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RETO MEIER: Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to
Google Developers Live.
My name's Reto Meier.
I'm the tech lead for the Android
developer relations team.
And today, I have the very great pleasure of interviewing
Hiroshi Lockheimer, VP of engineering for Android, and
Hugo Barra, VP of product for Android.
So congratulations on a great keynote yesterday--
a lot of really exciting news for
developers that we all heard.
I think probably the most exciting thing which
developers have been talking about to me is the new Android
Studio IDE.
Can you tell us a little bit more about what meditated
those changes?
Why have we gone in this direction, and what's the
future there?
HUGO BARRA: So as we said yesterday, we're listening.
This is one of the most common pieces of feedback that we get
from developers is that they want more options.
There's a lot of people who love Eclipse and will be
Eclipse die hard fans for the rest of time.
But there are people who want different options.
There are people using IntelliJ
already in the community.
So we thought, why don't we join forces with JetBrains,
and starting from their community edition product,
which is open source, can we build something that's even
more customized to Android developers?
And I think we're there with this early preview.
But there's so much more to come.
RETO MEIER: It's a really exciting time.
I think from a developer perspective, it's great to
have this whole suite of tools that we can use, depending on
whatever your preference is.
So it will be exciting to see how that continues on.
One thing which we get tend to get asked a lot-- and it would
be interesting to get your opinion on this-- is, do you
think we're ever going to get to a point where we can all
sit down with an Android device to do our Android app
developments?
HIROSHI LOCKHEIMER: Self-targeting?
RETO MEIER: Yes.
HIROSHI LOCKHEIMER: Like being able to compile on the device.
RETO MEIER: Exactly.
On the device.
So open up your Android, start writing some code, deploy it
to yourself.
HIROSHI LOCKHEIMER: Yeah, that would be a cool feature.
What do you think?
HUGO BARRA: That would be pretty cool.
It's a hell of a project.
HIROSHI LOCKHEIMER: I want to see people doing that,
writing some code.
Yeah, that would be cool.
RETO MEIER: That's always his excuse, right?
You want to give him a real computer.
He only gets the tablet.
[INTERPOSING VOICES]
HIROSHI LOCKHEIMER: It's very Inception-esque.
RETO MEIER: So one of the other big announcements which
is really exciting-- slightly less developer focused, but I
think a lot of interest to a lot of people-- is the music
on demand, or Music All Access, if I
remember the name.
So I got to ask, what is your seed for your
current radio stations?
What track is generating your radio?
HIROSHI LOCKHEIMER: Mumford and Sons for me right now.
I'm kind of into them right now.
I don't know about you.
Some sort of Brazilian bossa nova thing?
HUGO BARRA: I have several different music
personalities in one.
RETO MEIER: What's your developer personality?
When you sit back and you start writing out some code,
what do you put on then?
HUGO BARRA: I would say probably Daft Punk.
Definitely that would be my seed.
And yesterday, I started a radio station with
Supertramp's "Dreamer." It's a little weird, right?
RETO MEIER: Keeping it real.
I was pleased they had Daft Punk playing in my session
room before I went up on stage.
It was kind of the perfect way to start.
HUGO BARRA: Daft Punk seems to be an omnipresent theme here
at I/O.
RETO MEIER: It's hard to get away from, yeah.
HIROSHI LOCKHEIMER: What's your seed?
RETO MEIER: It's Daft Punk--
the Daft Punk track, "Get Lucky." I'm all
about that right now.
Perfect.
So again, we heard a lot of really impressive numbers
around Android's growth.
It seems like it's all really exploded over the
last couple of years.
People are asking me, what is the future?
How does the next phase of Android growth
and development look?
HIROSHI LOCKHEIMER: You want me to handle it.
OK.
Well, I think we can talk about device growth, the
number of devices and things like that.
But really what we want to focus on is business growth,
the opportunities for the developers out there.
So as you saw today, or yesterday, I guess--
and today and tomorrow--
RETO MEIER: All week.
HIROSHI LOCKHEIMER: All week, yeah.
Our focus is going to be around how to make developers
more efficient.
This goes back to your first question about why are we
doing an IDE.
Well, we want you to be more efficient and more tailored
tools for you.
And we want you to be more efficient so that you can run
a more efficient business and things like that.
