Google I/O 2019
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What Pixel 3a tells us about the state of the smartphone — and Google
Announced yesterday at Google’s opening I/O keynote, the Pixel 3a arrives at a tenuous time for the smartphone industry. Sales figures have stagnated for most of the major players in the industry — a phenomenon from which Google certainly isn’t immune.
CEO Sundar Pichai discussed exactly that on the company’s Q1 earnings call last week. “While the first quarter results reflect pressure in the premium smartphone industry,” he explained, “we are pleased with the ongoing momentum of Assistant-enabled Home devices, particularly the Home Hub and Mini devices, and look forward to our May 7 announcement at I/O from our hardware team.”
That last bit was a clear reference to the arrival of the new budget tier of Google’s flagship offering. The 3a is a clear push to address one of the biggest drivers of slowing smartphone sales. With a starting price of $399, it’s a fraction of the price of top handsets from competitors like Apple and Samsung.
There’s been a fairly rapid creep in flagship prices in recent years. Handsets starting at north of $1,000 hardly warrant a second glance anymore, while many forthcoming foldables are hovering around double that.
As Google VP of Product Management Mario Queiroz told me ahead of launch, “The smartphone market has started to flatten. We think one of the reasons is because, you know, the premium segment of the market is a very large segment, but premium phones have gotten more and more expensive, you know, three, four years ago, you could buy a premium phone for $500.”
Inflated prices have certainly made device purchases more burdensome for buyers. That, coupled with a relative lack of compelling new features has gone a ways toward slowing down upgrade cycles, hurting sales in the process.
I’ve enjoyed my early hands-on time with the 3a — more to come on that later. It’s important to note the different factors that have allowed Google to get to this stage. A key driver is, of course, Google’s purchase of massive R&D resources from HTC. That result of HTC’s dip into sub-replacement level hardware manufacturer has resulted in the ability to develop hardware in house, on the relatively cheap at a new campus in Taipei.
Also important is Google’s ongoing quest to further uncouple the importance of hardware from smartphone upgrades. The company’s big investments in machine learning and artificial intelligence particularly are driving many of the innovations best demonstrated on the imaging side of things. Devin captured this sentiment in this piece written in the wake of the iPhone XS announcement.
Notably, the Pixel 3a has essentially the same camera hardware as the pricier 3. Google cut some corners here, but that wasn’t one. There are still and will continue to be some limitations to what the 3a is able to do, based on processing power, but the line between what the two devices can do is already pretty blurry when it comes to taking photos.
There’s another factor that’s been looming over Pixel sales in all of this — but for several reasons, Pichai wasn’t ready to discuss it on the call. For years, the line has been hampered by carrier exclusivity, something that feels like it ought to be relegated to the smartphone past.
Certainly that sort of arrangement makes sense for young companies like OnePlus or Palm, which are looking for a way into a market, while seeking to maintain manageable growth. But Google certainly has the resources to grow outside of a single carrier deal. And the fact of the matter (as Huawei has discovered the hard way) is that carrier distribution and contracts as still key drivers of smartphone distribution here in the States, even as most manufacturers also offer unlocked devices. I suspect those upfront costs are enough to make many consumers do a double take — even though we all know in our hearts the contract is ultimately where they get you.
Thankfully, Google announced that it will be making the Pixel 3 and 3a available on a lot more carriers, starting this week. That move ought to have a marked impact on the Pixel’s sales figures going forward. The addition of Sprint and T-Mobile among others means a lot more retail shelf space and ad dollars across the U.S. Devices are a harder sell when your average consumer has to go out of their way to find them — not to mention the difficulty of convincing users to switch carriers for a new device.
I’d caution against using Q2 results as a direct measure of the 3a’s appeal and Google’s move toward a six-month device release cycle. At this early stage it’s too early to uncouple that from new customers who are coming on board courtesy of those carrier additions. Even so, the device is an interesting litmus test for the current state of the smartphone, right down to the return of the headphone jack.
