2016 Google Tracker: Everything Google is working on for the new year
Android N, a big VR program, Google Glass, and lots more are in store for Alphabet.
by Ron Amadeo - Jan 8, 2016 7:00am EST
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Android N and upcoming Android features
Enlarge / What could the "N" stand for?
Ron Amadeo / Nutella
It's obvious that some version after "Android M" (later dubbed "Marshmallow") will be "Android N," but we've already heard Googlers reference Android N's existence. This makes it sound like N will be the next immediate version.
The last two major versions—Lollipop and Marshmallow—are a good predictor for Google's typical Android launch schedule. Both OSes had developer previews released in the middle of the year at Google I/O, and both later saw release that year in October or November. Normally, we'd expect Android N to repeat this pattern in 2016.
There is a lot of chatter about Android and Chrome OS merging, though, so does this throw a wrench into the usual schedule? Reports expect a preview of the Chrome/Android hybrid OS to be released sometime in 2016 with a final merged OS out sometime in 2017. Are Android N and the hybrid OS the same thing, or is Android N a stop-gap OS while work continues on merging Chrome and Android? The two possible options we see are:
N and the hybrid OS are the same thing, and the larger project is given extended development time and is pushed back into 2017.
The final version of Android N and the preview version of the hybrid OS are separate products, with N being released at the usual time and a Honeycomb-style "Android for PCs only" releasing in 2017.
Regardless of whether or not the next version of Android gives birth to the Chrome/Android hybrid, we do know a good amount about future features that are headed to Android. Thanks to the way Android is structured, it's a toss-up as to whether these features are locked into an OS update or get parted out to one of the many components in the Play Store. That won't stop us from trying to guess what goes where.
A new messaging app—Goodbye Google Hangouts?
Instant Messaging has always been a sore spot for Google. The company has produced a ton of texting and IM apps: Google Talk, Google+ Messenger, Google Voice, Google Hangouts, and various Android SMS clients. None of Google's solutions has ever taken off or been loved the way iMessage, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, and WeChat are. Other companies are investing billions of dollars into instant messaging, but Google has never really taken IM as seriously as we think it should.
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A recent report from The Wall Street Journal claims that Google is working on yet another entry into the space by building a "new, smarter messaging app." The report says Google "plans to integrate chatbots" into the client, which would let people ask questions inside the messaging app. These chatbots will then "scour the Web and other sources for information to answer a question," according to the report.
The project is being led by Google's VP of communications products, Nick Fox. Fox is currently in charge of Hangouts, Project Fi, and Google's WebRTC efforts. The report states that in October, Fox offered to buy a company called "200 Labs," which made a chatbot rating service for the IM app Telegram. The company declined to join Google, but Google is apparently still building a similar service.
WSJ is calling this a "new" instant messaging service, which implies that Google Hangouts is going away, and we'll have yet another Google Talk to Google Hangouts-style transition. The report says the current timetable is "unclear," but given that Google was just looking to acqui-hire people for the project a few months ago, we'd guess it's still a long way away. Like with Hangouts, we'd expect most Android users to get this via an app update.
Split Screen
Andrew Cunningham
"Highly experimental" indeed.
We definitely know split screen is coming—not just because all of Android competitors already have support for it, but because an experimental version is already hidden in Marshmallow. It's buggy and unfinished, but it allows for two side-by-side apps in a horizontal or vertical configuration or four apps in a 2×2 configuration. The design needs a lot of work. Right now, there's really no way to close or manage open split screen windows.
In a Reddit AMA about the Pixel C launch, Andrew Bowers, a director of product management at Google, said, "We're working on lots of things right now for [Android] N that, of course, we wish we had, you know, yesterday. But we'd spoil the surprise of N if we shared all of them. Split screen is in the works!" If you read carefully, this doesn't definitively state that Android N will have split screen, but it is very suggestive.
Window management is a core OS feature, so the finalized version of split screen will definitely require a full OS update.
Rich Communications Services (RCS) Adoption
Rich Communications Services (RCS) is a new standard created by the GSMA as an upgrade to SMS and MMS. The standard brings a lot of "instant messaging" features to basic carrier texting, like the ability to see when someone is typing, contact presence, message delivery status, location sharing, and higher caps on photo and video sizes. It also allows you to easily transfer video and photos to the person you're calling, and the spec even includes screen sharing. Once the marketing departments of the world got ahold of RCS, it grew a lot of alternative names. T-Mobile was the first US carrier to implement it, and it calls RCS "Advanced Messaging." Sprint calls it "Messaging Plus," and the GSMA calls it "Joyn."
