If Google had its way, everyone in the world would be on the Internet, using Google services. To bring that goal to fruition, Google is reportedly working to build cellular networks in Africa and Southeast Asia to help bring hundreds of millions of people online for the first time.

According to The Wall Street Journal, Google is in talks with countries like Kenya and South Africa to fund and deploy cellular networks in those countries, using wireless spectrum reserved for television broadcasts. 

Bone deep in Google’s business strategy is that the more people that use the Web, the more Google benefits. That is why the company is testing its Google Fiber high-speed Internet access in various locations in the United States and why it bid in U.S. wireless spectrum auctions in 2007 and 2008. Google has long been planning to enter the cellular service market and there is no better testing ground than those portions of the planet that still lack Internet access.

Owning The Plumbing

Google’s play is to not only own what you do on the Internet, but the pipes you use to access it. 

Google would provide much of the critical infrastructure, such as the base stations and processors involved in building the networks, the Wall Street Journal reports. It could also employ “high-altitude platforms” – blimps and balloons – that could broadcast cellular signals for hundreds of miles. Google could also build out the network using satellites, a technique that a many remote areas use to quickly add telecommunications services. 

If Google can get the populations of sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia on the Internet, it can then sell low-cost Android devices into those regions through its manufacturing partners like Samsung, LG, ZTE, HTC and Huawei. Once those eyeballs are online, Google hopes to find ways to make money from them with its advertising and search products.

Google could also push various Android services to these newly connected Internet users. The Android Google Play app store is able to accept payments in 134 countries - giving the company the ability to sell apps, books, music and video to a large portion of the world’s population. 

In the end, this is a pure volume move for Google: get more people the capability to get online, give them a portal to do so (smartphones) and get them using Google. 

Google and Microsoft are finally shaking hands and agreeing to work together over Microsoft's controversial YouTube app for Windows Phone devices.

"Microsoft and YouTube are working together to update the new YouTube for Windows Phone app to enable compliance with YouTube’s API terms of service, including enabling ads, in the coming weeks. Microsoft will replace the existing YouTube app in Windows Phone Store with the previous version during this time," Microsoft and YouTube said in a joint statement sent to ReadWrite. 

Microsoft will take down the current YouTube app from the Windows Phone Marketplace and replace it with the version that Google and Microsoft will build together, based on YouTube's application programming interfaces, the established way third-party apps access YouTube content.

Microsoft had originally built its own YouTube app for Windows Phone that had violated YouTube's terms of service by stripping pre-rolled adds from the video content and allowing users to download videos. Last week, YouTube sent Microsoft a cease-and-desist letter warning that the Windows Phone app was a violation of the video website's terms of service. 

This post is the third in the ReadWrite series Making Android Pay, focusing on the opportunities and challenges that mobile developers face trying to make money from Android Apps.

In the waning hours of the Google I/O developers conference last week, an Android developer stood at a microphone to ask a very pertinent question: “If I am in the top 2% of Android apps on Google Play, how much money am I really making? $30 a month? $3,000? $300,000?”

The two poor Google product managers on stage couldn't or wouldn't give him an answer. They declined to cite revenue of other Android apps on Google Play’s top lists. They refused to share a general number of how much successful Android apps earn. The two Googlers, Ibrahim Elbouchikhi (product manager of Google Play Commerce) and Bob Meese (Google Play games business development), had highlighted earlier in their session that average revenue per user had more than doubled in Google Play in 2012.

But the developer in the audience was essentially saying was that twice zero was still zero.

To The Winners Go The Spoils

Unless your apps are massively popular on Google Play, it is very difficult to make a good living with Android app development. Developers building apps for Apple’s iOS still make more money than those building for Android, and Apple’s download rate is considerably higher (50 billion for iOS against 48 billion for Android) despite Apple’s considerably smaller installed base).

During their session, Elbouchikhi and Meese gave developers several tips on how to make money from Android. The focus was on two specific topics: games and the top lists in Google Play. 

Essentially, Google is saying that you need to hit the top lists on Google Play to even have a chance at making a decent living. (Getting there is difficult, of course, but developers "get a lot of sales [just] from being on the top sellers list.") The top lists are almost all games - and almost all monetized via in-app purchases. Look at the top grossing apps in Google Play. Of the top 25 grossing apps currently in Google Play, 24 of them are games. The only exception is Pandora, which brings in most of its money from its subscription service.

Top grossing Android apps on May 21, 2013

The domination of games is not unique to Google Play. The Apple App Store's top grossing and paid sections are also filled with games. Smartphones and tablets are great for gamers, especially casual gamers. This has led us to believe that there is a coming golden age for game developers. 

Non-game developers may be in a bit of trouble though. Yet there are things that developers can do to entice their audience to pay up. The idea is to first acquire users (through a variety of means), retain them by delivering excellent apps and customer service and then turn them into passionate users. It is only then that you can ask them to pay you for your product.

5 Keys To Android App Success

Elbouchikhi and Meese highlighted five important aspects of Android that make it easier to monetize an app:

1. Tablets pull in 70% more revenue than smartphones: It helps to create a version of your app optimized for the tablet form factor, which Google made easier to beginning with Android 4.0, known as Ice Cream Sandwich.
2. Employ in-app purchasing systems: In-app revenue increased seven-fold in 2012. While the "freemium" model can be manipulative, it does help developers make money from their users. Once you have created a relationship with a user, you can then hit them up for the "upgrade" (usually in games) or the subscription model (like Pandora). You'll have to deal with any ethical dilemma concerning in-app sales on your own.
3. Subscriptions work: Android has seen 200% app subscriber revenue growth in recent quarters. This approach can work for app developers focused on businesses and enterprises, media publications or music services. Some games employ subscription models but most go for the in-app purchase freemium model. (Meese noted that almost all of the top apps are free-to-play. "The barrier to success for a paid title is very high.") 
4. Better ratings means more revenue: Google has done significant work to help developers get better ratings for their apps. That entails standardizing design principles for Android, working to minimize fragmentation and performance issues and letting developers reply to users who have rated their app. This critical, because the higher the rating, the more money the app earns. According to Google, apps that earn a 4- or 5-star rating average almost 29 times more revenue than do lower rated apps.
5. Go global: Google realizes that most of its subscriber base is not in the United States or even in Western Europe. This is why it released its transcription service in the Google Play Developer Console at I/O last week.

"I think we are at the beginning of that and we will see that beginning to happen next as people get used to the process and developers get creative in figuring out how to build those passionate users and when the right time is to ask for payment," said Ellie Powers, product manager for Google Play. "And also what are the types of things that people are willing to pay for. There are things that people are not willing to pay for and some things that they are."

Top photo by Nick Statt: Google's Ellie Powers introduces new Google Play Developer Console features at I/O 2013.

This post is the second in the ReadWrite series Making Android Pay, in which we explore the opportunities and challenges mobile developers face trying to make money from Android apps.

How do you get mobile developers to love you? Give them free tools and pad their wallets. 

One of the big themes for Google last week at its I/O developers conference was helping developers make more money creating apps for Android. That included a variety of tools to help them engage with their users and process transactions as well as optimization tips to monetize Android.

Monetization is a big challenge for Android developers. Developers who make Android apps earn a fraction of what they make from Apple's iOS, which paid developers nearly $1 billion alone in January this year and $8 billion total as of February. Android developers can only dream of such riches. 

(See also How Google Is Wooing Developers to Make Apps For Android First.)

Yet there is hope. Google's VP of Android product management Hugo Barra told I/O attendees last week that Google had paid more to Android developers in the past 4 months than the previous 12 months before that combined. This increase has been driven by a renewed focus by Google to give developers more tools to make money, culminating in a slurry of announcements to the Google Play Developer Console last week.

"Everything from the analytics integration we have shown to you could imagine other things that Google could put together," said Ellie Powers, product manager for Google Play in an interview with ReadWrite.

Powers continued:

I think that is sort of the next thing. They want to have deeper insights. They want to know exactly what they should work on. And I think [with] the things that we are doing we can continue enhancing them. Developers always want more stuff. They are always really hungry and we are hearing from more and more developers. They are saying they want to invest more because you [Google] give us such great data we are able to use that to understand our users better and invest more in the Android platform.

