Monthly Archives: May 2022

There is more pressure than usual on Google to deliver surprises at I/O 2022. The company is expected to unveil its Pixel Watch, along with a more budget-friendly Pixel 6A, plus the latest slew of new Android 13 software and new features. Who knows? Maybe well see something else entirely.

The stakes are high, as always, for the new stuff to be good, and I dont really doubt Googles ability to impress with these new products. Its rare that Google doesnt have at least a handful of announcements (including a few pie-in-the-sky ones) that show extremely well. After all, what makes I/O fun to watch is that it is a mix of the tech thats within reach, along with some more far-flung stuff.

But what some of us at The Verge are most excited for couldnt sound duller by comparison. Instead of being surprised, we simply want to see if 2022 is the year Google figures out how to make its products relevant, for real people, for the long run. Releasing them is step one, but providing meaningful, long-term support behind these new products and the platforms that they operate on is something that Google still hasnt proven itself capable of even after all these years. Im not just talking about guaranteeing security and OS updates the boring stuff. I want to see Google go out on a limb for these gadgets and ideas like it has more than couch-cushion money to lose.

Follow-through has never been Googles strong suit. Many of its products have languished in ways that lend further credence to Googles infamous reputation for abandoning even its best ideas. There have been so many standout I/O announcements that seemed great but havent lived up to their potential, like Googles Assistant-powered Duplex service that can answer or place calls for you, which has been slow to gain traction even among people who could use it the most. Then there are ones that just straight up never materialized, like the ambitious Project Starline that Google claimed could provide a more realistic video chat experience, with depth sensors to make it look like the other person is sitting across the table.

Looking back on 2021, it failed to make good on the buzz it made on its marquee products. Its Stadia cloud game streaming platform was drastically scaled back in scope less than two years after Google became the first tech giant to go big with game streaming. Android 12 delivered underwhelming changes, and its Material You design widget rollout has been mediocre at best (it should be called Meh-terial you). The Pixel 6 had a buggy launch, which it still hasnt resolved with worthwhile updates. These were the phones that were supposed to signal to people okay, now were serious and prove the value of Googles custom Tensor processors. My Pixel 6 really isnt any more fun to use than my old Pixel 3.

The lack of Googles post-launch care has taken several different forms. My colleague Allison Johnson thought that the Pixel 5A was a safe but great midrange phone that more people should know about. But instead of going global with broad carrier support, as most manufacturers do these days with phones that theyre excited about, Google released the phone exclusively in the US and Japan and didnt partner with carriers to boost availability. Unless youre a Pixel superfan, its possible that this phones existence went under your radar entirely.

Given that approach, it seems as if Google wants to succeed with hardware on its own terms and to fail on its own terms, too. Perhaps this strategy stems from Google realizing that it likely wont ever be in the top spot for many tech hardware categories it participates in. Still, its strange to see this seemingly directionless strategy considering theres proof within Googles business (Google Photos, search, Chrome, Android, and Workspace, just to name a few) that investing heavily yields success.

If you want one representative example to watch out for, its smartwatches. If the biggest pre-I/O rumors are true, Google will unveil its first-ever flagship smartwatch, the Pixel Watch. Its an interesting time for the device to launch, as the bar couldnt be lower for Google to re-enter the smartwatch market after years of letting it evaporate. And I cant help but wonder what might have happened if Google hadnt left in the first place. It was yet another category that Google initially put some muscle behind until it didnt.

Google launched a dedicated smartwatch platform, Android Wear, in 2014 to compete with the Apple Watch. The company got the likes of Samsung, LG, Asus, Motorola, and more onboard to make hardware, each with an interesting spin on design, but each kind of crippled with the same ho-hum software, slow performance, and lousy battery life. Android Wear offered more in the way of options than Apple, but all of those options were, well, not good.

Google continued its software investment in the space, releasing a rebranded Wear OS with more features to turn a new leaf. But the best watches running Googles new software couldnt shake those first-gen issues loose even ones like the LG Watch Style and Sport, which were the flagships meant to carry Wear OS to new heights.