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Google Play is changing how app ratings work
Two years ago, Apple changed the way its app store ratings worked by allowing developers to decide whether or not their ratings would be reset with their latest app update — a feature that Apple suggests should be used sparingly. Today, Google announced it’s making a change to how its Play Store app ratings work, too. But instead of giving developers the choice of when ratings will reset, it will begin to weight app ratings to favor those from more recent releases.
“You told us you wanted a rating based on what your app is today, not what it was years ago, and we agree,” said Milena Nikolic, an engineering director leading Google Play Console, who detailed the changes at the Google I/O Developer conference today.
She explained that, soon, the average rating calculation for apps will be updated for all Android apps on Google Play. Instead of a lifetime cumulative value, the app’s average rating will be recalculated to “give more weight” to the most recent users’ ratings.
With this update, users will be able to better see, at a glance, the current state of the app — meaning, any fixes and changes that made it a better experience over the years will now be taken into account when determining the rating.
“It will better reflect all your hard work and improvements,” touted Nikolic, of the updated ratings.
On the flip side, however, this change also means that once high-quality apps that have since failed to release new updates and bug fixes will now have a rating that reflects their current state of decline.
It’s unclear how much the change will more broadly impact Google Play Store SEO, where today app search results are returned based on a combination of factors, including app names, descriptions, keywords, downloads, reviews and ratings, among other factors.
The updated app ratings was one of numerous Google Play changes announced today, along with the public launch of dynamic delivery features, new APIs, refreshed Google Play Console data, custom listings and even “suggested replies” — like those found in Gmail, but for responding to Play Store user reviews.
End users of the Google Play Store won’t see the new, recalculated rating until August, but developers can preview their new rating today in their Play Store Console.
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Facebook talked privacy, Google actually built it
Mark Zuckerberg: “The future is private”. Sundar Pichai: ~The present is private~. While both CEO’s made protecting user data a central theme of their conference keynotes this month, Facebook’s product updates were mostly vague vaporware while Google’s were either ready to ship or ready to demo. The contrast highlights the divergence in strategy between the two tech giants.
For Facebook, privacy is a talking point meant to boost confidence in sharing, deter regulators, and repair its battered image. For Google, privacy is functional, going hand-in-hand with on-device data processing to make features faster and more widely accessible.
Everyone wants tech to be more private, but we must discern between promises and delivery. Like “mobile”, “on-demand”, “AI”, and “blockchain” before it, “privacy” can’t be taken at face value. We deserve improvements to the core of how our software and hardware work, not cosmetic add-ons and instantiations no one is asking for.
AMY OSBORNE/AFP/Getty Images
At Facebook’s F8 last week, we heard from Zuckerberg about how “Privacy gives us the freedom to be ourselves” and he reiterated how that would happen through ephemerality and secure data storage. He said Messenger and Instagram Direct will become encrypted…eventually…which Zuckerberg had already announced in January and detailed in March. We didn’t get the Clear History feature that Zuckerberg made the privacy centerpiece of his 2018 conference, or anything about the Data Transfer Project that’s been silent for the 10 months since it’s reveal.
What users did get was a clumsy joke from Zuckerberg about how “I get that a lot of people aren’t sure that we’re serious about this. I know that we don’t exactly have the strongest reputation on privacy right now to put it lightly. But I’m committed to doing this well.” No one laughed. At least he admitted that “It’s not going to happen overnight.”
But it shouldn’t have to. Facebook made its first massive privacy mistake in 2007 with Beacon, which quietly relayed your off-site ecommerce and web activity to your friends. It’s had 12 years, a deal with the FTC promising to improve, countless screwups and apologies, the democracy-shaking Cambridge Analytica scandal, and hours of being grilled by congress to get serious about the problem. That makes it clear that if “the future is private”, then the past wasn’t. Facebook is too late here to receive the benefit of the doubt.