In September 2015, Google officially announced its intention to bring RCS support to Android, saying it has acquired a company called "Jide Mobile" to get the job done. Jide actually built the custom solution for T-Mobile and Sprint, and it also ships RCS solutions on Samsung and Sony devices. As part of Google, the group will work on integrating RCS into Android, allowing the extra features to be supported in the stock SMS apps. There's also a potential to integrate some of the features into the phone and contact apps.
SMS is popular not because it is good, but because it is ubiquitous, which makes replacing it with something new a difficult task. Integrating it into the world's biggest operating system is a good start, though. With the GSMA and just about all of the telcos onboard, a transition seems inevitable. Presumably this will be invisible to the end user—RCS will be used if both clients support it while SMS will exist as a fallback.
Considering RCS is already supported in some Android distributions, we'd guess that an app update could bring some of this functionality to the stock SMS app.
Google Photos gets a video editor
Google previously shipped a stock Android video editor way back in Android 3.0 Honeycomb, and it was awful. The editor officially died when it stopped shipping in 4.4 KitKat. It looks like Google will be jumping back into mobile video editors soon, though. In November 2015, it acquired Fly Labs, which makes a whopping four different video editing apps.
There isn't a lot of mystery here. In Fly Labs' going away message, the company announced it was joining the Google Photos team. The apps were all mostly single use: one allowed you to change the speed of the video for slow-mo or time-lapse video, another let you crop vertical videos and move the crop window around as the video progressed, and the last two were more traditional video editing apps that let you splice together clips with transitions and effects.
We'd look for all of these features to make it into the Google Photos app, which already has a photo editor. Will they still call it "Google Photos," though?
Google Play Podcasts
This is another product that Google had covered, killed, and is now bringing back from the dead. Google previously shipped an Android podcast app called "Google Listen" way back in 2009, but the app officially died in 2012 during one of Google's "spring cleanings." Podcasting then rose from the Google graves, and in October 2015 the company announced the awkwardly named "Google Play Music Podcasts."
That announcement called for podcast creators to submit their RSS feeds to a landing page so Google would have a whole catalog ready to go at launch. The page only said the service would be launching "soon." "Google Play Podcasts" would be a much more obvious name, so we're guessing that the "Play Music" inclusion means it will just be another section on the Play Music app and website.
Vulkan graphics API
Microsoft has Direct X, Apple has Metal, and soon Google will have Vulkan. Vulkan is a 3D graphics API created by the Khronos Group, an open standards consortium that is also responsible for OpenGL. Vulkan was conceived as a "ground-up redesign" and replacement for the 22-year-old OpenGL APIs. Vulkan offers better parallelization and multi-threading, lower overhead, and more direct access to the GPU. Vulkan also has better cross-platform support than OpenGL—the API is the same on mobile or the desktop, where OpenGL was split up into "OpenGL" for desktops and "OpenGL ES" for mobile devices.
On the official Android Developer Blog, Google announced the Vulkan graphics API would be coming to Android. Google said it would be working closely with the Khronos group on Android compatibility, and it would even be contributing tests to Vulkan's open source Conformance Test Suite.
Google actually hired the entire mobile team from LunarG, a 3D graphics technology company, to help out with its Vulkan implementation. The desktop half of LunarG is partnered with Valve to work on Windows and Linux support for the new graphics API.
Don't think OpenGL ES isn't going away, though. Google says it plans on supporting OpenGL and Vulkan, giving developers a choice of a more complicated, more powerful API or a simpler, more resource-intensive one. A graphics API would require an OS update, so we're guessing Vulkan will arrive with Android N.
Android swaps Java implementations to OpenJDK
Most 2D Android apps are written in Java using Google's Android SDK. Android's Java implementation is currently based on Apache Harmony, a "clean" open source implementation of Oracle's Java. However, Apache Harmony is also a dead open source project. Google recently told VentureBeat that "Android N" was dumping Google's Harmony-based implementation and would "move Android’s Java language libraries to an OpenJDK-based approach." OpenJDK is another free and open source implementation of Java, but this is the "official" one under the control of Oracle.
This news is of some note because Oracle, the owner of Java, is currently suing Google over its use of Java in Android. Things are still being battled out in the courtroom, but Google seems to believe switching to OpenJDK will reduce its legal liability moving forward.
