Google CEO Sundar Pichai speaks at the company’s 20201 Google I/O conference.Google
Google announced a slew of updates to its developer products Tuesday at its first Google I/O event since 2019.
Though Google makes most of its money from advertising, the annual event is a way to excite its developer ecosystem with updates ranging from software and artificial intelligence moonshots to shopping features. The company cancelled the annual developer conference last year due to the Covid-19 pandemic. This year’s event was mostly virtual, with a few in-person attendees at the company’s headquarters in Mountain View, Calif.
Here’s a roundup of some of the more interesting announcements from the day’s event:
Hardware
This year’s event was pretty light on hardware announcements — no big unveiling or refresh to its Pixel phones or home speakers. It did, however, announce some updates to existing products.
Most notably, Google said it now has a whopping 3 billion active Android devices, globally, well ahead of Apple‘s claim of 1 billion iPhones. However, Android devices are widely divergent in terms of the version of the platform they run, with some relying only on the core open-source code and others relying on custom apps and skins issued by hardware makers and carriers.
The company
