Google I/O 2021: Android 12, Search & Wear OS

Do you know that Android now powers three billion devices worldwide, up from two billion in 2017 and 2.5 billion in 2019? Google took to its annual developer event on Tuesday to unveil the next generation of Android and Wear OS, while also higlighting a slew of improvements coming to Search, Maps, Chrome, Photos, Shopping, and Workspace that aim to bring about a whole new level of interconnected experiences spanning its myriad products, effectively consolidating its ecosystem. Private by design and secure by default, that appears to be Google's new mantra, as it navigates a future that's largely reliant on AI, necessitating that users keep handing over a steady stream of data to drive its ad business and incentivise people to stay in its ecosystem. Here's a quick rundown of all the major announcements -

• A radical overhaul of Android 12, making it the "biggest design change" since it debuted Material Design in 2014, comprising of a new "Material You" visual language that features fluid animations and colourful theming options, redesigned widgets and Quick Settings menu, built-in TV remote control tools, a more racially inclusive camera, a privacy dashboard focused on location, microphone, and camera that presents a pie chart of how many times apps have accessed each of them in the last 24 hours, an "Android Private Compute Core" that sandboxes machine learning functions such as smart reply, now playing, and live caption on device and isolates them from the network to preserve privacy, new iOS-style notifications when apps access clipboard, and a digital car key feature to lock, unlock, or start cars straight from the phone.
• Updates to Google Search with Multitask Unified Model (or MUM) that seeks to understand information from different formats like webpages, pictures and more, simultaneously to surface relevant results, debuts LaMDA to make it easier for artificial intelligence systems to have more conversational dialogue, expands "About This Result" to all English results worldwide, leverages AI-enhanced shopping graph to search inside screenshots using Google Lens to shop items present in the photo, and debuts a new option to delete the last 15 minutes of search history.
• Announces plans to merge Wear OS for smartwatches with Samsung's Tizen OS into a unified wearable platform and "combine them into an experience that has faster performance, longer battery life and more of the apps you love available for the watch," in addition to bringing Fitbit integration, and redesigned and improved experiences for Google Maps, Google Assistant, Google Pay, and YouTube Music.

• Improvements to Google Maps with new routing optimisations, and personalised map views, and Google Photos, which gains new types of memories based on "not-so-obvious visual patterns" in the photos (say, the same backpack across multiple pictures), improved 3D Cinematic moments, and abilities to lock specific photos behind a passcode-protected space and better control what photos are highlighted in Memories.
• New features in Google Chrome that locally saves shopping carts from different websites, allowing users to access all open carts when opening a new tab, and enhancements to Password Manager with new tools to import passwords from other password managers, seamlessly auto-fill passwords across sites and apps, alert saved passwords that have been compromised via a third party breach, and even fix compromised passwords in Chrome for Android automatically.
• Deeper integration with Google workspace tools as part of an initiative called Smart Canvas, permitting users to jump into a Meet call right from Docs, Sheets, and Slides, or link to other documents and meetings, tag coworkers, and quickly assign tasks without having to leaving a Google Doc (called smart chips), and adds new features that let users present content to a Google Meet call on the web directly from the Doc, Sheet, or Slide, and brings pageless format and checklists in Docs to assign action items to other people. (It's almost like bundling Airtable, Asana, Coda and Notion into an all-in-one mega productivity suite.)
• Other miscellaneous announcements: teams up with Shopify by letting the company's 1.7 million merchants make their products more discoverable across YouTube, Search, Maps, Images, and Lens, launches Vertex AI for Google Cloud, a managed machine learning platform for developers to deploy and maintain AI models, unveils a dermatology tool that uses AI to help spot skin, hair, and nail conditions, based on images from patients, and teases Project Starline with the goal of making video calls more immersive and natural using 3D imaging and real-time compression to render life-sized, 3D holograms of participants on both ends of the conversation.