New Tools In The Google Play Developer Console

Specifically, Google issued six new features to Google Play to help Android developers optimize towards monetization:

1. App translation service: The ability to translate an app into a different language directly from Google Play Developer Console. This is an agency approach (human, not machine) that Google purposefully chose because it found the human touch of translations provided better results on the local level.
2. Revenue graphs: A new tab in the Developer Console gives developers a summary of their app global app revenue over time.
3. Alpha and beta testing and staged rollouts: Perhaps the biggest announcement for Android developers last week, beta and staged rollouts are unique to Android. This should encourage developers to take bigger risks knowing that they will not be rolling out a bug-laden app to 100% of its users.
4. Optimization tips: Based on analytics from Google Play, optimization tips will point developers towards market segments that could benefit them, like launching in a new country or developing specifically for tablets, which make 1.7-times more revenue per user than do Android smartphones.
5. Google Analytics: Mobile data on usage, time spent and a variety of cohorts as Google Analytics for Mobile is integrated straight into the Developer Console.
6. Referral tracking: Where are your installs coming from? Did getting written about by the major tech publications give you a bump? How about that in-app advertising? Referral tracking will tell you.

More Ways To Pay: Simplifying The Billing Infrastructure

Overlooked in the improvements made to the Google Play Developer Console were several infrastructure tweaks to the way Google processes payments for developers. The purchase flow (from app discovery to payment) has been simplified with the new user interface in Google Play, making it easier for users to pay in a variety of ways. Those include expanded gift cards and pre-paid options (which Google announced at I/O 2012 and has been improving on ever since). 

Google is working hard to get Android users to overcome their relative reluctance to paid purchases by promoting gift cards and other pre-paid mechanisms - like Google Play promotional credits with mobile device purchases. While Google acknowledged at I/O that "the barriers to success for a paid title is very high," making a purchase with a free credit seems to help encourage users to keep buying even when the credits run out. 

(See also Google Is Making Life Easier For Android Developers.)

The company is also boosting options for direct-carrier billing in markets around the world. One reason for the success of Apple's App Store is that the company already has every user's credit card number. Because Google doesn't make or sell Android devices, it may not necessarily have that information. In developing markets, especially, credit cards are either non-existent or not popular. Direct-carrier billing gives Google a popular, easy-to-use payment method almost everywhere. About 50% of Android's daily active users now have access to direct-carrier billing, the company said.

"We went from having 20 countries or so that could pay to what is it? 130 or so," Powers said. "So that is amazing. I think with a lot of developers they are only thinking about people in their own countries but it turns out that there are billions of people in the world... So helping developers reach into new markets really helps there too."

From a developer's perspective, of course, it doesn't really matter what option a user pays with - as long as they pay. Google takes care of the entire payments infrastructure on the backend - the developer doesn't even need to know what option was used. The ongoing problem, of course, is that even with the improvements, Google Play still can't match the ease of use of the App Store, which licenses Amazon's 1-Click payment patent. Even as Android eclipses Apple's iOS in many ways, playing catch-up in this area is likely to be an ongoing effort for Google.

Top image by Nick Statt: Google's Android head Sundar Pichai announces 900 million Android installations at I/O 2013.

This post is the first in the ReadWrite series Making Android Pay, in which we'll explore the opportunities and challenges mobile developers face in trying to make money from Android apps.

In December 2011, Google chairman Eric Schmidt predicted that mobile developers would be building apps for Android first instead of iOS by the middle of 2012. That obviously hasn’t happened. But Google has doubled down on its push for more Android-first apps, largely by making it easier for developers to make money from them.

"It has taken a long time, it is slower than we like, but we are getting there,” Ibrahim Elbouchikhi, a product manager for Google Play Commerce, said during Google I/O last week. 

Up to now, the main sticking point for many app creators has been simple: money. Make that, at least for most Android developers, the lack thereof. Until recently, Google just didn't offer tools that would let developers fully exploit the global Android ecosystem for their own financial advantage.

Developers: Show Us The Money

There's also the fact that, until Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich and 4.1 Jelly Bean, Android apps just weren't as good as iOS counterparts. Google first had to give Android feature parity with the iPhone and iPad before it could begin optimizing the ecosystem for money-making.

"Last year was sort of about reaching feature parity with, let’s say, other competitive platforms, where this year it has been all about going up to the next level. Innovating, doing things that are different," Ellie Powers, product manager for Google Play, said in an interview with ReadWrite. "Like now we have the beta testing feature unique to our platform and other sources of analytics coming together."

Google VP of Android Hugo Barra announces new tools at I/O 2013

Such bullishness hasn't yet dispelled doubts remain even among some of Android’s stoutest supporters, including some developers at I/O last week. One grilled Elbouchikhi about how much he could expect to make from a bona fide hit app. There's no easy answer to that question — let's just say that lots of variables are involved in that particular equation — but it's also a sign of just how heavily that question weighs on the minds of developers.

In this series, we'll take a close look at the new tools Google has rolled out to lure developers away from Apple and get them to develop for Android first. Let's just say that the thickness of developer wallets seems to be front and center in Google's thinking.

Aww, What A Cute Widdle Android Baby

Google still thinks of Android as a very young, even though it has been on the market for nearly five years and in development since 2005. "I feel like Android is a baby," said David Burke, engineering director for Android at an I/O session. "I think there is so much more we can do."

If Android itself is a baby, that makes the developer tools and monetization techniques Google has been pushing nearly newborn. The Google Play Developer Console — a suite of tools for publishing and distributing Android apps — was announced at I/O 2012. and the company has only been working on solving developers' biggest issues for about a year and a half.

Google realizes it still has developer issues with Android, from app discovery to user retention to the fundamental act of getting developers paid. But if we learned anything at I/O last week, it is that Google is aware of these problems and working hard to address them. In fact, almost every Android announcement at I/O last week was aimed at boosting Android's standing among developers by addressing its perceived shortcomings vis-a-vis iOS. 

Will that make Android No. 1 in the hearts of mobile developers? We'll see.

"We are still very new. My mother still hasn’t figured out why people would want to buy apps. But most people have. I think there are a lot more business models that are going to develop in the future," Powers said.

What will it take for you to build for Android first? Let us know in the comments. 

Next: New tools in Google Play for getting you paid.

Top image: The Google Android team onstage for a fireside chat at I/O 2013. All photos by Nick Statt for ReadWrite

Browser maker Opera just released a new version for Android with a slew of new features, an upgraded design and better performance. And, for the first time for Opera, it is not running on its own Presto rendering engine.

Opera for Android is running WebKit.

In February, Opera said that it was ditching Presto in favor of WebKit, the open source browser engine that powers the likes of Apple's Safari browser and Google Chrome. The release of the new Opera for Android is the first "final" (gold version, not in a beta stage) release of Opera running WebKit, according to Falguni Bhuta from the Opera communications team.

Opera's decision caused a bit of a hullabaloo among the browser community. Mozilla's Robert O’Callahan said at the time that it was, "a sad day for the Web." O'Callahan and other browser enthusiasts lamented the loss of Presto, as it was one of only a small handful of browser rendering engines available to developers. Including WebKit, the others are Mozilla's Gecko and Microsoft's Trident for Internet Explorer.

New Features Come To Opera

Rounding up the new features for Opera, users will find some interesting capabilities:

Discover - A new feature to Opera for Android, "Discover" helps users find new articles with just a swipe from the homescreen. Opera has selected relevant global and regional news sources to give users a way to find what it going on around them.

Off-Road mode - Opera Mini has long been known for its compression technology that helps users minimize how much cellular data their browser is using. This often helps when you are having trouble getting a data connection or are roaming and is new to the full Android version of Opera. 

Combined address and search bar - Basically, Opera just created its own "omnibox" that allows you to type in website URLs or search from the same field.

Tabbed browsing - Not specifically new in the final Opera for Android version, but the UI has changed a bit from the last version and offers private browsing.

History - Easier to find your browser history. Swipe to the right to access content from the left of the homescreen.

Save for later - Allows you to download a complete webpage so as to read it later or while offline. Goes well with the "Off-Road" mode when you just want to be able to load an article or a website for later review but know that you are not going to have access to cellular data or Wi-Fi. 

Customizable navigation bar - Top or bottom, put the navigation bar where you want it.

New Speed Dial - Opera's "Speed Dial" feature now syncs with bookmarks to provide easier access to frequently visited websites from Opera's homescreen.

The new version of Opera can be found for free in Google Play.

Meet Jolla, the smartphone that almost never came to be.

When Nokia decided to jump off its burning platform a few years ago and go with Windows Phone, there were no people more disappointed with the decision than the hundreds of engineers that had been working on the company’s own mobile operating system, MeeGo.