So a lot of what we do--
Google Play services, also similar things, bringing the
power of Google into your application--
it's all about that.
Making developers more productive, making it a
fruitful business for everyone.
I think that's where the growth is going to be.
RETO MEIER: Very nice.
And it happens that tomorrow is all about business.
All the Google Play sessions are going to be all tomorrow.
HIROSHI LOCKHEIMER: That's cool.
RETO MEIER: There should be some really exciting stuff for
[INAUDIBLE].
HIROSHI LOCKHEIMER: By the way, I was really excited by
the developer console stuff that Elie showed yesterday.
RETO MEIER: Absolutely, yeah.
HIROSHI LOCKHEIMER: That stuff is really cool-- the
translations, and the staged rollouts, and all that stuff.
RETO MEIER: Yeah, it's been really impressive
working with that team.
Because we're on developer relations, we're right on that
cutting edge.
And to see Elie and her team come in and really engage with
developers and find out, what do they want?
Let them get yelled at for a little while instead of me.
It's kind of nice.
They actually can do something about it, which is fantastic.
So it's really exciting.
HUGO BARRA: How do you feel about all the things that
you've been asking us to do for the last three years
suddenly starting to come to fruition?
RETO MEIER: It's kind of nice.
HUGO BARRA: You're going to have to come up
with some new ones.
HIROSHI LOCKHEIMER: Yeah.
RETO MEIER: Absolutely, yeah.
And that's why we've got Office Hours upstairs.
It's been great to finally be able to talk to some of the
people who have come to I/O year after year and are asking
us these things.
And we can finally say, well, yeah, actually we launched it.
What else do you want?
Changes the conversation.
HIROSHI LOCKHEIMER: What else do people want?
RETO MEIER: What else do people want?
They want all kinds of things.
I think it's really more along the same lines.
I think people want to have richer tools, particularly
around design.
I think that's one of the most exciting elements of Android
right now, and mobile, and computing in general, is
trying to move beyond apps which do what you want them to
do to apps which are delightful and create this
experience that people really love.
Which leads me into another question.
What are some of the Android apps that you guys love from a
design perspective?
We have design all afternoon today.
We're talking about design, telling people what they
should be doing.
Do you have any apps that you've been playing with which
really encapsulate that spirit of design that you'd
like to call out?
HIROSHI LOCKHEIMER: All the apps that I'm using right now
are pre-release stuff that I'm really excited about, but I
probably shouldn't say.
I'll get in trouble.
I'm really excited about a lot of the designs
that are coming up.
Existing apps, I don't know.
You're a big app fan.
RETO MEIER: You've always got the cool stuff, Hugo.
[INTERPOSING VOICES]
HUGO BARRA: I'm a pretty big fan of Currents.
I'm a pretty big fan of the new music app
with the new design.
HIROSHI LOCKHEIMER: Yeah, All Access?
Yeah, absolutely.
HUGO BARRA: I'm a pretty big fan of Hangouts, because it's
very focused on just very quick messaging, and things
get out of the way.
But it still has some cool features like the parallax
when you slide the compose panel over the
conversation list.
But Play Store is my current number one.
I'm actually completely in love with the new Play Store
experience, particularly on my Nexus 7, actually.
RETO MEIER: They've done a really great job there.
You mentioned the Nexus 7 as well.
So I think tablets are something which represent a
huge opportunity, I think, for developers.
Are there any tips that you guys would suggest, as big
tablet users, for developers who are just sort of starting
to make that transition into building apps for tablets--
sort of guidance that you might want to suggest to them?
HUGO BARRA: Well, I would say, first of
all, look at the data.
It's pretty clear to everyone now that Android tablets are
in a major tear.
If you look at the data that we've released, the data that
comes from third parties, it's pretty insane.
And the tablet explosion, curiously, is not US-centric,
like the initial smartphone explosion was.
It's actually happening all over the world.
So as a developer, I would think very carefully about the
markets that I could go into first.
But there are markets like Brazil, Mexico, Indonesia,
where more than 50% of the tablets that are sold, from
what we hear, are Android tablets.
So clearly, these are exploding markets.
And in these countries, what's really interesting is that a
tablet is actually sometimes the only computer that a
person has.
It's actually very common.