Googles support slowed down, with fewer major updates and even fewer must-have apps. While a few manufacturers like Fossil and Mobvoi have kept the proverbial torch lit (and, more recently, Samsung with its Wear OS 3-powered Galaxy Watch 4), the platform is not in a great place. So, theres a lot riding on Google being able to kickstart it again. But even if the company unveils a promising new product, its possible that Googles biggest chance of success with smartwatches is behind it, as almost all of its OEM partners (aside from Samsung) have given up. Still, I hope that Google provides a similar amount of support for the Pixel Watch as it does with its Pixel phones, for whatever thats worth.

Regardless of the product, be it hardware or software, this years announcements at I/O present an opportunity for Google to start again. Thats the best and worst thing about Googles strategy: it cant stop starting over. Despite some ever-present fixtures in its strategy, like Android, its search business, and Google Assistant, theres little to no logical throughline with its hardware and software. Its often exciting to see what the company does next, but Ive learned to doubt Googles ability to care about its latest products for six months (or even six weeks) after launch. I want to be proven wrong.

At I/O, well see the new products take the stage over. But Im eager as ever to see if Google recognizes that the initial impact of these gadgets matters less than the long-term support.

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Google I/O 2022: Google needs to invest more in support than surprises - The Verge

The parent company of dating apps Tinder, Match and OkCupid is suing Google, alleging that the company exerts too much control over payments through its Google Play app marketplace.

The lawsuit, filed Monday in Californias Northern District, accuses the company of deploying anticompetitive tactics to maintain a monopoly on the Android mobile ecosystem:

Ten years ago, Match Group was Googles partner. We are now its hostage. Google lured app developers to its platform with assurances that we could offer users a choice over how to pay for the services they want.

But once it monopolized the market for Android app distribution with Google Play by riding the coattails of the most popular app developers, Google sought to ban alternative in-app payment processing services so it could take a cut of nearly every in-app transaction on Android.

Matchs lawsuit is the latest instance of app developers demanding relief from Google and Apple over the 30 percent standard cut now, sometimes 15% that those tech giants extract from in-app payments. Longstanding tensions around the issue boiled over in 2020 when Epic Games sued Apple for antitrust violations, a case that didnt result in a clear-cut victor but did force Apple to allow developers to point their users to alternative payment options.

Facing pressure over its restrictive payment choices, Google recently launched a pilot program that would allow apps to offer an alternative payment option along with Google Plays own system within apps. Spotify was the only company named as a participant in the pilot program, and Match claims that the company has rebuffed its own efforts to sign up.

At the same time, Google announced plans to crack down on apps that circumvent its billing systems, setting a deadline of June 1. In light of the deadline, Match Group CEO Shar Dubey called the lawsuit a measure of last resort for the dating app company.

They control app distribution on Android devices, and pretend that developers could successfully reach consumers on Android elsewhere, Dubey said. Its like saying you dont have to take the elevator to get to the 60th floor of a building, you can always scale the outside wall. Its not legitimate.

In a statement to TechCrunch, Google dismissed the new Match lawsuit as a self-interested campaign to avoid paying its fair share. Even if they dont want to comply with Google Plays policies, Androids openness still provides them multiple ways of distributing their apps to Android users, including through other Android app stores, directly to users via their website or as consumption-only apps, a Google spokesperson said.

Match Group is a member of the Coalition for App Fairness, a developer advocacy group that calls attention to the ways that Apple and Googles dominance over the mobile software market negatively affects app developers. Epic Games, Spotify and Tile are others prominent members of the group, which was formed in 2020 around the time that Epic escalated its own complaints.

Developers tired of paying such a hefty cut of their in-app earnings to Apple and Google are stepping up the pressure on those companies, but governments around the world are increasingly taking an interest in the issue too.

In the U.S., the bipartisan Open Markets Act would crack open both the iOS and Android app store, upending Apple and Googles shared stranglehold on the mobile software world in the process. That bill moved out of a Senate committee earlier this year and appears poised to continue the slow crawl toward becoming law.

