and we plan to continue that and even more. Do you think people are ever going to live in a full Google ecosystem and the way that you can live in a full Apple ecosystem? Like, you don't have another kind of PC, you just have a bunch of Google stuff in operating systems? I guess I already live that life, and I think a lot of people already do live that life. You know, I use a Chromebook. I'm very productive on that, as productive as I personally can ever be,

usually looking at Dieter's tweets but they're very distracting no they're very good they're very good just reply to get back to work from time to time that would help me out

I'm just here to be dunked on okay I have two more questions from Twitter and then I want to end on some big stuff and then we want to look to the future these are very very granular questions I hope you're ready for this Bray asks where did the screen recorder

go in Android Q beta 3 They just took it away. I don't know. Did it go somewhere? Yeah, the screen recorder feature is gone. The context here is on iOS, there's a built-in screen recorder so you can record a little video of what your screen is doing. And on Android, you've had to use third-party apps to do it.

And some of them, like, they work pretty well, but they're also, like, they require a lot of, like, knowledge to understand what the frame rates and stuff does. And so we saw some early signs in beta one and two, I think at least two, that you were thinking about maybe putting a screen recorder into Android. and maybe it's going away. So is there a screen recorder coming to Android? And if not, is it hard? Or do you just think they're bad?

I don't know the answer to that. It sounds like if I understand the question, you were looking at beta 1 and beta 2 and thought we were going to build a screen recorder. There's like a thing that's like, it was there. It was there. And it's gone in three.

This is the Vergecast audience. They were paying attention. Okay. I mean, we're always experimenting and evolving all the way through the betas. Okay, okay. So it's coming back. Okay, and then I'm going to try to not butcher this name. But Siri Tambo said, you actually said, you mentioned 5G earlier. They say, 5G seems like a natural application for RCS and other communications technologies. Are you going to, like, push to get there with 5G as the carrier's role there?

Is that a natural inflection point? For RCS specifically? No, RCS is independent of whether it's 4G or 5G. So we're pushing ahead on RCS right now. Okay. All right, so I have a very serious question asked. You guys are both senior executives at Google. We've been talking a lot about the culture of how you build stuff, how inclusive the company wants to be.

There is protests happening at Google about the culture of the company. There is a letter today from the people who organize the walkout, requesting that the company appoints some outside investigators into the culture of the company. How does that impact you? Are you thinking about that every day? Are you working on it? Yeah, so I haven't read that letter specifically, so I won't comment on that letter. But talking about this generally, this topic that you brought up,

I think it's really important that we're having these conversations, you know, and I think as a company, we're always striving to do better and understanding, you know, it's a workplace, right? So we want people to be productive. And if things are getting in the way of their productivity because of these cultural issues, we have to address them. And so I think you've seen Google, for instance, has taken steps,

maybe not as many as these organizers want, but have taken steps. And I think the company will continue to do so. But otherwise, you know, in specifics of this letter, I don't, I actually don't know, so I shouldn't make stuff up. Yeah, that's a pretty good idea. But is it something you talk about here at SPPA at Google? Is it something that you were talking about in your leadership meetings? Yes, absolutely.

We talk about it, you know, within the company, absolutely. Okay. Okay. What are the post-it notes that I didn't get? I have one that I wish you would do, which is I just wrote, I just wrote, huh. Do you just request? Yeah, yeah. I just have a, huh, just rant. Wow. Where I didn't, you know, I didn't, you know, I just figured, you know, I have another one.

Q is incremental, iterative. I guess you covered that sort of in the beginning. I did say it felt incremental, this distinction between it being foundational and, like, people say incremental, and I actually think incremental is fine. But we talked about at the top, it does really feel like you're setting up for like the next, I don't know, 10 years, but the next four or five years. How often do you feel like when you're making a new version

that you're going to release that you need to swing for the fences? And do you try and aim for like a TikTok strategy? Like we're going to do bug fixes and a couple fan favorites and then next year we're going to do the big stuff. I think it's, I mean, I don't think we really design that way.

I think where you find at different points as you evolve, there are different inflections. And some of those you kick off and they take it several years. So I think, let me give you two great examples. I think what you're seeing happen with machine learning, with live caption, this is just unbelievable. The idea that you can now take what was like 2 gigahertz, finite state transducer running in the cloud,

and now it fits on, you know, it fits on like this phone, and 80 megs. That's just unbelievable technological achievement. And I think more interesting is what it makes possible. And so I think the seeds of that set up really in P with, you know, adaptive brightness, adaptive battery. But in live caption, you see ML. Actually, it's captioning our conversation. Oh, my God.