These were developers that had put in countless hours to make MeeGo the platform of the future and the initial results were intriguing. The Nokia N9 was a beautiful phone (its core design would eventually be the basis of the first Nokia Windows Phone, the Lumia 800) with interesting functionality that, at the time, bested Android in utility. When Nokia scrapped MeeGo, these developers were out of a job and, worse, had the rug pulled out from under a beloved project.

So, they banded together to keep the project going. And the result is Jolla, a smartphone from Finland running an operating system called Sailfish, born on the legacy of MeeGo.

What Is Jolla?

Pronounced “yo-la,” Jolla as a company is the continuation of the “Mer” project. The Mer project was initially a fork from the Linux-based MeeGo designed to bring as much of the old Maemo operating system (MeeGo was formed as a conglomeration between two operating systems, Maemo and Moblin) to Nokia’s hardware as possible. Mer was eventually suspended when most of the development resources started going to MeeGo.

When Nokia dropped support for MeeGo, the Mer project was resurrected. It was intended to provide a new environment for the many developers and engineers who had worked on the open-source project, from Nokia or elsewhere. MeeGo itself morphed when it was began being supported by the likes of the Linux Foundation (backed by Intel and Samsung among others) and became Tizen. 

These old Maemo engineers just won’t admit defeat to their original dream and just realize that MeeGo/Maemo is, for all intents and purposes, dead. So now we have Jolla and a prototype smartphone searching for an audience.

The Jolla Smartphone

The first Jolla smartphone is a 4.5-inch, dual-core, 4G LTE enabled device with 16GB of internal storage and a replaceable battery. It runs the gesture-based Sailfish OS which, presumably, will operate a lot like the old Nokia N9 based on MeeGo Harmattan. 

Jolla is now available for pre-order and will be shipped first to European countries. The price tag is a reasonable €399 and Jolla expects to begin shipping by the end of 2013. Basically, Jolla is now asking people to support the project through pre-orders in a very Kickstarter-like fashion, imploring the community to get behind the project, or “The Tribe,” as Jolla co-founder Marc Dillon describes it. 

Based on Linux, Sailfish OS will be compliant with Android apps. This will allow Sailfish OS developers (the very small handful that currently exist) to port Android apps to Jolla, much in the same way that BlackBerry developers can port Android package files (APKs) to BlackBerry 10. 

The Drawback Of Open Source Democratization

Developers often complain that Android is a fragmented ecosystem. Too many different CPUs on different screen sizes from different manufacturers to make sense of it all. Yet, if you compare Android to what happened to the MeeGo community, Google’s mobile operating system seems tame.

Android always had a champion in Google to keep it on point. This contrasts with the Maemo/Moblin/MeeGo/Tizen/Jolla community that has had so many competing interests and egos that development has never really produced anything tangible other than a few interesting prototypes (like the Nokia N9 and now Jolla).

The Jolla group is essentially the most disillusioned of them all. Some have also called them the most creative and innovative while also being the most stubborn and arrogant. And now this team, finally, has what it wants – its own company and smartphone.

Google sure knows how to throw a geek fest. The After Hours party after the first day of Google I/O was packed full of augmented reality, food, fun, dancing, Billy Idol and... robots.

Lots and lots of robots.

It was hard not to miss the robots, considering that the main bar on the third floor of Moscone West had three robots mixing cocktails. The wait for a robot-mixed drink was considerable, as a human controller told each bot what concoction to make. Google may have come up with the self-driving car, but these robot bartenders are pretty awesome too.

Check out the photos from the Google I/O After Hours party below.

Dancing on dots

Sergey Brin and Sundar Pichai mix it up with the press

Robot drummer

I swear I have seen this robot before. At MIT, perhaps?

Taking augmented reality pictures

Geek's pose

This guy was using an augmented reality app to wireframe the crowd

These robots went toe-to-toe

Dragons!

Watching Billy Idol from the dots

This giant robot hand was crushing everything in site

GenyMobile founder Cedric Ravalec (and Jon Hamm lookalike) talks to ReadWrite Editor in Chief Owen Thomas about his startup in France.

The crowd was told not to take pictures of Billy Idol. Nobody listened.

“We are only at 1% of what is possible.” ~ Google CEO Larry Page

Page is right. Even though it seems like we get a breakthrough new technology every year, we are really just scratching the surface. But what does that really mean? If we have achieved only 1% of what is technologically possible, Google is setting itself up to be the company that fills in the other 99%.

Just look at the Google I/O keynote Wednesday morning in San Francisco. The company had so many aspects of its product portfolio to announce that it took three hours to work through it all. And that was before Page hit the stage and turned all philosophical:

I think we're all here because we share a deep sense of optimisim about the potential for technology to improve people's lives and the world.

Google Owns The Second Half Of The Chess Board

At a conference in Boston last week Andrew McAfee, a Principal Research Scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, related a story about the pace of innovation that directly speaks to Page’s notion. McAfee recounted how the inventor of chess introduced the game to the emperor of India. The emperor was so impressed with the game's combination of simplicity and complexity, depth and vision, that he told the inventor he could have any gift he could imagine. 

The inventor asked for a grain of rice, doubled for each square on the chess board. On the first square he would get a single grain of rice, on the second square he would get two, on the third he would get four grains, and so on. The request seemed fairly humble to the emperor and he granted it.

What the emperor did not realize, of course, is that if you keep doubling a number, it doesn't take long for for the figures to get really, really big. If the emperor had delivered all the rice he agreed to, the pile would have been bigger than Mount Everest. 

McAfee linked this story to Moore’s Law (which holds that number of transistors on an integrated circuit doubles approximately every two years) and the explosion of data created by humans, rapidly approaching the mind-numbingly large “yotta” byte. Between Big Data and Moore’s Law, McAfee said, we have entered the second half of the chessboard of innovation.

Google's Mountain Of Rice

In this case, though, Google is both the inventor and the emperor. Just like chess, Google’s portfolio of products is deceptively simple but utterly complex. And the company is well positioned to turn that portfolio into a truly epic mountain of rice. 

Rice, in this case, could mean data. Or money. Or better yet, innovation.

Who is going to challenge Google’s core products? Yahoo and Microsoft can't come close to what Google has done with the knowledge graph and voice search. Android is forging ahead of iOS around the world. Chrome is one of the simplest but most sophisticated browsers on the planet. And the company's search ad products just keep cranking out the profits that pay for the company's push in to new areas.

Larry Page Doesn't Think Competition Is Interesting

Yet the individual products seem almost incidental to Page's quest for innovation. Towards the end of the keynote, he harped on the technology industry for holding back the pace of innovation with lawsuits, data hoarding and stifling cross-platform integration:

You know we haven't seen this rate of change in computing for a long time. Probably not since the birth of personal computing... [but] despite the faster change in the industry, we're still moving slow relative to the opportunities we have.

If Page had his way, Google would not be playing chess against it competitors, but working with them to create even more rice:

You know every story I read about Google is sort of us vs. some other company, or some stupid thing, and I just don't find that very interesting. We should be building great things that don't exist. Most important things are not zero-sum. There's a lot of opportunity out there. We can use technology to make really new and really important things to make people's lives better. 

Business, of course, doesn’t typically work that way. Google has to exist within a whirlwind of quarterly earnings statements and antitrust lawsuits, litigation and corporate development. Given all that, it's amazing that Google is able to do all that it does, pushing the boundaries of technology every year. If Page is right, and we are truly just at 1% of what technology is capable of, someone has to lead the way into the remaining 99%. And despite Page's protestations, no one is better positioned than Google to do just that. 

Images by Nick Statt for ReadWrite.

Is there anything that Google didn't announce at the keynote of its Google I/O developers conference Wednesday morning? 

Google just unleashed a fury of new features for all of its properties today at the Google I/O keynote. We saw new developer features for Android, a variety of tools  and functions for the Chrome browser and OS, a boatload of pictures and communication features for Google+ (along with a redesign), the expansion of Google’s Knowledge Graph, new music, new maps for mobile and more. It is enough to make your head spin just thinking about how much stuff Google is doing these days.

But there were things we thought we might see from the I/O keynote that did not show up.

A New Version Of Android

We were almost certain that Google would at least provide a small new update to Android. Whether it was Android 4.3 Jelly Bean or Android 5.0 Key Lime Pie (or any mix thereof), how could Google go through an entire I/O and not update its most important platform? 

Android has seen 900 million activations. Google Play Android apps have been downloaded 48 billion times. Android has become a mature, stable platform. Google does not really need to push out new Android updates at a breakneck pace the way it has done in the past. Today’s Android news seemed more about helping the developer ecosystem and community catch up with the platform, to make their lives easier and make them more money. 

