Fresh from The Android Show: Your essential guide to what’s new

Transcript - Season 7 Episode 4 - The Android Show I/O Edition

Seang 00:00:00 We strongly believe these changes help make Android products feel more premium, feel more engaging, and of course easier to use.

Voiceover 00:00:07 Welcome to the Made by Google Podcast, where we meet the people who work on the Google products you love. Here's your host, Rachid Finge.

Rachid 00:00:15 Today we're all in on Android, the most secure and best looking system of them all. Let's unpack all the incredible news from the Android Show I/O Edition with the one the only Seang Chau, Vice President and General Manager of the Android platform.

Voiceover 00:00:31 This is the Made by Google podcast.

Rachid 00:00:33 Seang, welcome back to the Made by Google Podcast. Great to have you again. So it's no coincidence that we're talking to you about The Android Show I/O Edition, so I wanna unpack the show. But before we do that, you know, in years past, all our big announcements came at Google I/O itself, but this year, Android now got its own gig. Why do we make that split?

Seang 00:00:54 Because we have so much to share, Rachid, and also every year at I/O we keep hearing from people that they wanna know more about how the overall Android experiences are getting better every year. Right? We do these big releases every year, and now we're doing these quarterly releases and now we're doing two Android releases every year with the minor SDK bumps and there's just so much going on that was difficult to fit it all into I/O. And so we figured, hey, we have this, uh, Android show, let's do an I/O version of it, a special I/O Edition of the Android show. And, and that's what we created to do just that so that we can share more. And I just wanna make sure that people understand it's not just for developers, you know, it's for anyone interested in hearing about the latest updates coming to Android and the Android ecosystem that includes our users and our super fans.

Rachid 00:01:42 And you're right, we have a lot to talk about when it comes to Android. So let's dive in. Android 16. You're right, much more than just an API level bump. It's around a corner and it looks absolutely stunning. So why did we in the first place decide to change the look and feel of Android this year?

Seang 00:01:58 You know, we wanted to help both our internal designers and developers, as well as Android's developer and designer ecosystem just build more usable and engaging products with a UX, a user experience that was emotion driven. It wasn't too stale, if you will. And we strongly believe these changes help make Android products feel more premium, feel more engaging, and of course, easier to use. These changes are backed by three years of research demonstrating that these designs are preferred by users, they're easier to use, they're cooler and cooler is very important. . Yeah, of course this new system is what Google will be using for updates to our own products.

Rachid 00:02:38 So that system you're talking about, it's called Material 3 Expressive. How would you sum up what that is? Material 3 Expressive.

Seang 00:02:46 Yeah, Material 3 Expressive is an add-on to our previous Material 3 launch. It's not a complete new system, it's not a complete redesign, but it is a visual update and it's really focused on helping people express themselves more. And, when we say people, we mean not just folks that are using the devices, but the folks that are building the apps and experiences and how they can express their identity of their system and their capabilities. We do believe this is our biggest redesigning years. It's got a bunch of little beautiful details that make the entire system feel fluid and responsive. We want to make sure that people can, again, whether they're developers or the users, reflect the individual personality and style, which we have always felt is one of our core strengths over an Android is that ability to have and show your personality and style. And of course this also helps from an information architecture perspective to bring forward the information you care about and the things that you want to show to users to the forefront of the experience and make sure that people can get to it quickly and be able to navigate smoothly.

Rachid 00:03:56 I think most of our listeners will have seen some sort of image by now of, you know, what Android 16 will look like with Material 3 Expressive. Any specific widget or thing in Expressive that is your favorite that you like the most in the design update?

Seang 00:04:10 Yeah, I think my favorite in the design update is probably just to how much detail we put into all the little animations.

Rachid Mm-hmm.

Seang 00:04:10 Where every time you try to slide a notification or you know, you go into the all apps view and and you move things around, everything around it kind of reacts. You get these little haptic feels, everything's very elastic. It just, it looks and feels fantastic and that attention to detail and that smoothness just makes for such a premium feel and just looks cool, which we think people will really love.

Rachid 00:04:42 Yeah, they sort of felt like citizens living together reacting to each other in a way. That's right. It was really cool. Absolutely. So in more of a concrete way, what will this look like in practice?

Seang 00:04:53 Right, so on your phone it's going to look more natural and really fun, silky smooth notifications. We've updated the color themes and the responsive components. We've emphasized the typography, the fonts are now much more interesting and legible. We're using sizes and boldness and those kind of things to really update legibility and just have better readability across all of our applications. And then trying to get to a consistent or coherent aesthetic across all of our Google apps, such as photos across Fitbit, across Gmail, and all of this really to kind of focus on making your daily interactions with your phone easier, more intuitive and just overall just more fun and of course premium.