Last week, a competition complaint in the Netherlands against Googles Play Store from Match Group prompted a preliminary investigation into the companys potential anticompetitive practices. That countrys Authority for Consumers and Markets is also sparring with Apple over its own app payment processes, and the regulatory group has ordered the company to allow dating apps to offer alternative payment options.

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Match Group sues Google over monopoly power in Android app payments - TechCrunch

In early 2019, Michele Turner sat down for dinner with her colleague Grant Erickson. Joining them at the restaurant in Silicon Valleys Woodside were two of their counterparts from Amazon and two from Apple. Turner and Erickson both worked for Google. The hosts of this dinner party were Tobin Richardson and John Osborne from the Zigbee Alliance. The aim of the evening was simple: fix the smart home.

Turner, the senior director of Google Smart Home Ecosystem, and Erickson, then a software engineer at Google, had agreed to meet with their competitors to find a solution to the major pain points in the smart home: reliability, connectivity, setup, and the multi-platform problem. While this was not the first conversation between the companies, it was a significant step forward in an ongoing effort by the Zigbee Alliance to bring the industry together and address the challenge of interoperability in the smart home.

Grant, who was also president of the Thread Group at the time, had been leading conversations with us internally at Google about how to solve some of the bigger problems in smart home, recalls Turner. We knew we had the foundational technologies to start to address this but that there was a lot to fix. Grant made a proposal. The Apple folks and the Amazon folks obviously had viewpoints as well. But we all could see the bigger picture of what needed to happen.

Turner recalls they left the meeting with a draft proposal agreed on by all parties and with a commitment to take it further. Initially known internally as Project Unity, it went public just prior to CES 2020 as Project Chip (Connected Home over IP). Shortly after that along with a rebrand of the Zigbee Alliance to the Connectivity Standards Alliance the fruits of that Woodside dinner became Matter: the new interoperability smart home standard, and an unprecedented industry coalition.

The Verge sat down with Turner ahead of Google I/O this week to hear how the company plans to implement Matter when it finally arrives later this year and what it will mean for users of Googles Nest products and the Google Home app.

Google has confirmed that all of its existing Nest branded smart speakers and displays will be upgraded with an over-the-air firmware update to support Matter, allowing you to use Googles voice assistant to control any Matter-enabled device in your home, no matter who made it. It will also update its Google Home speaker and has said that the Nest Wi-Fi, Nest Hub Max, and Nest Hub (2nd Gen) will serve as Thread border routers. Thread is a low-power mesh networking protocol that allows devices to talk to each other locally without a hub, using border routers to route the packets of information around your house. Along with Wi-Fi, Thread is a key component of Matter.

This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.

Matter has evolved substantially from that first meeting, and there have been delays and setbacks. Do you still feel confident in that original vision, that its being carried through and is on track to achieve what you set out to do at that Woodside dinner three years ago?

Michele Turner: I do. And, in fact, I think its exceeding our original vision in some ways. Its been incredibly heartening to see the enthusiasm and the adoption and the number of companies that have joined the CSA and the Matter workgroup. Were at 200 companies its amazing.

I think the CSA made the right call [on the latest delay]. We need to make sure that were going to have very high-quality devices in peoples homes. It has to work right. This is super complex. Partners have to make sure that the multi-admin is working accurately [a key feature of Matter that allows devices to work with any platform simultaneously], that theyre not only working with just the Google Nest controller devices but with the Amazon controller devices, the Apple controller devices, the Samsung controller devices. The complexity of this is very high.

How is Matter going to change the smart home experience for the Google Home user?

For the Google Home user, I think the bigger areas of Matter where theyll see change first is in getting your devices set up. I just set up some lights at my mother-in-laws house, and it still took me 45 minutes to set up four lights. It shouldnt have been so hard. The first thing is going to be that significantly simpler setup.