Hardly Any New Hardware

Google announced a new version of the Chrome Pixel for Chrome OS and a “Nexus” version of the Samsung Galaxy S4. 

We were not really expecting much in terms of hardware from I/O this year, but compared to 2012, the new gadgets were really sparse. Google did not announce a new Nexus device (because there was no new version of Android). That means no new smartphone or tablet, no updates to Google Glass, no set top box for your television and no smartwatch. 

No Major Upgrade to Chrome OS

Chrome was a major topic during the I/O keynote. Google featured the mobile Web, the Chrome Pixel and demoed HTML5 and responsive design features.

Yet Google did not do anything groundbreaking with Chrome OS. Google’s desktop operating system never really seems to take major jumps - instead seeing a constant stream of new updates and features. Chrome may not seem like it is evolving much on a day-to-day or month-to-month basis, but look back a year and you will notice that it is significantly different today than it was at last year’s I/O. 

Google Glass Makes No News

Google co-founder Sergey Brin did not make an appearance at all during the I/O keynote. Hence, neither did his pet project, Google Glass. After all the announcements on Android, Chrome, Search, Maps, Google+ and everything, Google's most-hyped new product these days got no mention.

Larry Page addressed a question from Robert Scoble on Glass at the end of the keynote, but that was about it. It seems that Glass is not a substantial part of Google's future. It is cool, fun, geeky, but kind of a side show.

Note, lead image by Nick Statt was altered to create an empty podium.

If you build a lot of Android apps, you know there are certain aspects of the process that make you want to rip our your hair. Google understands your pain. Even better, it's offering some relief.

Instead of focusing on a new version of Android specifically to kick off the keynote at Google I/O this morning, Google focused on new tools and services that will make developers' lives easier. Google VP of Android product management Hugo Barra announced a variety of new services for Google Play, location and gaming. 

Android Studio

The biggest new feature for developers is Android Studio, a dedicated Google-made integrated development environment (IDE) custom-made to simplify the process of building, testing and deploying Android apps. In particular, with Studio, Google aims to solve one of the longest running and bigger problem for Android developers: fragmentation.

Developers often cite the variety of screen sizes and different Android versions as one of their biggest headaches. With Android Studio, developers can render their apps in real time across any type of screen size that Android supports. Studio can also help translate apps into different languages straight from the console.

Maps & Location

Google also announced new ways for developers to tap features of Google Maps in their apps. The new Google Maps API version 2 aims to make it easier for developers to add Google Maps straight into their apps while also improving the speed with which maps render.

Google said it's also been working to improve the battery drain that turning on smartphone location services can cause. The company claimed that Android location services will use less than 1% of a device's battery per hour. If that holds up in the real world, it would represent a major improvement over the current location performance on Android.

Google also announced three new application programming interfaces —i.e., hooks for developers to use Google services in their apps — for Android location:

• Fused Location Provider -- location is faster to acquire, more accurate, low power location mode that uses less than 1% of battery per hour.
• Geofencing -- Can have up to 100 geofences active per app. 
• Activity Recognition -- Help users track their physical activity. Machine learning classifiers to help people "quantify" themselves. 

Google Cloud Messaging

Google said its Cloud Messaging service is delivering 200,000 push messages every second. That is 17 billion messages a day. Google claims to have 60 milliseconds latency, half of what it was when Cloud Messaging was announced last year.

Among the new features in Google Cloud Messaging are Persistent Connection and Upstream Messaging (from the app to your server, GCM does all the client side functions for you). Cloud Messaging will also be able to synchronize notifications between Android devices so you can send a message to a user's tablet or Android smartphone in one shot. 

Gaming

Google is putting a major focus on Android games at I/O this week and announced a variety of new APIs for Android games. None of these are especially groundbreaking, although they really make Android gaming perform a lot like Apple's iOS Game Center.

• Cloud Save: The ability to save game play to the cloud and play among multiple devices. 
• Achievements: The ability to earn badges based on performance.
• Leaderboards: The ability to have a leader board among your friends on a specific app. Instead of having to raise the global rankings, play against your friends.

The one mild stroke of genius here is that Google is rolling these APIs to both iOS and the Web, meaning that it can extend its gaming experience outside of Android. 

Google Play Developer Console

The Google Play Developer Console was announced at I/O 2012. The goal is to help developers manage and monetize their apps. Five new features were announced for the developer console:

• Optimization Tips: Analyzes app and how it is doing in the Play Store and gives you tips to get it to perform better.
• App Translation Service: Allows you to get professional translations from the developer console. Russian!
• Usage Metrics: Google analytics metrics directly in the Google Play Developer Console.
• Revenue Graphs: Simple tool as a tab in the dev console to see how much money you are making.
• Beta testing and staged rollouts: Three tabs, alpha testing, beta testing and production. Can use Google+ and Communities to get beta testers. Can manage the rollout in one go. That is huge so you don't push out bugs to thousands or millions of users.

The biggest announcement here is the beta testing and staged rollouts. This is something that iOS developers have been asking from Apple for a while.

What are the biggest new features in building for Android? What are you most excited by? Is it the Android Studio that helps you render from a dedicated IDE? Or the beta testing and stage rollouts? Let us know in the comments. 

Lead image by Nick Statt for ReadWrite

Designing a mobile app can seem simple when you are sketching it out on the whiteboard. But when you actually sit down in your developer environment and get cracking, turning your ideas into reality is not always so easy.

That's only the beginning, of course. What if you need to design your app for both the iPhone and Android? You will very quickly learn that you cannot just cut and paste your design from one platform to the other. Android and iOS frameworks share some basic principles, but when it comes to design, they are as different as ebony and ivory. 

For instance, the notification bars in iOS and Android may look similar, but they perform different functions on each platform. And did you know that the action bar interface icon for iPhone is 20x20 pixels, while Android's is 24x24 density-independent pixels? Do you know the difference between a pixel and a density-independent pixel?

Here’s a quick reminder, from StackOverflow: Density-independent Pixels - an abstract unit based on the physical density of the screen. These units are relative to a 160dpi screen, so one dp is one pixel on a 160dpi screen. The ratio of dp-to-pixel changes with the screen density, but not necessarily in direct proportion. Note: The compiler accepts both "dip" and "dp," though "dp" is more consistent with "sp."

Sometimes you just need an easy chart to remember these kinds of things. Mobile cloud-service provider Kinvey created a quick infographic going over the basics of iOS and Android design for easy reference when you are pulling out your hair trying to port your iPhone icons over to an Android app (or vice versa). Check it out below.

What are your biggest app design problems? Let us know in the comments.

Square, PayPal, and Groupon all made news today with the common goal of getting small businesses to junk their cash registers for Internet-connected devices that promise to bring the simple act of settling accounts into the future.

Change With Your Coffee

I work from home, but every morning I wake up, take a shower and go straight to work from my local coffee shop. About half of those days I stop at the neighborhood ATM kiosk to grab some cash. Call it quaint, call it archaic, but my local coffee shop only takes hard currency.

The coffee shop, 1369 in Cambridge's Inman Square, is really the only reason I bother using cash at all. 1369 is a little old school, a little hipster. Cash sales were kind of its “thing.” That’s why I was surprised the other day when I ran into 1369’s owner, Josh Gerber, and he told me that the coffee shop was going digital with the Square Register.

To me, this is disruption personified. No longer are we talking about some abstract concept of how smartphones and tablets could change businesses at the local level. We are seeing it in action on a tangible scale on the street, in our neighborhoods and, yes, at our local coffee shops. 

Mobile Reshapes Main Street

Leading the charge in this changing business landscape are companies like Square, PayPal, LevelUp, Intuit, Groupon, Revel and a variety of others. The task these companies have taken on is no easy challenge – each aims to redefine the point of sale and replace one of the most common items for Main Street business: the cash register.

The chosen vehicle to replace the cash register? The iPad.

Call it the iPad-ification of the point of sale or the mobilization of American’s businesses. We are now starting to see distinct results from several years of ecosystem growth and product releases intended to change the way that basic commerce is conducted. 

Square is the leading disruptor. It was the company that made the original card-swiping device for the iPhone and, later, the iPad. With its Square Register software, it introduced one of the first connected point-of-sale solutions. Today, Square took that a step further by announcing the Square Stand, a full replacement for the cash register that holds an iPad, includes a built-in credit-card swiper and allows business to connect cash drawers and receipt printers. The Square Stand, due out in July, is available for pre-order for $299.