Rachid 00:05:35 I just wanted to quickly double click on that font. Is it like an update to the existing one? Is it a completely new one? It was one of those things that you immediately see like, hmm, something's new here.

Seang 00:05:45 Yeah, we came up with this technology recently to allow font sizing and manipulation while keeping it consistent so that you don't lose the feel of that font. And now we're using that capability across the entire UX where you have a clearly the same font identity, but are able to change its thickness, its width, and its look without really changing its identity. And being able to do that across the UX has allowed us to, uh, have a lot of fun with how we present information to the users.

Rachid 00:06:17 And I imagine that also comes in handy when using it on other devices than just phones, right? Because you also in the Android show talked about Wear OS 6 for example, where Material 3 is also coming. Right?

Seang 00:06:29 That's right. Because one of the neat little things about watches is we have watches that are circular and you wanna make sure that the UI elements that are shown on the display kind of conform to that circular display. Instead of trying to fit a text into a square or a rectangle within that circle, we want to with expressive on Wear OS 6 to really embrace that circular aspect of it. And so you'll see a lot of morphing and flexing of texts and buttons and other UI elements around the curves of display. It's very cool.

Rachid 00:07:05 You mentioned research a couple of times, so Material 3 Expressive is the most researched update to Google's design system, right? Why is that important?

Seang 00:07:14 Yeah, we spent over three years on this research to make sure that we're coming with a design system that made sense, right? We had researchers doing, I think it was 46 studies with over 18,000 participants around the world. And we focused on user attention, including eye tracking and what are they looking at? Why are they looking at those things? We were looking at gauge their preferences for different UI elements and even emotional perception by doing comparison surveys and then assessing usability through a bunch of experiments as well. Now this research helped our teams develop the building blocks and the guidelines for Material 3 Expressive. And this data also indicated that the expressive designs that we built were preferred by the participants. You know, because of people's preference and how cool they thought it was, it was a positive driver of behavioral intent, which is always a good thing when doing these assessments.

Seang 00:08:13 We saw that Material 3 Expressive designs were easier to use with, with less time. So with a reduced time to click and UI elements were spotted four times faster. Again, we were doing the eye tracking where people were paying attention and where user attention was. And so we saw that when things are four times faster to find that key UI elements that you're looking for, users can get things done sooner. And this is four times faster than non expressive screens. So ultimately all of this research really kind of emphasizes the importance of balancing expressiveness with functionality and accessibility of UI elements, all in the purpose of making sure that we have the most positive user experience that we can.

Rachid 00:08:53 And the research also suggests that you found a system that works for everyone, like not only the young generation, also people 40 and up. They all seem to like kind of the same system, which is I guess quite remarkable because often you see a UX that works maybe for Gen Z for example, or something that works for an older population, but this one works for everyone it seems. Yeah,

Seang 00:09:15 We really wanted to make sure that Gen Z and global youth responded well to these design changes because they represent such a large population and you know, just like every generation before them, the youth of today kind of define the trends of tomorrow. So if we're able to kind of lean into their preferences and their insights, we can make sure that what we're doing stays relevant without alienating our existing users. And we think with all the research that we've done, we have found that balance of making sure that we're found to be cool and attractive to our global youth, while also still feeling premium to our existing users.

Rachid 00:09:57 So going beyond the looks of Android 16, I'm excited about the changes to notifications. Looks to me they're getting a lot smarter in 16.

Seang 00:10:05 That's right. When you make things smarter, you actually make it easier where introducing a smarter way so you don't have to manage your notification. So for instance, we have this thing called live updates where we will highlight the most important information for you at that time. So you don't have to go navigating around your phone to see the most relevant status updates or the most critical status updates. For example, real-time tracking of deliveries or ride share applications because you'd wanna know where your car might be or where your packages may be. So we're able to show that across multiple surfaces on your device for various delivery, ride share and navigation applications.

Rachid 00:10:46 Now we can nerd out here a bit. Uh, Seang, what's your favorite change in Android 16? Whether it's the looks or functional above or under the hood, anything that comes to mind for you?

Seang 00:10:56 There's a lot of stuff here. We talked a lot about the user experience, so we'll just, uh, I'll go ahead and skip that piece for a second and talk about some of the things under the hood. We have done a lot around security and safety, uh, because that's super important for users. We have over 3 billion devices out there and we wanna make sure that our users remain as safe as possible, both their physical security as well as their device, physical security as well as their digital security. And that's why we really wanted to highlight how Android security is best in class, right? And we have put a lot of work into that and Android 16, as you see with our announcement, takes that to the next level.