The second piece is the speed and the reliability of the local network. This has been a big pain point for users. My team spent a lot of time working with partners on improving reliability and reducing latency. Because in our mind, if its not as fast as a light switch, whats the point? We believe Matters going to drive down those latency numbers significantly and improve the overall reliability of devices in the home.

Then, I think interoperability for users is going to be a big piece. As much as we love having everybody using the Google Assistant, the reality is people have iPhones and Android phones in their homes. Some of them want to use HomeKit. We just dont have that kind of compatibility today for users. And I think thats hard. Being able to have multi-admin really work well between these ecosystems is going to be a big benefit for users.

Then, our long-term goal is to build out what we call the proactive home. Instead of having a whole bunch of connected devices, how do we build that truly proactive home that works for the benefit of users? ... Matter is going to be absolutely foundational to that. Its the architecture behind the proactive home. If we dont have a home thats reliable, if we dont have things running locally, if it doesnt work consistently, we cannot deliver on that promise.

The proactive home is really that intelligence layer, whether its being able to predict that Im going upstairs, its 10 at night, and I always go into my bedroom at that time, so turn on the lights for me; or, Im watching TV, its 9:30PM, the kids are in bed, and I get a notification on my phone that the lights just went on in the kids bedroom. Is somebody sick? Are they watching YouTube? Being able to do anomaly detection. Now, Matter doesnt do that. But its foundational to be able to enable the rest of that. Because if that core foundation of the home of the smart home isnt solid, the rest of it just doesnt work.

Have you got features like that lined up ready to go? Can we expect to see a significant shift in the way we use our Google smart homes from Day One? Or is this going to be more of a slow build?

Its going to be more of a build. We have to get those intelligence signals coming in, then we have to actually apply machine learning to them. We have to get enough of them coming in that we can build machine learning models around, build algorithms around, to start doing those predictive models.

We have some of that data off of the cloud today. Weve been using it in the Home and Away routine. But that we drive off of the geofence signals and the PIR sensor thats in the thermostat. Its taken us years to get that right. And we have a lot of data coming in from those sources. Now were going to have Matter sensors as a first-party device. Sensors are critical to being able to understand and drive this sort of predictive intelligence in the home. But its going to take time to bring in the signals and build those models. They have to work accurately. You dont want your lights to turn on at 2AM because some signal went haywire.

You mention that sensors are key to the smart home. Is Google exploring other ways of sensing beyond little white plastic boxes? At the Google Smart Home Developers Summit last year, you discussed technologies like ultra wideband for fine location tracking that could be potentially implemented in the smart home. Is that something thats tied to Matter? Or is that something more specific to technologies youre developing within your own ecosystem?

Its not directly tied to Matter. Were working with third-party partners that are using UWB today to try to build some of those more frictionless experiences in the home. But right now, in terms of the smart home area of Google, were mostly working with some of our third-party partners in the home security area around how to use UWB signals for things like frictionless entry [a security system turning off automatically when you walk in]. Thats a thing thats coming.

How are Google Nest devices going to work with Thread and Matter? Its been announced which will be upgraded to Matter and which will be border routers. Can you tell us a little bit about how thats going to work in the Google smart home powered by Matter?

Our Nest Hub Max and our Nest Hub (2nd Gen) will be able to act as Thread border routers, and were actively looking at other devices that may need Thread because Thread has been a part of our strategy for a long time. Now we are looking at the topology of the home. We understand what the mix of devices generally are in homes, and we want to expand that Thread footprint with our partners, like Nanoleaf and others. We have a lot of conversations around whats the best way to start getting more Thread border routers into the home so that we will be able to have that truly fast network. Theres only so many that Googles going to have.

Weve committed to our new Nest Thermostat being on Matter, and we are still evaluating if the learning thermostat can handle Matter. It does have Thread. But just because it has Thread doesnt mean we can run Matter on it.

So, when the Nest Thermostat(s) is upgraded to Matter, youll be able to control it from an Apple HomeKit controller (such as a HomePod or Apples Home app) with Matter?