Not to be outdone, PayPal announced at the same time a new program called “Cash For Registers” where it will buy old registers from businesses that wish to install PayPal Here, its own iPad-oriented point-of-sale system—and it's waiving payment-processing fees for the rest of the year.

Groupon also unveiled a new iPad-friendly version of its Breadcrumb point-of-sale software today.

Already, Revel Systems uses the iPad and Intuit can install any variety of smartphones or tablets into an effective register replacement. 

Conceptual To Implementation

Four factors are driving the implementation of iPad point-of-sale systems in small and medium-sized businesses:

• Install cost: It is often cheaper to buy an iPad and a couple of accessories that it is to go through a major point-of-sale vendor like Aloha or Micros, whose devices can cost thousands of dollars apiece.
• Interchange: The classic credit-card readers often have a variety of hidden costs for the business. They take a few percentage points of the total sale and often have a monthly fee or minimum that must be reached by the merchant, driving up their take to an effective rate of 3 to 5 percent for many merchants. Square charges interchange of 2.75% with no hidden fees on swiped transactions. A company like LevelUp does not charge interchange, but rather makes money as a marketing and advertising platform, offering incentives to users. 
• Mobile acceptance: A couple of years ago (even last year, when we first noticed the iPad point-of-sale trend), smartphone and tablet adoption were still in relative infancy. That has changed in a big way extraordinarily quickly. In just a few years, smartphones are now the norm. Second and third wave mainstream consumer adopters are now looking at them not as some weird fad but as practical tools for solving problems.
• Ease of use: Anyone can hit a few buttons on an iPad and swipe a credit card. Proprietary register systems pose a training nightmare. 

Square's new Stand product promises to be more durable than the older plug-in card swiper. Square merchants like Blue Bottle were known to stock multiple replacement swipers in case one went bad—but no one wants to fiddle with hardware while customers are waiting.

PayPal is taking a less prescriptive approach than Square's integrated hardware and software, but it too is pushing iPad-based solutions. It rolled out an iPad version of PayPal Here in March, with one nice feature from its parent company, eBay: Merchants can scan barcoded inventory for easy input into the register's list of items for sale.

"The reason the iPad is such a great device is it's touchscreen; you can integrate it with devices like receipt printers; it's relatively affordable," says PayPal president David Marcus. "It's the ideal device."

Marcus says PayPal's seen many merchants upgrade from the smartphone version to the iPad version.

"We just want to accelerate the inevitable," Marcus says of PayPal's move to offer free payment processing to merchants who take it up on the register turn-in offer. The cash register "is a dumb device," he says, that doesn't handle features like loyalty tracking or remote ordering.

At 1369, Gerber knew that he would eventually need to go digital, at least to the bare minimum of accepting credit cards. Yet, the average check at 1369 (or really any other coffee shop) is in the $4-$5 range. When you are processing a lot of small transactions, that interchange rate becomes painful. That is why it is good for businesses when payment processors battle on interchange and lower rates for everybody.

We are now in a phase in the Mobile Revolution where we are seeing concepts become reality. This is not just some startup CEO saying, “I am going to change the world” or a huge gadget manufacturer telling us that this is the next big thing. These are real implementations we can see, feel and touch, in our neighborhoods and at our coffee shops. 

Photo via 1369 Coffee House

Owen Thomas contributed reporting to this story.

Nearly five years ago, a smartphone came out that few thought much of. Little did people know that the device would be a harbinger for the next half-decade of mobile innovation, pushing boundaries of technology and launching a fundamental shift in how people interact with computers.

That phone was the HTC G1, the original "Google Phone." It was a clunky, bug-ridden touchscreen device with a slide-out physical keyboard. The G1 did not sell particularly well. The buzz at the time was over Apple's still relatively young iPhone and varying BlackBerry devices, like the original Bold 9000.

Let's not say that the G1 was the beginning of the Mobile Revolution. There are neither beginnings nor endings in the turning of the wheel of technology. But it was a beginning.

The beginning of the Android Era.

It is amazing to look back at the last five years of Android and see just how far the devices that run Google's mobile operating system have come. From the G1 to the Nexus 10, the hardware, software and everything in between has gone from buggy, crash-prone phones to finely tuned devices that dominate mobile computing. Google and its manufacturing partners have done well in a half decade of innovation. What will the next five years bring?

Google is expected to announce a new version of its Android mobile operating system at its I/O developers conference, which runs Wednesday through Friday this week. Google refreshed its flagship Nexus line in November, and new Android chief Sundar Pichai recently downplayed expectations for major new products at I/O, a change from last year, which saw major launches like the Nexus 7 tablet.

Instead, in a sign of Android's maturation, Google will likely put the focus on devices from its hardware partners, like Samsung and HTC—a sign of Android's increasing maturity as a platform. Let's take a look back at the devices that brought Android to this pivotal point in its history.

HTC G1

Released: October 22, 2008

Hardware: 3.2-inch screen (320x480), 1150 mAh battery (removable), slide-out physical keyboard, 256 MB internal storage (expandable external storage), 192 RAM, 3.2 megapixel back camera.

Firmware: Android 1.0

The G1 (also known as the HTC Dream) was the first of Google's flagship smartphones. At the time it was a bit of a curiosity, mostly interesting for how it introduced Google properties (like Maps, Street View, Calendar and Search) to the smartphone market. The G1 was limited to T-Mobile in the United States.

Motorola Droid

Released: October 17, 2009

Hardware: 3.7-inch screen (480x854), 1400 mAh battery (removable), slide-out keyboard, 512 MB internal storage (expandable external storage), 256 MB RAM, 5 MP back camera.

Firmware: Android 2.0 (Eclair)

Boom goes the dynamite. The Motorola Droid was the first true Android smartphone to be popular with the masses. It was released to Verizon with heavy marketing targeted at what the Droid could do that an iPhone could not, like multi-tasking. The "Droid Does" slogan became a popular part of the geek lexicon and was Motorola's high water mark in the smartphone wars. The Droid shipped with the original Android 2.0 "Eclair" version but was quickly updated to a much more stable version in Android 2.1.

Nexus One

Released: January 5, 2009

Hardware: 3.7-inch screen (480x800), 1400 mAh battery (removable), 512 MB internal storage (expandable), 512 MB RAM, 5 MP back camera.

Firmware: Android 2.1 (Eclair)

The Nexus One was the first Android device commissioned directly from Google to serve as the flagship of the operating system. The One was built by HTC (an altered with HTC's "Sense" skin for its Incredible smartphone) and immediately became the sexiest Android smartphone on the market. The Nexus series has since become known as the "guide" device for new versions of the operating system. The Nexus One also marked an experiment by Google to bypass the carriers and sell directly to consumers through its website. The One was also one of the first Android smartphone to ship with Near Field Communication (NFC) functionality. This experiment did not take among consumers and most subsequent Nexus devices were offered through Google alongside subsidized versions from the likes of AT&T, T-Mobile, Verizon and Sprint. Google did not release a Nexus device for Android 2.2, with updated firmware for the Nexus One serving as the de facto flagship for Froyo.

Nexus S

Released: December 16, 2010.

Hardware: 4-inch screen (480x800), 1500 mAh battery (removable), 16 GB internal storage, 512 MB RAM, 5 MP back camera, VGA front camera.

Firmware: Android 2.3 (Gingerbread)

Samsung really started its rise to the top of the Android pyramid in 2010 with the release of its wide-ranging Galaxy S smartphones. Google tapped the Korean manufacturer for the next two Nexus devices, starting with the Nexus S. The device was the flagship for Android 2.3 Gingerbread, which is still the most-used version of the operating system years after its release.

Motorola Xoom

Released: February 24, 2011.

Hardware: 10.1-inch screen (800x1280), 6000 mAh battery (non-removable), 32 GB internal storage, 1 GB RAM, 5 MP back camera, 2 MP front camera.

Firmware: Android 3.2 (Honeycomb)

Google took a break from the Nexus line with Android 3.2 Honeycomb and went with Motorola for the flagship device of the operating system. Honeycomb and the Xoom turned out to be a complete albatross in the Android ecosystem, never gaining traction with consumers or developers. In fact, Honeycomb was so lampooned for being "half-finished" that Google never even released the normally open source Android kernel code and very few devices were ever made that used the operating system. Honeycomb was supposed to be Google's answer to the Android tablet conundrum. To this point, the only Android tablets that had been released ran some version of Froyo or Gingerbread, Android versions that were suboptimal for large screen devices. Honeycomb ultimately served as the stepping stone between Gingerbread and Ice Cream Sandwich, which married the smartphone and tablet capabilities of Android and made it much easier for developers and manufacturers to create applications for a variety of screen sizes. 