Your phone has no signal. There we go. So I feel like what's happening with ML and, you know, really what's amazing, too, is how you can do that in such a privacy sensitive way. and the new ways that the OS can help you. I think that's just transformational. I think if you look at digital well-being, you see something that's kind of at a different phase

in its iteration where the work on digital well-being last year was really amazing. And to be able to talk about stats in the keynote, like, look, people who are using this reduce their nighttime use by 27%. That's pretty amazing. And you see us continue to work on that because that's a multi-year investment for us.

So I think what you're seeing is, it's not that one release is big and one is small, It's that in each release, we're kicking off, you know, different major initiatives and those extend over time. We're really trying to think about initiatives in a long-term way. So, yeah. How do you measure that stat, that 27% stat? Oh, that's a good question. We defined nighttime usage as between 11 p.m. and 8 a.m., and then we looked at the phone usage within that time period.

So I think this leads to, like, the last big privacy thing, which is Google does collect a lot of data. You obviously know when people are using their phones and not, and they've got the setting turned on. That's based on an opt-in, obviously. Oh, yeah. No, that was just a user study where users came in. Oh, it was user study, okay. Well, great.

No further questions from it. No, but you guys, I mean, this is a big theme of this I.O. is privacy. You build an operating system that no one pays for, right? Like, at least here, maybe in Europe, now you've got to, like, pay a dollar or a euro or something, some number. But, you know, it's a free operating system. there is a lot of, I would say, uncertainty and confusion around the core business model, regardless of what Google says, like people think you sell their data.

How do you think about that as your architecting Android for privacy? Is that becomes more and more of a focus? Is that something that your team talks about? Like, this is going to be a privacy feature, or is it kind of baked into everything? I think privacy and security is foundational. I think you start from that frame. I think actually live captions is another great example. You kind of start from the idea that, look, everyone should always be in control of their data and who they share it with.

I think you really see that with the location controls are a great example. We make it very easy now to understand what you're sharing. And even if you've forgotten, we'll remind you because we want to make sure that we're following your intention. You know how earlier you're asking if we have engineers and product people thinking about European competition stuff? As opposed to that, privacy, absolutely, security, absolutely, we do want our product people and engineers and designers to be thinking about it. And in fact, they do, right? And Steph is saying earlier, it is sort of a foundational part of how we think about it. Yeah.

Okay, we're over time. I can see the Google people like. I've been typing time on my screen for you. Oh, I don't look at your screen. Oh, okay. No. I do. I actually stare your screen all time.

Another one of those things is good. Bulletin, I just want to end. This is a big I-o. announced a bunch of stuff. Yeah. You've been talking to a lot of developers and people, and us, rather unfortunately, for a few days. It's been fun.

It's been fun. Yeah. Thank you, Roshy. I appreciate your support. Give me the next big vision. Like, where do you want this to go? Like, what are the behaviors you want to see people? What are the things you want to see people build using the tools that you've given them?

That's a pretty big question. You know, I think... I'm trying to end up some hope. Yeah, no, no. I think we talked about... I'm excited about how form factors are going to evolve. We talked a little bit about the foldables, but that's one example, right? There could be others.

How the network is going to evolve, whether that's 5G, 5G, or 6G or 7G or whatever it is. And how, you know, if you think to, it wasn't that long ago. Like there are a lot of things that we do on phones today that we just wouldn't have imagined. At least I didn't imagine even just a few years ago, the things that I do on my phones today. And so what are the next generation of things that can be done on your phone, or I should call it device, right? because they may not be a phone. I think that's pretty exciting. And how do we unleash the creativity and innovation

in developers through our platform? Those are the kinds of things that we think about. Yep. And at the same time, we wanted to happen in a healthy way. That's why I think we're thinking a lot about digital well-being because I think 10 years ago, would you have imagined that people be spending so much time on their phones? And so now that we're in that present,

we want to help people kind of find that balance. Great. Well, thank you guys so much for drawing out. Thank you so much. really great. So we ran out of applause to Rosh. Thank you. I think we got to all the cards.

I think we did. You did. Except for a hot question mark rant. So stay tuned for Vergecast after hours with Deer and Hiroshi. Just go and at each other. That'll be at the bar. Thank you to our wonderful audience.

You guys were lovely. No one just randomly screamed the word Android, which is it both great and also slightly disappointing. So let's do it now. There it is. Thank you to everybody for listening. Thank you to the key.

Computer History Museum for having us. It's been lovely here. Rock and roll. All. Promocode. There it sucks. You got it.