After pushing commits to the Android Open Source Project, Google told the court "On December 24, 2015, Google released new versions of the Android platform that are expressly licensed by Oracle for use by Google under the free, open source license provided by Oracle as part of its OpenJDK project. Specifically, these newly released versions of Android utilize the method headers (and the associated sequence, structure, and organization of those method headers) at issue in this litigation under the open source OpenJDK license from Oracle." The company went on to say "any damages claim associated with the new versions expressly licensed by Oracle under OpenJDK would require a separate analysis of damages from earlier releases, which are not expressly licensed by Oracle under OpenJDK."
Google seems to be saying that switching to the OpenJDK, which is released by Oracle under a GPL license, means that future versions of Android are safe from Oracle's patents and copyrights. If Oracle has a problem with that, Google believes it would require a new lawsuit.
VentureBeat spoke with Google again after the initial report and came away with a clear conclusion. "The company is still making changes to OpenJDK to make it work on Android. As a result, future versions of Android will continue to contain parts of Google’s “own implementation,” just based on OpenJDK," it wrote. It seems Google just wants to upgrade.
Ripping the Harmony-based guts out of the Android Runtime and replacing it with OpenJDK will be a lot of work. All sorts of tiny little things will change from Harmony to OpenJDK, which will require a large effort from Google and could potentially cause problems for app developers. On the plus side, using OpenJDK also opens the door to the latest Java features such as lambdas, providing a significant quality of life improvement for Android developers. Android's Java implementation is currently based on Java 7, while OpenJDK supports the latest version, Java 8, and should be updated to support all the future versions of Java. Apache Harmony retired at Java 6.
Google sets your schedule for you with its "Timeful" acquisition
Sometimes Google acquires a company quietly, and we're left to wonder what the company is up to. Other times, it acquires a company and writes up a full blog post detailing its future plans! Google did the latter when it acquired Timeful Inc., maker of an artificial intelligence scheduling app. A user could tell Timeful that they wanted to exercise three times a week, and the system would schedule it "based on an understanding of both your schedule and your priorities."
Timeful took the form of a calendar app, so a Google Calendar integration is a natural fit. In the announcement, Google said it was "excited about all the ways Timeful’s technology can be applied across products like Inbox, Calendar and beyond." Look for auto-scheduling features in those products in the future.
Google Play comes to China
As the world's most populated country, China is also the world's biggest smartphone market. Google isn't really involved in China, though. After a series of cyber attacks on Chinese Gmail users and disagreements over search censorship, Google stopped cooperating with the Chinese government. Its services were promptly blocked by the Great Firewall.
With the Alphabet restructuring, though, Google seems to be warming up to China. Sergey Brin was quoted by The Wall Street Journal as saying, “Each Alphabet business can make its own decisions on which countries to operate in.”
In September 2015, both The Journal and The Information wrote articles saying Google Play was headed back to China. WSJ says that Google has been working on a special version of the Play Store that includes "only apps and services approved by the Chinese government."
Enlarge / Data sourced from TalkingData. The total adds up to more than 100 percent because some users have more than one app store.
With no "default" Android app store in China, the app store market is a fragmented mess. The lack of the Google Play Store created a power vacuum, which was filled up by app stores from Internet companies like Qihoo, Tencent, and Baidu or Android OEMs like Xiaomi and Huawei.
We're very interested to see what happens with the MADA (Mobile Application Distribution Agreement) contracts Google makes every Google Play Licensee sign. The contract has "anti-fragmentation" clauses that require any OEM licensing the Google Play ecosystem to only ship Google Play on all of their devices—they aren't allowed to make non-Google AOSP forks and can't ship rival app stores. This clause only applies to territories Google does business in, which in the past has created a loophole allowing China's fragment app store market to flourish.
All the major Android OEMs in China are international companies that are under contract with Google, so what happens when Google moves into China? Do new Android devices in China suddenly all have to ship with Google Play? Does Google give everyone time to transition? Will the rules in China be totally different? We really have no idea.
It's worth noting that MADA contracts are confidential, and we've only seen versions that are a few years old. More recent contracts could provide a clearer picture of what happens in the event of a Google China expansion, but we aren't privy to that information for now. The only way we'll really be able to find out is to watch what the major OEMs do and try to draw conclusions from it.
plus the $$ they'd charge for like 2 lines...