Yes, that is the multi-admin feature. If I want to have both HomeKit and Google Home running in the house, my HomeKit controller my HomePod or my Apple TV should be able to control my thermostat.

However, a Matter controller cant control another Matter controller [so a Nest Hub cant control a HomePod Mini]. Theres a real difference here between controller devices and end devices. The controller devices act differently.

Will manufacturers still have to certify their devices for each separate platform, as well as Matter certification and Thread (where applicable)? And if they dont get the Google certification, will they still be controllable by Google Assistant or a Google Nest smart speaker or display?

If they choose to use our APIs, we will certify them to make sure they did their API implementation accurately. That will give them access to the Works with Google Home badge. But yes, they can do, say, a generic light bulb certification with Matter, get their light bulb working with Matter, and not use our APIs at all. Then, as long as the user has a compatible Google Nest hub in the home, they can use the Google Home app to set up the device as well as the Nest Hub to control the device.

As youve said, Matter is complicated. And theres a lot of expectation thats been placed on its shoulders. What would you say is the biggest misconception right now with Matter?

I think the biggest misconception is that Matter is going to solve every problem in IoT. It doesnt have a native intelligence layer thats going to automatically give you the proactive home. In my mind, its solving three very foundational things. Its solving making setup easier for the majority of the devices that people put in their homes. Not the majority of device types, necessarily, but the majority of devices people put in their homes.

Its making the IoT more reliable and faster. And then its going to solve this multi-admin problem. Its going to provide that device interconnectivity that we dont have today that is really great for users. While its going to be a lot more than that, its not today. But its solving what we believe are really the core problems that have challenged adoption by mainstream users in the past.

Its clear that connectivity is the main issue here thats being solved. But when everything works with everything, the platforms are going to need to differentiate themselves to attract the user. Why will people want to use Google Home in the future when Matter arrives, as opposed to any of the other platforms?

One of the things that Matter does is level the playing field for these device makers. Now theyre all getting a little bit commodified. And theyre worried about that. The CSA says there are 130 devices on track to launch with Matter. But there are tens of thousands of devices out there. Theres a long way to go.

Some of the developers are a little bit wait and see because theyre worried about getting commoditized in the market. What Google is going to be offering to these developers and I talked about this in the Smart Home Developer Summit, well have more on it coming up at I/O is the ability to work with us to build automations on our platform, which will enable them to differentiate.

Were not the experts in lighting; were not the experts in home cleaning; were not the experts in leak detection. Thats what our partners do. We want to build the best platform on top of Android, for them to be able to differentiate and build these new experiences that will create new offerings for users. I think thats the value.

Google is going to have some key offerings along the lines of intelligence in context that developers are going to be able to take advantage of to build these compelling and next-generation solutions on their platform.

Originally posted here:

Google explains why it's all in on Matter, the first true smart home standard - The Verge

Last fall, Google announced a key improvement to devices running its Google TV front end with personalized access so that each user in a home could have individual profiles with their own recommendations and Assistant responses. In December, that feature was delayed until the coming months, and its still nowhere to be found; however, 9to5Google reports glanceable cards for Google TVs ambient mode screen saver that were also announced at the same time are starting to roll out.

When they were announced in October, Google showed a version of the UI (the picture above) with large personalized cards scrolling across the middle of the screen. They could display information like weather, sports scores, and news or toss in shortcuts to content you might like, including podcast episodes, music, and photos.

On the devices where its showing up so far, however, 9to5Google mentions that it actually looks a bit different, with smaller information chips lined up across the bottom of the display with stuff like YouTube video shortcuts, a podcast in Google Podcasts, or a prompt for Google Assistant. If its enabled on your device, they mention that an indication should be a menu prompt telling you proactive personal results are now on so that you can go to the Assistant settings and turn them off if you dont want them on your TV screen.

As with most things Google, the exact timing of the rollout is unknown, but with Google I/O kicking off tomorrow, maybe well hear more about its smart TV features then.

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Google TV's ambient mode screen saver with sports scores and podcast links is rolling out - The Verge