At Google’s I/O, we saw demos from Pichai showing how “our work on privacy and security is never done. And we want to do more to stay ahead of constantly evolving user expectations.” Instead of waiting to fall so far behind that users demand more privacy, Google has been steadily working on it for the past decade since it introduced Chrome incognito mode. It’s changed directions away from using Gmail content to target ads and allowing any developer to request access to your email, though there are plenty of sins to atone for. Now when the company is hit with scandals, it’s typically over its frightening efficiency as with its cancelled Project Maven AI military tech, not its creepiness.
Google made more progress on privacy in low-key updates in the runup to I/O than Facebook did on stage. In the past month it launched the ability to use your Android device as a physical security key, and a new auto-delete feature rolling out in the coming weeks that erases your web and app activity after 3 or 18 months. Then in its keynote today, it published “privacy commitments” for Made By Google products like Nest detailing exactly how they use your data and your control over that. For example, the new Nest Home Max does all its Face Match processing on device so facial recognition data isn’t sent to Google. Failing to note there’s a microphone in its Nest security alarm did cause an uproar in February, but the company has already course-corrected
That concept of on-device processing is a hallmark of the new Android 10 Q operating system. Opening in beta to developers today, it comes with almost 50 new security and privacy features like TLS 1.3 support and Mac address randomization. Google Assistant will now be better protected, Pichai told a cheering crowd. “Further advances in deep learning have allowed us to combine and shrink the 100 gigabyte models down to half a gigabyte — small enough to bring it onto mobile devices.” This makes Assistant not only more private, but fast enough that it’s quicker to navigate your phone by voice than touch. Here, privacy and utility intertwine.
The result is that Google can listen to video chats and caption them for you in real-time, transcribe in-person conversations, or relay aloud your typed responses to a phone call without transmitting audio data to the cloud. That could be a huge help if you’re hearing or vision impaired, or just have your hands full. A lot of the new Assistant features coming to Google Pixel phones this year will even work in Airplane mode. Pichai says that “Gboard is already using federated learning to improve next word prediction, as well as emoji prediction across 10s of millions of devices” by using on-phone processing so only improvements to Google’s AI are sent to the company, not what you typed.
Google’s senior director of Android Stephanie Cuthbertson hammered the idea home, noting that “On device machine learning powers everything from these incredible breakthroughs like Live Captions to helpful everyday features like Smart Reply. And it does this with no user input ever leaving the phone, all of which protects user privacy.” Apple pioneered much of the on-device processing, and many Google features still rely on cloud computing, but it’s swiftly progressing.
When Google does make privacy announcements about things that aren’t about to ship, they’re significant and will be worth the wait. Chrome will implement anti-fingerprinting tech and change cookies to be more private so only the site that created them can use them. And Incognito Mode will soon come to the Google Maps and Search apps.
Pichai didn’t have to rely on grand proclamations, cringey jokes, or imaginary product changes to get his message across. Privacy isn’t just a means to an end for Google. It’s not a PR strategy. And it’s not some theoretical part of tomorrow like it is for Zuckerberg and Facebook. It’s now a natural part of building user-first technology…after 20 years of more cavalier attitudes towards data. That new approach is why the company dedicated to organizing the world’s information has been getting so little backlash lately.
With privacy, it’s all about show, don’t tell.
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Live transcription and captioning in Android are a boon to the hearing-impaired
A set of new features for Android could alleviate some of the difficulties of living with hearing impairment and other conditions. Live transcription, captioning and relay use speech recognition and synthesis to make content on your phone more accessible — in real time.
Announced today at Google’s I/O event in a surprisingly long segment on accessibility, the features all rely on improved speech-to-text and text-to-speech algorithms, some of which now run on-device rather than sending audio to a data center to be decoded.
The first feature to be highlighted, live transcription, was already mentioned by Google. It’s a simple but very useful tool: open the app and the device will listen to its surroundings and simply display as text on the screen any speech it recognizes.