So I think there's a lot of opportunity there that
developers aren't yet attuned to, and which I think they
should take a closer look at.
HIROSHI LOCKHEIMER: And really, tactically, I think
following the tablet design guidelines, you saw yesterday
that we're starting to do some stuff with that now, with the
targeting where all apps are designed for
tablets in Play Store.
[INTERPOSING VOICES]
RETO MEIER: You do the right thing.
HIROSHI LOCKHEIMER: Exactly.
So following those guidelines actually has some merit now.
There's some benefit to you.
RETO MEIER: Can actually see it.
HIROSHI LOCKHEIMER: Yeah, exactly.
So I think that's a really tactical thing that developers
should start doing.
RETO MEIER: So the transition has been from more and more
powerful smartphones to we've started to see tablets.
So do you think we've kind of started to plateau now in
terms of that rapid growth around mobile technology?
Or do you think there's still more to come?
Are we going to see new features in chip sets?
Are we going to see new sorts of devices?
Or are we kind of done now we got phones and tablets?
What do you think?
HIROSHI LOCKHEIMER: I think we're just at
the beginning, honestly.
I'm excited about all the sensors
that could be in your--
I think Larry talked about this yesterday, right?
All the sensors that could be combined and put into phones
in a more battery efficient way.
New kinds of use cases that we haven't even imagined yet.
I don't know what they are.
That's Hugo's job to figure this stuff out.
HUGO BARRA: You get the easy job.
HIROSHI LOCKHEIMER: I think we're just getting started.
HUGO BARRA: We're just getting started.
Sundar opened with some cool lines yesterday in his keynote
speech where he was talking about 900 million Android
devices activated, but then 7 billion people in the world.
And you look at markets that are growing so quick, like
India for example.
He didn't specifically break out India, but India has less
than 2% of penetration from an Android perspective.
So less than 2 out of maybe 100 people
actually have an Android.
And it's a booming economy, so it's obviously clear that that
market is going to do so well.
So we haven't even scratched the surface I think is
probably the way to look at it from the point of view of
growth worldwide.
So I really think that there's a lot more to come.
HIROSHI LOCKHEIMER: Yeah, there's growth.
But there's also, I think, technically just so much more
that could happen.
Even just a few years ago, you couldn't have imagined some of
the things we're doing today.
RETO MEIER: Absolutely.
I remember when you guys put a barometer into the zoo.
HIROSHI LOCKHEIMER: Yeah, that's right.
RETO MEIER: That's interesting.
HIROSHI LOCKHEIMER: Exactly.
RETO MEIER: So seeing what developers can come up with
more newer sensors.
Particularly some of the stuff around location has been
really, really exciting.
HIROSHI LOCKHEIMER: Yeah, exactly.
And the Google Play services, those APIs, the location APIs
that Hugo talked about.
RETO MEIER: So I think we're just about ready to wrap up.
So I wanted to ask you, flip it around, go the other way.
So we're talking about the future.
Android's been around for about 5 years now, thousands
of devices.
What's your all time sentimental
favorite Android device?
HIROSHI LOCKHEIMER: For me, it's got to be the G1, because
that's what started it all.
That's old school, but that's what really started it.
And it had that wacky fold out display, which was a
real pain to build.
But HTC did a great job, I think.
And just a lot of sentimental value for me.
I don't know about you.
HUGO BARRA: For me, it's got to be the Droid.
Droid.
Because that's when we came out with voice search and
turn-by-turn navigation and all those cool things in a
really, really big way.
So I think to me, that was the big water divider from an
adoption perspective.
RETO MEIER: I remember when we were dogfooding the Droid.
So you had 100 people on the floor in building 44, and
every two seconds, Droid, Droid.
Yeah.
And for me, it was the same-- the Droid and the Nexus 1.
Because I gave away a bunch of Nexus 1s at that point to
developers to help get them kick started.
And so yeah, that has a special place in my heart.
HIROSHI LOCKHEIMER: That's cool.
RETO MEIER: Well, thank you guys very much for taking time
out of your busy schedules to chat to us on Google
Developers Live.
Congratulations again, and good luck for
Android in the future.
HIROSHI LOCKHEIMER: Thank you.
Likewise.
HUGO BARRA: Thanks for having us.
RETO MEIER: Thank you.