Google said little about Android 14 at Google I/O so maybe the platform has been forgotten and it’s time to move on
As a long time owner and fan, I was curious what Android 14 news we’d hear from Google I/O. After all, I/O 2023 was a revolutionary moment for Google products. The first folding phone! The first tablet (in a while)! A new ‘a’ Pixel! But … almost no Android news?! Now I’m wondering if Google forgot about the true meaning of Google I/O and the little droid who got them there.
The new Pixel 7a phone, which I reviewed for a week before it was announced at Google I/O, will ship with Android 13. No new OS for the new phone, just some minor improvements (camera), or not (battery).
The new Pixel Tablet will run Android 13. There will be Nest software, and some sort of Google Chromecast feature built in, but these seem exclusive to the Pixel Tablet, and not upcoming Android tablet features. In fact, Google didn’t say anything at all about how Android was adapted to run better on the Pixel Tablet, and its silence is suspect.
The new Pixel Fold will run Android 13 at launch, and it will probably do more for Android phones than any Android device that Google has released to date. Google will finally have to adapt its interface to work with the dynamic, foldable display. Multiple displays at once, even. We’ve seen some promise of how dual screen features could work in the AI demos that Google showed off during the Google I/O keynote address.
In one demo, the Pixel Fold acted as a live interpreter for a conversation between two people speaking different languages. By holding the Fold up so both parties could see, each could read a translation of the other’s words on the screen facing them. One person gets the big inner display, one gets the outer screen. Both people get live translation.
Amazing! New AI features are coming to Android! Except that Google never really expanded on that, or whether anything similar would come to other Android phones.
In fact, the only other AI feature that I remember from the Google I/O keynote address was some sort of generative AI wallpaper. Nothing I couldn’t accomplish by asking DALL-E to create an image then make it my wallpaper. I guess Google thinks I should be impressed when the Pixel does it for me, but I’m not interested.Apple is not messing around with iOS 17
This is a terrible year for Google to be asleep at the Android helm. Apple seemed distracted by side projects like the AR headset that may never materialize, but recent rumors suggest iOS 17, the next major iOS update, will be a real crowd-pleaser.