We’ve seen this in translator apps and devices, like the One Mini, and the meeting transcription highlighted yesterday at Microsoft Build. One would think that such a straightforward tool is long overdue, but, in fact, everyday circumstances like talking to a couple of friends at a cafe can be remarkably difficult for natural language systems trained on perfectly recorded single-speaker audio. Improving the system to the point where it can track multiple speakers and display accurate transcripts quickly has no doubt been a challenge.
Another feature enabled by this improved speech recognition ability is live captioning, which essentially does the same thing as above, but for video. Now when you watch a YouTube video, listen to a voice message or even take a video call, you’ll be able to see what the person in it is saying, in real time.
That should prove incredibly useful not just for the millions of people who can’t hear what’s being said, but also those who don’t speak the language well and could use text support, or anyone watching a show on mute when they’re supposed to be going to sleep, or any number of other circumstances where hearing and understanding speech just isn’t the best option.
Captioning phone calls is something CEO Sundar Pichai said is still under development, but the “live relay” feature they demoed onstage showed how it might work. A person who is hearing-impaired or can’t speak will certainly find an ordinary phone call to be pretty worthless. But live relay turns the call immediately into text, and immediately turns text responses into speech the person on the line can hear.
Live captioning should be available on Android Q when it releases, with some device restrictions. Live transcribe is available now, but a warning states that it is currently in development. Live relay is yet to come, but showing it onstage in such a complete form suggests it won’t be long before it appears.
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Google expands digital well-being tools to include a new ‘Focus mode,’ adds improved parental controls to Android
Last year at Google I/O, Google introduced a host of new digital well-being tools aimed at helping people better manage their screen time, track app usage and configure their device’s “do not disturb” settings. Today, Google is updating its suite of tools to include a new feature called “Focus Mode” that lets you temporarily disable distracting apps while not missing critical information, as well as a few new features for users of its parental control software, Family Link, which is now part of the Android OS.
With Focus Mode, a new feature for Android devices, you can turn off the apps you personally find distracting while you’re trying to sit down and get things done. For example, you could disable updates from distracting social media apps or email, but could choose to leave texting on so family members could reach you in an emergency.
Though not mentioned during the announcement, the feature also could help people enjoy their devices in their downtime — like streaming from Netflix without getting bothered by Slack notifications and work email. That’s not necessarily a way to reduce screen time — which is what a lot of today’s digital well-being features provide. Instead, it’s about finding balance between when it’s time to work and when it’s not, and what things deserve our attention at a given time.
Also unveiled today at Google I/O were new features for Family Link, Google’s software that lets parents control what kids can do on their devices, and track their usage.
Now, parents can set time limits on specific apps instead of just “screen time” in general. This is similar in a way to what Amazon’s FreeTime parental controls offer, as they allow parents to require that kids finish their reading before they can play games, for example. In Google’s case, it’s instead allowing parents to limit certain apps they believe are distractions to children.
Another new feature will allow parents to give kids extra screen time, or “bonus time.”
This could help kids who need just a few more minutes to wrap up what they’re doing on their device, or could be doled out as a reward, depending on how parents wanted to use the feature.
The company also announced it’s making Family Link part of every Android device, beginning with Android Q. That means Family Link will become accessible from device settings, instead of being an optional app parents can choose to download. You’ll find it under the “digital well-being and parental controls” in Android Q devices rolling out later this summer, says Google.
“We’re spending a lot of time on phones, and people tell us, sometimes they wish they spent more time on other things. We want to help people find balance and digital well-being. And yes, sometimes this means making it easier to put your device away entirely, and focus on the times that really matter,” said Stephanie Cuthbertson, senior director for Android.
She said these tools were already proving useful, as 90% of app timers helped users stick to their goals and there was a 27% drop in nightly usage thanks to Wind Down. However, the company didn’t share how many users were taking advantage of the digital well-being features as a whole.
