Google Gets Out In Front Of Our I/O AI Complaints In This Week’s News
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Considering it’s a developer conference and Android is the world’s most popular OS, Google I/O has traditionally put our favorite operating system front and center. But ever since ChatGPT forced Google to declare a code red, I/O is becoming more and more about AI.
The week in mobile saw Google shift its I/O strategy even further, announcing some of the biggest changes coming to Android a full seven days ahead of time. We’re still looking forward to this coming Tuesday — after all, Gemini’s a big deal on mobile, and Android XR didn’t make the pre-I/O announcements — but this past week saw some of the year’s most important news. We’ll get you caught up below.
Last Week’s Roundup
Google gets out in front of our I/O AI complaints
Put yourself in Google’s shoes: On the one hand, you absolutely need your AI efforts to succeed, or else you’d risk losing your lead in the field of online information. Meanwhile, Android is in a great place, having matured to the point where people complain that updates aren’t flashy enough anymore. You have a conference where you try and entice developers to utilize your platforms, and you’ve put more work than anybody into the field of AI.
Of course you would use that conference to hype devs up about platforms like AI Studio, Vertex AI, and Gemma — even if it cost one of your most successful products a little time in the limelight. But as Android fans started becoming more vocal about AI dominating the keynote, you’d start feeling the need to pacify them, at least a little.
So Google tried to please everyone this year. The company streamed a special I/O edition of The Android Show to highlight new features coming to its mobile OS, and it did so a full week ahead of time — happy now, Android fans? We’re okay with it, especially some of the Android 16 and Wear OS 6 changes that were shown off.
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Android’s big ‘Expressive’ redesign gets a beta this month
Early on, a lack of cohesive design was one of Android’s biggest drawbacks when compared to iOS. The #holoyolo era finally gave the OS some direction in this regard, then Matias Duarte came and blew all of our minds with Material Design. An updated version of this UI motif gave us dynamic theming with Material You, but things have stagnated a bit since then.
This week, Google made Material 3 Expressive official, and while it may look a lot like Material You in screenshots, it truly comes to life when you see the animations in action. The playful, bouncy UI will debut on Android 16, but not with the first release. Instead, Google will launch Android 16 next month, followed by Material 3 Expressive “later this year.” But there’s good news for those of you who like to live on the bleeding edge — a beta program for the Android version that will ship with Material 3 Expressive is all set to kick off this month.
Wear OS finally gets dynamic themes as Google embraces round displays
Beyond watch faces, there aren’t many ways to customize the Wear OS interface. Thankfully, that will finally change when Google’s Material 3 Expressive redesign heads to watches. The new UI will introduce dynamic theming for your wrist, automatically setting accent colors to match the theme of your watch face.
The redesign might actually impact Wear OS more than it does Android. In addition to the color theming, Google has taken cues from the predominantly round screens of Android smartwatches. Elements like buttons and tiles will scale up as they animate towards the center of the screen, giving the UI somewhat of a fisheye effect. But words don’t quite do it justice — you should see it in action to judge for yourself.
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One UI 8 is coming this summer
In the midst of Google’s pre-I/O announcements, a line from Sameer Samat, President of the Android Ecosystem, stood out: Not just Pixels, but “Samsung and many other” devices are slated to get Android 16 this summer. We had heard some rumblings, and the early One UI 8 leaks definitely look like Samsung’s back on track with its releases, but it was still reassuring to hear from such an official source.
Warner Bros. finally realizes Max was a bad name
We’ll end this week’s roundup with a piece of oddball news: Warner Bros. Discovery has announced that HBO Max is making a comeback. First, there was the confusing duo of HBO Go and HBO Max, but things were simplified in 2020 when both apps were consolidated into HBO Max. Then, in 2023, WBD made the SEO-unfriendly decision to ditch the HBO branding and simply call its streaming app Max. Thankfully, after two years of nobody knowing what to call the service anymore, the app will be changing its name back to HBO Max.
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