Rachid 00:11:37 Cool. And I do have some questions about safety and security. We'll get to that, but I want to talk about Gemini first. So the Gemini experience in Android 16, what was the goal of integrating Gemini in this year's Android?

Seang 00:11:50 Yeah, we wanted to make sure that Gemini felt like it was, uh, designed within your workflow. That it was designed to be part of the phone experience and not just this destination, this, this separate app that you have to launch to get into because maybe you might forget to do that, right? So we wanted to make sure it could exist across surfaces and could make sure that when you needed the help that it was there to help you, right? It's a super powerful and capable, uh, assistant that is available everywhere. Uh, and you can activate it on most devices just by a long press of the side button. And Gemini is already available around the world in over, I think 40 languages now. So we wanna make sure that it's available to users as they need it.

Rachid 00:12:34 Would you consider yourself a Gemini Power user by now?

Seang 00:12:37 . You know, at the beginning I really struggled to figure out what I should be using Gemini for and then I decided maybe I could use it for everything. And it has really impressed me. And Gemini 2.5 Pro, which is now available has really helped me a lot. When I can't think of something or I have a word or an artist or a title stuck at the tip of my tongue and I just, just can't think of it, if I just ask, Hey, what's that word that sounds like this, that kind of means this, that might rhyme with this other thing and it just nails it? Or who's that artist that sang this song that talks about this and it nails it? It's amazing what Gemini is able to help. Gemini has been able to help me save a lot of time through the assistant that it's provided me, whether on device or sitting at my computer. So yes, I probably am a power user at this point.

Rachid 00:13:29 Okay, so we're bringing Material 3 Expressive to more than just phones and I thought it was great to hear that Gemini is also coming to more devices than just phones. So tell us where is Gemini headed in the coming months?

Seang 00:13:41 Right, so Gemini is going to be coming to you on your watch, on your car, and also when you're sitting on your couch, uh, watching TV.

Rachid 00:13:51 Amazing. So if we zoom into the car, for example, what can it do that Android Auto without Gemini can do?

Seang 00:13:57 It can really transform how you drive and how you get help while driving so that you're not distracted. 'cause Gemini Live can really make your commute more productive and engaging. For instance, you can simply ask for help with information you might have forgotten, like a book club summary or discussion points while you're driving to your book club.

Rachid 00:14:18 That's actually a great one. I've been thinking about, you know, all the conversations I will have with Gemini live while I'm on my way to that thing, right? Even if it's maybe giving a presentation somewhere, you need just those little facts or details to talk about or maybe polish some things up while driving in a safe way. That is really cool. So you also mentioned that Gemini is going to the living room on Google TV, I presume. What is Gemini gonna do for me in the living room?

Seang 00:14:43 That's right. We're bringing Gemini to your largest screen in your living room, and that's Gemini on Google TV for instance, if you wanna watch a movie with your kids, you get age appropriate movie recommendations. It will also help, uh, kids, uh, explore their questions. Kids ask a lot of questions, they're very curious, so, and...

Rachid 00:15:03 They do yes, ,

Seang 00:15:04 Uh, if they want an explanation for instance of whether Pluto is still a planet or not, what's the latest thinking of that or other questions about the solar system or any other topic they might come up with. Gemini will help to make sure that we're finding the relevant YouTube videos that again, are age appropriate and are able to show that to the curious kids.

Rachid 00:15:23 Well let's talk about Watch. What can Gemini do on my watch specifically? It seems to be like a unique UX challenge as well. You know, having Gemini, you know, that is great with presenting information on, on such a small screen for example,

Seang 00:15:36 Right? And the nice thing about Gemini and your wrist when you're out and about is that you can still get help while hands free 'cause it's attached to you. Yeah. So for instance, things that you can't use a phone conveniently for, uh, but you still need information, uh, while you're cooking, for instance, or, uh, commuting while you're exercising, those kind of things where your hands may be busy and you still would like to get some help or some advice on something.

Rachid 00:16:02 And then perhaps the most exciting one because it's the newest one coming to Android XR, what should I expect from Gemini on a headset like that?

Seang 00:16:11 Yeah, we're excited that later this year we're bringing Gemini to Android XR. It's a new platform that we're building in collaboration with, uh, Samsung. I think we've, we've talked about this a little bit in the past, but that platform will be for extended reality devices such as headsets, glasses, and so on. We strongly believe this is going to help unlock new and powerful ways to interact, uh, with the world around you. So for instance, imagine Gemini helping you, uh, plan a vacation while you're sitting in a rich immersive environment where you can quickly access and see videos, maps, and even get local tips for the areas that you'll be visiting. We'll be sharing more of those details about Android XR and Gemini at I/O next week.