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Google’s Pixel 3 and 3a are coming to more carriers, including Sprint and T-Mobile
If you’re going to go carrier-exclusive, Verizon (Disclosure: our parent company’s parent company) is probably about as good as any. Ultimately, however, exclusives invariably do more harm than good when it comes to growing your footprint.
That’s no doubt a key part of why Google had a rocky financial quarter when it came to the Pixel line. Exclusivity coupled with all the other headwinds currently facing the smartphone industry spelled bad news for the reliable line. Thankfully, however, that’s starting to change with today’s arrival of the Pixel 3a.
The budget handset, along with its flagship brethren, are about to be available on a lot more carriers. Google’s keeping Verizon around and adding T-Mobile, Sprint, US Cellular, Spectrum Mobile (Charter) and C Spire. The devices will be available online through those carriers starting today, and will be hitting shelves tomorrow.
That means a heck of a lot more retail display space and ad dollars will be pumped into the product, which should help give the new handset and its six-month-old predecessor a nice little bump ahead of Google’s Q2 reports.
AT&T is notably the odd one out here. While the devices will support the carrier, they won’t be available through its retail channels — nor will they be available through contract. That certainly makes a difference here in the States, where contracts are still king.
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The headphone jack is back for the Google Pixel 3a
Hello old friend. I knew you would be back. I didn’t know how or when, but I knew we would be reunited again. It turns out all it would take was a cratering smartphone market to bring you back around.
Google, of course, famously stood its ground on the importance of the 3.5 mm for the first Pixel, only to drop it a generation later. Now that the company’s got a budget offering in the form of the Pixel 3a, it’s returned to the nurturing arms of the hardwired headphone.
The move makes financial sense. Hardware manufacturers have been a bit more hesitant to drop the technology of budget and mid-tier devices, due to the added cost of asking users to upgrade to either Bluetooth headphones or USB-C models.
Curiously, however, the 3a won’t actually ship with its own headphones. According to Google, “Since Pixel 3a has compatibility with 3.5mm analog audio, USB-C digital audio and wireless Bluetooth 5.0, we feel like this gives users the flexibility to choose the headphones that are best suited to their individual needs.”
I mean, sure. But let’s be real, this likely had a lot more to do with manufacturing margins on the devices. Given how cheap these sorts of default headphones likely are to produce, however, it would have been a nice gesture to toss them in for users.
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Google’s budget Pixel 3a starts at $399, available in ‘purple-ish’
Last week’s earnings didn’t go the way Alphabet wanted. The fault primarily lies at the feet of the company’s ad business, but the hardware side didn’t come out great, either. Like the rest of the industry, Google’s been struggling to sell smartphones. Sundar Pichai cited “year over year headwinds” in reference to Pixel 3 sales figures.
He did, however, hint at good things to come. Selling the future is an important part of a CEO’s job, of course, but there are reasons to be hopeful. There are interesting innovations on the way, like 5G and foldables, and, in Google’s case, there are other things in the works. Pichai alluded to both a new Taipei R&D campus and, in the much shorter term, hardware announcements planned for Google I/O.
It was clear to all listening that the exec was referring to the Pixel 3a with the latter bit. Like the Pixel 3 before it, the phone had leaked out all over the place in the preceding months and weeks. By late last week, it was showing up at Best Buys in Ohio.
Like the aforementioned Taipei campus, the device is very much the product of Google’s massive investment in HTC’s R&D team. Tired of outsourcing design, the company simply went ahead and picked up an existing property. The deal made sense from Google’s perspective — HTC knows how to make phones, even if it’s forgotten how to actually sell them.
Another thing the Taipei team brought to the table was the ability to build a phone on a budget. It’s something that could ultimately prove a saving grace for the Pixel team as Google and the industry at large grapple with those “headwinds” of stagnant global economies and slowed upgrade cycles. What makes the 3a a particularly compelling product, however, is how it fits in with Google’s long-stated plan of innovating more on the software/AI/ML fronts.
