Non-dev at Google I/O Extended Amsterdam 2015 viewing party
Author: Frank Stam
During the HITBHaxpo event, located in the beautiful Amsterdam Beurs van Berlage the Dutch Android User Group organized a central viewing party of the Google I/O Extended 2015 event.
As a member of the Elements support team it’s usually not a regular occurrence to visit an event such as yesterday. Nevertheless these things are always interesting; specially to see what kind of tech and tools my colleagues will be dealing with in the upcoming year(s).
The Haxpo itself had some nice expositions of DIY 3D printers and LED displays that can be programmed for multipurpose use. After some walking around at the expo we had some pizza and drinks at the DutchAUG booth before we moved to the viewing room for the main event of the day, the Google I/O keynote.
After some introductions the presentation went on to motivate young people interested in developing. Six young developers below the age of 20 got awarded with a new Chromecast, hopefully motivating them to keep up the good work. The youth is our future after all.
Soon after this the connection was made with the conference in San Francisco. Most notable features that were mentioned were the implementations of some expected features. The new Android M (of which M still isn’t officially linked to a nice candy related name — perhaps Mars or Macadamia Nut Cookie?) will include fingerprint support and a wallet function in Google Pay. There will also be better control over how Android M handles app permissions in the future. Apps will no longer request all permissions from start, but instead will prompt the permission request when a protected feature is required.
Improvements have been made to webview based apps, so overall look and feel is more in line with the app. This will include better app-to-app links and also native A/B testing tools to improve marketing your app.
Outside of Android M the store will be updated with a new set of guidelines for family and kid friendly apps. When an app meets these standards a star rating will be given to make them easier to be found.
Also Android Wear was shown with all its new features. A New version of Google Cardboard has been released too. This new version is also considered to be compatible with iOS devices and has a supporting platform, named Jump, specifically dedicated to everything VR.
Last but not least there’s been an announcement for Brillo. This Android mini project will make it easy to unify all devices running on android.
All in all it was a very informative evening and we spoke with a lot of other Android developers. Thanks DutchAUG for organizing the event!
Originally published at www.elements.nl on May 29, 2015.