Galaxy Nexus

Released: November 17, 2011.

Hardware: 4.65-inch screen (720x1280), 1750 mAh battery (removable), 16/32 GB internal storage (no external memory), 1 GB RAM, 5 MP back camera, 1.3 MP front camera.

Firmware: Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich)

In many ways, Android phones made a giant leap at the end of 2011. Screens started to get bigger (eventually much bigger) and Android got a lot smarter, easy to use and out of its own way. This was epitomized with the Galaxy Nexus and Ice Cream Sandwich. Android can almost be categorized into two phases: Android 2.3 Gingerbread and everything that came before and Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich and everything that came after. Starting with the Galaxy Nexus, Android smartphones have run smoother, been more secure, had bigger screens and hardware specifications that are all almost nearly double what came before.

Nexus 7

Released: July 13, 2012.

Hardware: 7-inch screen (800x1280), 4325 mAh battery (non-removable), 8/16/32 GB internal memory (no external memory), 1 GB RAM, 1.2 MP front camera.

Firmware: Android 4.1 (Jelly Bean)

The first Nexus tablet was announced at Google I/O in June 2012 and shipped a couple weeks later. The Nexus 7 cemented the market for lower priced tablets (next to the Kindle Fire at $199) with smaller screens in the 7-inch variety. From a hardware point of view, the Nexus 7 was not the most sophisticated tablet ever to be released, but it showed that Android has the ability to seamlessly run on tablet-sized screens while also highlighting the capabilities of Jelly Bean as a tablet operating system. Google refreshed the Nexus 7 later in the year to give it cellular connectivity. 

Nexus 4

Released: November 13, 2012.

Hardware: 4.7-inch screen (768x1280), 2100 mAh battery (non-removable), 8/16 GB internal memory, 2 GB RAM, 8 MP back camera, 1.3 MP front camera. 

Firmware: Android 4.2 (Jelly Bean)

The latest Android firmware is version 4.2, the second instance of Jelly Bean (much in the same way that Android 2.0/2.1 were both Eclair). The Nexus 4 from LG was released at the end of 2012 with two other devices -- the Nexus 10 from Samsung (below) and the upgraded Nexus 7. As yet, adoption of Android 4.2 has been minimal as it is an iterative update to what already existed in Android 4.1, with some minor feature upgrades. While many people consider the Nexus 4 to be a superb instance of an Android smartphone, it was criticized for its lack of 4G LTE, of which most new smartphones have included by default. The phone was made available through Google Play store (along with it tablet siblings) and on T-Mobile.

Nexus 10

Released: November 13, 2012.

Hardware: 10.05-inch screen (1600x2560), 9000 mAh battery (non-removable), 16/32 GB memory, 2 GB RAM, 5 MP back camera, 1.9 MP front camera.

Firmware: Android 4.2 (Jelly Bean)

Samsung came back to produce the first branded large-screen (8-inches or up) Nexus tablet with the Nexus 10. The tablet was the first large screen to roll out with a flagship Android update since Motorola released the Xoom tablet with the Honeycomb release in February 2011. 

What will this week bring at Google I/O 2013? Will we finally see Android 5.0? Or is there another update to Jelly Bean (Android 4.3)? We will be everywhere at I/O next week bringing you news of Google's latest gadgets, apps and developer news. Stay tuned.

If you like Google, mobile development and cloud platforms, this is going to be a good week for you.

Google will have lots of goodies this week for developers - and consumers - at its I/O developer conference in San Francisco. We might see some new hardware, a couple updates to Google’s major platforms (Maps, Android, Chrome, Google+ and Play) and most likely a surprise or two. But, really, the week belongs to the developers.

Historically, I/O has been an occasion for Google to get its developer community together and introduce them to the newest tools, tips on how to develop for Google apps and best practices. Until the last couple of years, I/O (which Google started in 2008) was all about developers and less about big product announcements. In 2011, Google announced Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich as well as Chromebooks from Samsung and Acer. In 2012, the rage was Android 4.1 Jelly Bean, the Nexus 7 Android tablet and the spectacular unveiling of Google Glass. This year, we expect Google to once again focus heavily on its developer community - with fewer major product announcements.

From a hardware perspective, Google may or may not announce new devices during I/O, but don't expect an event like 2012, when Google-branded hardware stole the show. If Google does announce hardware, we expect that it will release (or at least update) some kind of Nexus tablet and/or smartphone (probably through LG), an update to its Chromebook line (likely through Samsung or Acer) and maybe something to do with Google TV.

Otherwise, Google I/O will be a developer’s paradise. Here’s what mobile, Web, cloud and social developers should be looking forward to:

Android Update: Probably More Jelly Beans

Chrome Android by Paul Wilcox

Google’s new head of Android, Sundar Pichai, told Wired not to expect any major product announcements at I/O. Considering that Pichai is head of Android and Chrome OS, we tend to think that he was specifically talking more about Google’s computing platforms and less about new hardware. 

That said, Google will update Android one way or another this week. The rumors surrounding I/O are that Google will issue an iterative update to Jelly Bean, Android version 4.3. If true, that means that Google is not yet coming out with Key Lime Pie, the next named version of Android. 

Regardless if we see a new version of Android or just a Jelly Bean update, there will be plenty of Android news at I/O. Some major themes:

• Gaming: Google will host a variety of game-related developer sessions at I/O. It will give developers best practices, design tips and ideas on taking their games to the next level. Google’s Ingress augmented/alternate reality game will be featured, with several Ingress battles taking place at Moscone West during the week. Most of the Android gaming sessions will take place on Day 1 (Wednesday, May 15) of I/O.
• Design & Performance: Google’s biggest objective with Android during the week will be working with developers to make their apps function seamlessly, look better and present dynamic user experiences. Most design and performance sessions will take place on Day 2. 
• Google Play: Google will be giving developers tips on how to best monetize their apps and get seen on its app store, Google Play, throughout the conference. Google Play sessions will be held on Day 2 & 3. 
• Maps: We expect a big update to Google Maps in both user interface, functionality and developer tools. Location is a key ingredient in how Google uses Android and there will be a variety of location- and Maps-related sessions on all three days of the event.

Chrome OS Tools, Apps & Features

Chromebook (by Mark Hachman)

Again, if we can believe Pichai, there will not be any major new announcements for Chrome. But there might be a new Chromebook announced at I/O and there will definitely be new feature updates. 

Chrome OS and the Chrome browser are important to Google because they are the company’s window to the Web. Chrome OS is also a key cog in Google's cloud strategy - the company wants to tie developers to the operating system and get them to run their apps in Google’s cloud platform. Many of the announcements and sessions at I/O related to Chrome will focus on functionality, cloud adoption and Google Apps (like Maps, Gmail, Drive etc.). On Monday, Google announced that Gmail, Google+ Photos and Drive will be merged to give users 15GB of storage. That type of integration will be prominent in how Google steers developers toward developing for Chrome at I/O.

• Drive: Google will be making a bid to get developers and users to tie their Chrome OS and browser storage to Drive, its personal cloud product. Google will push tying use of its Apps to Drive, such as in the Day 1 session titled, “Integrate Google Drive With Google App Scripts.”
• HTML: Chrome is for the Web and of the Web. Hence, HTML will always be a big part of development for apps on Chrome OS and the browser. I/O has several sessions on how to create mobile websites optimized through Chrome with HTML. It will also have sessions on Dart, Google’s programming language meant to accelerate function and performance in HTML Web apps. 

Google+ Enhanced Communication

The biggest improvements to Google’s social network likely concern communication. Google Babel is rumored to be the company’s integration of all of its messaging platforms into one product - likely to be rolled out through Google+. Google will spend a lot of time showing developers how to use Google+ as a “one true sign-in” platform, much like Facebook uses your profile to let you sign into a variety of websites. Google will also announce new features to Google+ designed to get developers to build more apps for the platform and increase engagement - from brands and consumers. 

Location, Location, Location

Google Maps will get some heavy play at this year's I/O. Maps will likely get a user experience overhaul - look for that to be a major component of Wednesday morning's keynote. Google wants Maps to be integrated everywhere, from Android to Chrome to every third-party app in between. On Day 1 and Day 2 it has a variety of sessions dedicated solely to Maps integration. That includes HTML5 and mobile Web visualization, indoor maps, API integration and discovery.