From the sound of the company’s past rhetoric, hardware is becoming increasingly irrelevant to the topic of smartphone advances, and this $399 handset is a good place to prove that out.
“The smartphone market has started to flatten,” Google VP of Product Management Mario Queiroz told TechCrunch ahead of launch. “We think one of the reasons is because, you know, the premium segment of the market is a very large segment, but premium phones have gotten more and more expensive, you know, three, four years ago, you could buy a premium phone for $500.”
The Pixel 3a cuts some hardware corners, compared to its flagship brethren, but manages the feat of coming in at $399 for the standard version and $479 for the XL — those sport 5.6 and 6.0 OLEDs, respectively. The design looks remarkably similar to the Pixel 3, though the glass and metal materials have been swapped out for a cheaper polycarbonate unibody design.
The biggest change internally is the switch from last year’s cutting edge Snapdragon 845 to a much more middling 640. That won’t make a huge difference for most daily tasks, but you may well notice an impact on more resource-intensive tasks like gaming.
I’ve been using the XL for a couple of days now (albeit laid up in bed with the stomach flu for a few of them), and have found it to be a pretty reliable mid-tier device, coupled with some of the standard Pixel features like Active Edge — not to mention the shocking return of the headphone jack. I’ll report back when I’ve been able to play with it a bit longer, to see whether Google’s promise of hardware agnosticism can really excel here.
Google does seem to have a lot of hope riding on this one, along with what looks to be a shift to a half-year phone release cycle (flagship in fall, budget in spring). The company is competing with a lot of budget smartphone makers, including one-time subsidiary Motorola and countless manufacturers in China. The appeal of a cheaper Pixel is apparent, but this isn’t a device that screams excitement, Purple-ish color aside.
That said, Google finally opening the device to additional U.S. carriers beyond Verizon should certainly help. The 3a will be available online starting today, with in-store availability starting tomorrow.
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Next-generation Google Assistant is coming to new Pixel phones this year
A next-generation Google Assistant that can handle more complex tasks across apps — quickly switching from hailing a ride, to checking the weather, to taking a selfie — is coming to new Pixel phones later this year.
An early demonstration of the more robust Google Assistant was shown Tuesday at Google I/O 2019, the company’s annual developer conference.
A key feature is that users will no longer have to exclaim “Hey Google” for every question or task. Instead, a user can make a variety of requests after the initial “Hey Google” wake command.
During the demo, a Google employee onstage was able to use the voice assistant to craft a text message, quickly search photos of a trip, filter further to find animal photos, then add the image and send the message. In a subsequent task, the user verbally asked for flight information, added to the text and sent.
The next-gen Google Assistant will be able to compose and send emails, as well.
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Google’s budget Pixel 3a XL pops up at an Ohio Best Buy
The Pixel 3a is arriving next week at Google I/O. That statement felt like all but a given before, and now that the handset is showing up at Ohio-area Best Buys, well, you can pretty much bank on it at this point.
Google’s budget take on its Pixel flagship is expected to take the stage during the May 7 keynote at Mountain View. Meantime, we’ve got another pretty good look at the thing courtesy of an Android Police reader who spotted boxes at a Springfield store.
The shots confirm Google’s strict adherence to silly color naming conventions, with the appearance of “Purple-ish” alongside “Just Black.” The former is a new color and looks to be about as subtle as you can get with a purple piece of electronics. Other side-of-the-box specs confirm what we’ve seen so far, including a 6-inch display on the XL version, coupled with 64GB of storage.
The handsets arrive just six or so months after the release of the Pixel 3. The company addressed the flagship device’s poor sales on this week’s earnings call, noting, among other things, that it had some hardware planned for I/O, marking a break from past years. It will be interesting to see how Google positions the product, as it continues to make software, AI and ML the focus of upgrades over hardware specs.
More info on what to expect next week in Mountain View can be found here.
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