Rachid 00:16:55 Can't wait to see that and maybe try that some. That'd be amazing. So let's get back to safety and security. We touched upon that a little while ago. We of course used Google AI to keep Android users safe. I'm not even sure if people realize that this has been going on for a while now.

Seang 00:17:10 That's right. You know, with all the personal data that is on your device, as I mentioned before, we wanna make sure that we are keeping that data secure both digitally as well as physically. You know, you have banking information on there, you might have healthcare information on there. We have always been constantly innovating to keep you and your data safe. One of the new features that we're building and that we're super excited about is AI powered scam detection, which can block messages before you even need to see them. And we've been blocking billions of suspicious messages for Google Messages users every single month. It's getting smarter and better at spotting new tech scams and now we've made it even smarter. So it can recognize crypto financial, toll road, gift card, and other types of scams to help keep you safe, your family safe, and most importantly, this new smart detection happens all on your device to keep your conversations private to you.

Rachid 00:18:09 Would you be comfortable saying that Android is absolutely leading the way when it comes to on-device AI protection?

Seang 00:18:16 Absolutely. This is one of the many ways that we have a defense in depth security strategy. We've also invested super heavily in things such as theft protection features, which we've now launched and, um, made a lot of progress in in the countries that we've launched. As you've seen, we've launched Theft Protection features, actual device theft protection features. We also have real time malware detection and platform level fraud detection. And this is the kind of commitment that we've had to our users and has led to Android smartphones receiving top scores for built-in security as well as our anti-fraud capabilities in recent studies.

Rachid 00:18:58 Yeah, that, that's amazing. And if you wanna know more about theft protection, I gladly recommend, uh, one of the episodes in season six of the Made by Google podcast, uh, where we actually go in depth about theft protection, including some brilliant anecdotes and how you were actually testing the features. You know, I guess Googlers trying to steal each other's phones and see if the phone locks. That was a great episode to talk about, uh, theft protection. Now Seang, let's talk about something new. The Find Hub, which is I guess the successor to Find My Device. What changed in the Find Hub and why did we change the name?

Seang 00:19:31 We changed the name because Find My Device is about, I mean, it sounds like it's about finding your device. Once we added the ability to see where your family and friends and your loved ones are, it didn't make sense, uh, to call it Find My Device anymore because we're talking about family members. So we decided to call it Find Hub. So with Find Hub you can easily locate your devices and other tagged items, check if your friends and family and loved ones got home safely, share your location for, you know, a limited period of time, uh, during a night out if you're not feeling as safe as you might want to, uh, all in a unified space. And we're adding even more compatible devices and Bluetooth tags to our ever expanding list of partners, including Disney and a bunch of brands that you're already familiar with.

Rachid 00:20:20 Yeah, can we talk about that a little bit because that's something that caught my eye during the Android show. Like we're, we're gonna have luggage that has sort of built in tags. Did I understand that correctly?

Seang 00:20:30 Yeah, so we are working with luggage manufacturers. We're, uh, working with ski equipment manufacturers so you can find your skis or your snowboard. We're working with a lot of manufacturers because at Android we believe in being open and with an open ecosystem we can have a lot of partners that can create built-in capabilities into the products you already love

Rachid 00:20:50 Can you talk about tracking without talking about privacy, right. So what about privacy in the Find Hub?

Seang 00:20:55 That's right. Find Hub from the beginning was designed with safety as a core principle. We were the first to create these cross-platform unknown tracker alerts in case you had a tracker or other tag that might be following you around. We didn't launch our system until we could ensure that this cross-platform capability was available. And then later this year we're bringing satellite connectivity to Find Hub so that you can stay connected and be able to find and locate loved ones even without cellular service.

Rachid 00:21:30 That is a really cool feature. Now see, and it almost feels unfair to ask you this because you're right, the Android updates definitely deserved, uh, their own show this year. So there's so much to talk about. But you know, as a returning guest, how we close out our episodes, we love to offer our listeners a top tip, something that our guests, uh, worked on that the listeners should try, you know, once they get their hands, for example, on Android 16 or new version of Wear OS all of course with, uh, the new Expressive Material design. So what do you think, what is the top thing our listeners should do once they get all these updates?

Seang 00:22:07 Yes, I think something that people may not realize is that if you share your screen with Gemini, it can actually help you with what you're doing on your phone, whether it's homework summarizing a really lengthy PDF, going through financial reports, any of those kind of things. Like as you scroll through, you can get help from Gemini. It's actually really, really fun and can save you a bunch of time.

Rachid 00:22:33 That is a great tip and something everyone should try. So you and thank you so much for once again joining the Made by Google Podcast. Hope we'll have you again soon, and, uh, good luck with Google I/O next week.

Seang 00:22:44 It was my pleasure. Thanks for having me.

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