Only A Little Glass

Google Glass was the big announcement at I/O 2012. It will likely be a major theme at the keynote on Wednesday. The hype that surrounds Glass requires Google to mention it prominently. Yet, when it comes to developers, Glass will only be a sideshow to the major events around Chrome, Cloud and Android. 

Google is holding just four announced Glass development sessions, all on Day 2. Essentially, these sessions are Developing For Glass 101, and will include how to use the Google Mirror API.

This week's Google I/O conference is promising to be an anticlimactic event when it comes to new products running Android, Google's mobile operating system for smartphones and tablets. And that may be a good thing.

The Year of Android was 2011. That was the year that Android became a stable platform and sales of smartphones running the operating system began to rocket towards the moon. Android was all that anybody could talk about, for good or bad.

Two years later, Android is almost a forgotten term among the partners Google depends on to make hardware.

By our count, four major smartphones running Android have already launched this year: the Samsung Galaxy S4, HTC One, HTC First and LG Optimus G Pro. All of these smartphones are some of the best to ever hit the market in terms of screens, batteries, processors and cameras. Even the HTC First, considered a ho-hum middle-market device, is of such quality that it helps to redefine what a middle-market smartphone can be. 

Each of these smartphones shares a distinct trait: They all run on Android, and yet its presence is not a talking point. Instead, the smartphones themselves take center stage. The HTC One is best known for its “ultrapixel” camera, Zoe camera features and BlinkFeed home screen. The Samsung Galaxy S4 is so packed with features (like Air Gesture, Air View and Smart Scroll) and Samsung-made apps that the underlying Android operating system is hardly recognizable. The First is, of course, the “Facebook Phone,” running the Facebook Home launcher. The Optimus G Pro is a large-screen phablet, or smartphone-tablet hybrid, with a couple of neat user interface tricks up its sleeve. 

HTC One The Device Has Become The Story

For Android's first five years, the story about every new smartphone running Android was the operating system. How well does it work? Do apps run without crashing? What Android features are present and how well do they work? When manufacturers like Motorola, Samsung or HTC announced new smartphones, they would show off what can be done with Android. If something was good or bad about a device, it was Android that received the praise. Or the blame.

I was at the launch events for the Galaxy S4 and the HTC One. At both events, Android was mentioned exactly once, in passing to note what operating system the phones were running. In reviewing those two smartphones, I hardly thought about Android at all. The focus was on the features of the smartphones, such as the improved cameras and battery life. 

Android’s Inflection Point

The first Android smartphone was released in October 2008. The HTC G1 was a curiosity. Most people thought of it as the "Google Phone,” and it was notable only because it came pre-loaded with Google apps like Maps.

Looking back over five years of Android, we can break it down into two distinct eras: What came before Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich and what came after.
The Google Nexus family of devices

Gingerbread, released in December 2010, is still the most-used version of Android. It was the release that supercharged Android smartphone sales across the globe. But it defined an early era of Android development where manufacturers and users had to play a guessing game about compatibility with screen sizes and hardware.

Ice Cream Sandwich, which came out less than a year later, was the biggest leap that Android has made in its short history. This was the version where Google started to take design, performance, functionality, and ease of use and development more seriously. With Ice Cream Sandwich, Google made it simpler for developers and manufacturers to build apps for multiple screen sizes and varying chipsets. In Ice Cream Sandwich, the improvements that had been introduced in Android Honeycomb 3.2 (designed specifically for tablets) were merged with the core of Android 2.3 Gingerbread.

With Ice Cream Sandwich, Android not only became usable, it became seamless—and that's when it started to fade into the background. 

Since Ice Cream Sandwich, Google has worked to refine Android’s features, functionality and performance and been very successful. Last year, Google announced Android 4.1 Jelly Bean, a mostly iterative update that brought a couple neat tricks to the operating system, like its “Android Beam” NFC sharing, resizable widgets and Google Now. Google announced last year at its I/O developer conference that performance in Jelly Bean was a key focus (the so-called “Project Butter”) and the results were noticeable. Since Ice Cream Sandwich, users and developers have complained less about Android’s fragmentation problem, apps not working on different devices and screen sizes.

It is very telling that the focus for Jelly Bean (both version 4.1 and 4.2) was not on new features, but performance. It took several years for Google to get Android to the point where it wasn’t fighting itself but rather creating a platform that just worked well.

The Benefits Of Android Maturity

At the beginning of 2012, Google started requiring that apps show consistency in look and user experience across the board. The goal of Android’s Holo Themes: ensuring that various Android “skins," or interface layers on top of the core Android OS, would look consistent while also allowing designers to differentiate the look of their apps. This, along with a variety of improvements in CPU performance and efficiency within newer devices, has led Android to a state where the operating system no longer gets in its own way.

What has this led us to? A developer landscape where apps built for Ice Cream Sandwich and Jelly Bean run with more consistency and reliability. Smartphones and tablets where the manufacturers can create excellent features and experiences that are built on top of Android without needing to be a feature of the operating system itself.

Some argue that this scenario puts Google at a disadvantage, allowing Samsung, the dominant Android smartphone maker, to take advantage of a weakened Android and push its own innovations. 

I disagree. A sign of maturity for any technology platform is when it stops being primary topic of conversation and becomes part of the background.

It has taken the half-decade since the first Android smartphone for the operating system to get to this point, but now that Android has matured, everybody from app developers to smartphone and tablet manufacturers benefit. The ultimate winner then becomes the consumer who reaps the benefits of a platform that allows innovators to push the boundaries of what is possible.

If you are waiting for a surprise bombshell of a product announcement at Google I/O in San Francisco this week, you may be disappointed.

Speaking to Wired, Google’s new head of Android Sundar Pichai said of I/O, “It’s going to be different. It’s not a time when we have much in the way of launches of new products or a new operating system.”

What does that mean exactly? Are we not going to get a new version of Android? A platform update to Chrome? A new Android Nexus tablet or smartphone? 

Events like Google I/O, Microsoft Build, Apple’s World Wide Developer Conference and similar events tend to follow a fairly simple script. The CEO will get on stage, do a little cheerleading and pump up the numbers of units sold, dollars made and developers paid. Then a variety of division chiefs will get on stage and announce new aspects to their products (like Andy Rubin talking about Android at previous I/Os). A few new products will then be introduced and hyped to get some buzz going. After the keynote, there will be about three days of sessions and meetings aimed at developers. 

Last year, Google followed this script almost perfectly. Until people started jumping from planes. 

Google went off-script in a huge way last year by introducing Glass, its augmented reality glasses that are currently the most-hyped item among the Technorati. Glass was introduced by Google co-founder Sergey Brin and a live demonstration of Glass-wearing stuntman jumping from a plane over San Francisco commenced. It was one of the strangest (and coolest) twists of a keynote presentation in recent memory. 

If we can take Pichai at his word, we are not going to see any of these pyrotechnics this week at Moscone West.

“Both on Android and Chrome, we’re going to focus this I/O on all of the kinds of things we’re doing for developers, so that they can write better things. We will show how Google services are doing amazing things on top of these two platforms,” Pichai told Wired.

So, we may not see any exciting new hardware at I/O this week. But we will definitely see a bunch of interesting developer news as Google rolls out tools to make Android richer, Chrome easier to build upon as well as features surrounding games, cloud and Google+. We will also likely see many, many mentions of Google Glass.

We will be at I/O covering all things Google this week. What do you want to see from Google? Let us know in the comments. 

Nokia thinks it has the perfect summer smartphone for you. Today, the Finnish smartphone maker announced the Lumia 928, a Windows Phone with a 4.5-inch display, improved camera capabilities and sound capabilities. The Lumia 928 will be available through Verizon starting next week for $99 on a two-year contract.

Yet, if you are thinking that this new Lumia is giant leap forward for Nokia and Windows Phone, you are mistaken.

Nokia calls the Lumia 928 a “new expression of the world’s most innovative smartphone.” Presumably, Nokia is referring to last year’s release of the Lumia 920 as the most innovative smartphone. Essentially, what Nokia is saying is that the Lumia 928 is an iterative update to its last flagship device, except this time it is coming exclusively to Verizon.

