6 reasons why Google I/O 2018 will change app development forever
Introduction
Google I/O is an annual event hosted by Google and it is aimed at developers. At this event, Google exhibits its groundbreaking technologies and its latest enhancements to its product range.
We have seen from previous events that Google’s technologies have either directly or indirectly impacted on how people build, design and use apps. In this article, we will look at Google’s latest developments and how they will affect how we design, build and use apps.
Highlights from this year’s Google I/O
1. Android P
Android P is Google’s latest version of its mobile operating system and many enhancements aimed at improving the users’ experience, including the introduction of iPhone like gestures, a ‘do not disturb’ and ‘wind down’ mode helping users get a good night’s sleep.
Android P has the ability to limit time spent on apps, this is particularly bad news for social apps like Facebook and gaming apps where the users would see them as more ‘bad apps’ and choose to limit their time on these apps, but this is good for apps like educational and productivity apps which might be substituted in their place.
Summary — Android P is good news for educational, meditation and productivity apps bad news for social and entertainment apps.
2. Smart Compose
Smart Compose is a new feature being added to Gmail. This feature takes autocomplete that we’ve become used to on Google Searches to a brand new level.
Auto-suggest functionality on Google Search
Smart Compose uses AI to predict what you are going to write in real time increasing the speed that you are able to compose an email. Intelligent prediction of user intent seems to be making its way through Google’s portfolio of products.
Summary — Users will want apps to be more intelligent and predict what they are trying to do in real time.
3. Google Assistant
Google Assistant is available both on Android devices and via Google Home, it’s a virtual personal assistant that can engage in two-way conversations. This virtual assistant is getting more intelligence and is now able to provide a “continued conversation” so that talking feels more natural. This assistant is also getting new voices so that you can select the voice of your choice.
The big talking point is that the Google Assistant is able to make phone calls on your behalf. In the keynote speech, the virtual assistant called and booked an appointment with a human at the hair salon. I’m not going to delve into the ethics of machine-human conversations in this article but this is something that needs consideration before this feature is rolled out.
Summary — Expect to see virtual assistant slowly making their way into 3rd party apps and products and also expect to see more integration between 3rd party apps and Google Assistant as it becomes more powerful.
4. Google Lens
The Google Lens app was presented at Google I/O 2018. It is an app that is able to display relevant information from the analyses of real-time camera imagery.
In the presentation, the phone’s camera was able to recognise objects in real-time and when the user selected an object from the camera feed it then used Google’s search engine to find similar products online, it then displayed more information about that product or enabled the user to purchase it.
In addition to its search functionality, it also had a powerful optical character recognition system that enabled real-time recognition and selection of text.
Summary — Expect to see more apps that use the camera to undertake real-time image processing.
5. Google Maps
Google announced that Google Maps is getting augmented reality capabilities. This neat feature uses its image processing technologies to identify street names and places of interest in real time superimposing this information onto the camera’s feed.
Google’s visual positioning system is able to recognise buildings and landmarks that are in front of it.
Summary — Augmented reality will become mainstream following the success of Pokemon Go and now Google Maps. App developers will be increasingly experimenting with AR to solve practical problems and for entertainment.
6. ML Kit
Google builds its products on powerful APIs, often many of these APIs are made public for 3rd party developers to use. At Google I/O 2018, Google announced that it is making it machine learning API (ML Kit) available to the wider development community. This will enable developers to have access to its AI expertise that has pre-built Google-provided machine learning models. This kit will help developers to create apps with text recognition, face detection, barcode scanning, image labelling and landmark recognition. Best of all the kit works both online and offline.
Summary — Expect to see more apps that utilise the phone’s camera to achieve smart results quite quickly
Summary
At this year’s event, expectations were high and Google did not disappoint. I have only covered some of the major announcements that will effect app design and development. Other items of note not covered in this article that will affect the app ecosystem include Google News, Android Studio on Chrome, Smart Displays, and Android app bundling.
We have also seen that mobile devices and cloud services remain firmly at the centre of Google’s strategy. With many consumers of Google’s products and beyond benefiting from their research and development into computer vision, natural language processing, and neural networks.
Dan Amos
Digital Strategy Lead at BMJ and author of ‘How to become an App Entrepreneur’