The specs on the Lumia 928 are proof that this is not a giant leap ahead for Nokia. It sports a 1.5-GHz Qualcomm processor, 2000 mAh in battery, a 1280x768 display on its 4.5-inch screen (334 pixels per inch), 1 GB of RAM and 32 GB of internal memory. The camera is improved over the Lumia 920 with a 8.7-megapixel back camera with Carl Zeiss optics and Nokia PureView technology and Optical Image Stabilization (OIS). For the most part, these specs are only marginally better or equal to the Lumia 920 that has been available since the end of 2012. 

If you put those specs up against those from this year’s two biggest Android smartphones, the Lumia 928 does not stack up. The HTC One and Samsung Galaxy S4 both sport quad-core processors from Qualcomm (at 1.7 GHz and 1.9 GHz clocks, respectively) and crisper displays (469 ppi for the HTC One, 441 ppi for the Galaxy S4), better batteries (2300 mAh the One, 2600 mAh for Galaxy S4).

Nokia wants to differentiate on the camera. That is an increasingly hard position to take in the market, as every single smartphone manufacturer thinks it can differentiate on the camera and have worked extremely hard to create unique capabilities. HTC sports its “ultrapixel” camera, which works extremely well in low light situations. Samsung has a 13 megapixel camera with the Galaxy S4 and a variety of nifty features. Apple and BlackBerry also sport innovative, quality cameras for their flagship smartphones. It is well and good for Nokia to continue touting PureView and Carl Zeiss, but at this point those have become marketing buzzwords bereft of much meaning to the actual consumer. 

So, take the Lumia 928 for what it is: a slightly better Lumia 920, only this time exclusively for Verizon. 

Microsoft appears to be sticking a finger in Google's eye with the launch of its new YouTube app for Windows Phone. The app, ReadWrite has confirmed, strips out YouTube ads when it plays back videos and allows users to easily download video by way of a prominent "download" button.

Both behaviors violate the cardinal rules YouTube imposes on developers who use its service. To get around those restrictions, it appears that Microsoft reverse-engineered some portion of the software used to access YouTube's basic functions, which are generally known as application programming interfaces, or APIs. If so, that could mean Microsoft can do just about whatever it wants with its YouTube app.

Google had previously declined to build a YouTube or any other Google apps for Windows Phone 8, citing the lack of users on the platform.To get an official YouTube app on Windows Phone, Microsoft decided to circumvent Google and just build the app itself. 

YouTube's restrictions, found in section II of its terms of service, are fairly explicit:

Your API Client will not, and You will not encourage or create functionality for Your users or other third parties to:

[...]

7. modify, replace, interfere with or block advertisements placed by YouTube in the YouTube Data, YouTube audiovisual content, or the YouTube player;

[...]

11. store copies of YouTube audiovisual content;

In a variety of tests, ReadWrite found that the Microsoft YouTube app indeed appears to be stripping pre-roll ads from videos that would normally appear. Ads appear on both this video from BuzzFeed on the Web and Android as well as this video from popular YouTuber Jenna Marbles. Neither of the videos had pre-roll ads when viewed via the Microsoft app.

As for downloading, that's fairly easy to spot in Microsoft’s YouTube app — there's an entire button dedicated to it. See the screenshots below.

Microsoft admitted to Neowin.net, a technology website that focuses on Microsoft, Apple and Linux news, that it had re-architected some of YouTube’s APIs to get the app to work. A Microsoft PR rep confirmed the statement below and offered no further comment:

Windows Phone invested additional engineering resources against existing APIs to re-architect a Windows Phone app that delivers a great YouTube experience, including support for unique Windows Phone 8 features such as Live Tiles and Kids Corner. Microsoft did not receive any additional technical support to create the Windows Phone YouTube app.

Neither Microsoft nor YouTube had responded to requests for further comment as of this morning. We'll update the story when and if we hear back.

This wouldn't be the first time that Microsoft has reversed-engineered Google. In February 2011, Google caught Microsoft's Bing search engine copying Google search results. Google had set up a “honeypot” trap to catch Microsoft in the act.

One fine day, we might all ditch our smartphones in favor of smartwatches or other wrist-worn devices that do everything that a smartphone can do, but better. That day is not coming any time soon.

The ideal smartwatch would be able to stand by itself without requiring help from a smartphone to perform its mojo. It would not need to be tethered to a smartphone, so companies like Apple, Google, Samsung and Microsoft would not be able to tie you into a closed-looped ecosystem where to use their smartwatch, you would have to own their smartphones too.

Unfortunately, there are practical limitations to building this ideal smartwatch. It all comes down to components – the hardware inside the watch – and an industry playing “wait and see” to learn if this next fad in wearable computing will be a consumer hit.

(See also: The Smartwatch Arm Race: Don't Lock Us Into A Closed Loop.)

Google smartwatch patent Battery Life, Heat & Efficiency

The problem is that the components to create the ideal smartwatch – device-independent but small enough to be practical – do not really exist yet. The biggest technical challenges to creating such a smartwatch are related to power consumption. Surprisingly, that does not necessarily have much to do with the battery inside.

Power usage in mobile devices is more about the operating system the device runs (iOS, Android, BlackBerry etc.), how the device's processor (CPU) manages energy efficiency and the size and capability of the cellular modem. Loading and running a smartphone-style operating system on a watch-sized device would require significant processing and modem power.

Robert Thompson, the director of smart devices, consumer segment, at component maker Freescale, laid out three distinct challenges to creating a cellular modem for the ideal smartwatch:

1. Size of the die for the modem chip.
2. Power consumption.
3. Cost: the amount of research, development and change to manufacturing processes needed to achieve the required size and power-consumption.

“Even if Qualcomm today could reduce the die size or the size of their cellular modem that might fit into a smartphwatch... and therefore reduce the power consumption and the heat dissipation to a level that would allow it to be used as a wearable device, there is no silver bullet on the power management [integrated circuit] front," Thompson warned.

The modem makers would need to see significant consumer interest in wearable devices to feel safe making the investment needed to create components that could fit in smartwatches, Thompson said. He adds that companies like Apple, Google or Samsung could foot the bill for such improvements, but that is not likely to happen in time for the first wave of smartwatches. 

“That cost structure, for obvious reasons would make the margins extremely high and make it almost impossible for any of the major players apart from maybe an Apple, Google or Samsung, that have the purchasing power in the millions of units, to have any cost structure that would make this smartwatch appealing to the majority of people,” Thompson predicted. 

For now, Thompson said, none of the major potential smartwatch makers are really considering the use case for the "ideal" smartwatch. Most are still trying to figure out how to make the device as low-power as possible while tethering the device to a smartphone. 

The Art Of The Possible

Apple smartwatch patent Consumers have a kind of blind faith that tech manufacturers will, eventually, be able to create the technology of their dreams. They may have a general notion of Moore’s Law (where the capability of chips “doubles” every two years) and a rudimentary knowledge of what the hardware specifications in their smartphones actually mean.

Turning that faith into reality doesn't get any easier as expectations continue to ratchet up. 

Technological innovation does not happen overnight. More than a decade of research, development and evolution of manufacturing processes was required to create workable smartphones. Gadget makers live in a world constrained by the art of the possible - and they constantly strive to expand those constraints.

Based on the current component state-of-the-art, Thompson said he sees two ways that gadgets like smartwatches can evolve: as “hub” devices for other wearable computers and as data-collection devices that can connect to your home network.

“I think the next evolution that smart watches can take is that they don't have to talk just to your smartphone or tablet, but can also talk to your home gateway,” Thompson said. “I think that in the home network that we are going to have Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) added to the many protocols a home gateway will connect to. So your smart watch doesn't just have to be a companion device to your smartphone, it can pass data directly to the gateway and then to the cloud where it can be analyzed and then pushed down back to your hub device.”

As hub devices, smartwatches would manage power by only on turning its power-consuming features (CPU, sensors, modem, Bluetooth) when needed. For instance, if a smartwatch wearer was exercising or checking messages, the device would turn on, collect the data needed, allow the user to perform the desired action then go back to sleep. It would turn on to connect to a network (through a smartphone or Wi-Fi network) to send that data to the cloud and back. 

Thompson expected that type of functionality to dominate smartwatches in the short term.

“From a technological perspective, all the components are there, from a cost perspective you could argue that it is achievable today because a multi-combo chip of Wi-Fi, GPS and Bluetooth Low Energy can be used and then incorporated into a smart watch today,” Thompson said.

That's great, and many people will be thrilled to get a smartwatch tethered to their smartphone. But the ideal, independent smartwatch will have to wait for a new generation of hardware components. 

Lead image by Aaron Muszalski. Black-and-white images from Google's smartwatch patent filing.