LAURENCE MORONEY: Laurence Moroney
here on the Coffee With a Googler stage on level two.
And I have a great pleasure to chat
with David Burke about Android M.
And hopefully you've had a chance
to download the Android M developer preview.
I took a look at it last night, and I've
started calling it Android Mmm.
And so Dave, welcome to the stage.
And thanks for joining us.
DAVID BURKE: Thank you.
Thanks for inviting me.
LAURENCE MORONEY: I hear we had a little bit of fun
last night, yesterday, with the whole keynote and something
that was on your watch face.
DAVID BURKE: Yeah, so I'm wearing this new Huawei Watch.
It's super nice.
And I decided I wanted to hack up my own watch face.
And I was trying to think what I should do.
So of course, people speculated about what
the name of the new dessert's going to be.
So what I did was I created a watch face that basically
alternates all my favorite desserts beginning with M.
It's very simple to code up.
LAURENCE MORONEY: You should open source that.
DAVID BURKE: Indeed.
And then the actual doodles were drawn by Dan Sandler.
Dan is a wizard at creating amazing doodles.
He does all our Easter eggs in Android.
So he literally whipped up, like, seven or eight
desserts for me.
And then when I went on stage, I decided, well,
I might as well put one that's very easy to recognize
from a distance.
So I fixed it on Milkshake.
And then when I was handing over to David Singleton, I was like,
and now I'd like to welcome David Singleton up
to the stage to talk to you about Android Wear.
And if you look at me, I'm kind of, like, really pronounced.
So it worked out pretty well because The Verge then picked
up on it and put it on Reddit.
And then Reddit just goes whoo.
And everyone's speculating.
It's like, oh, it's going to be Milkshake,
it's going to be Milkshake.
And then I figured I'd wait a little bit.
And then I posted on Twitter.
And I took multiple shots of the watch.
You can see it's currently on Marshmallow right now.
LAURENCE MORONEY: That's Marshmallow.
OK, I was wondering.
DAVID BURKE: It's Marshmallow, yeah.
Oh, and there's Malt Ball.
Or Malteser, as we would call it.
LAURENCE MORONEY: Oh, I love Maltesers.
DAVID BURKE: And so then I posted on Twitter, going,
rumors of Milkshake are exaggerated.
It actually has all my favorite M desserts.
My favorite tweet was somebody went, troll level keynote.
LAURENCE MORONEY: Hey, if you're going to do it,
that's the place, right?
DAVID BURKE: I was having some fun.
But it's great.
LAURENCE MORONEY: One of the things
that struck me when you were talking yesterday
about Android M was really the focus on quality.
I have a Nexus 5, and I upgraded it from KitKat to Lollipop
last year.
And I really like Lollipop.
And I'm, like, surprised and impressed
that if we can have even more quality.
So could you tell us a little bit
about what you're doing with that?
DAVID BURKE: The way to think about M
is, well, first to understand M, you sort of
have to think about what was L, or Lollipop.
So with Lollipop, we had literally the biggest release
we'd built since 1.0.
Massive changes, right?
So material design, which is our new design language.
We had a 64-bit support.
We changed the run time.
We changed how parts of the network stack work.
I mean, we went a little bit crazy.
And then if that wasn't enough, we then
did Android TV and Android Auto and Android Wear.
So it was a very big release for us.
We're super proud of what we did.
But for M, what we wanted to do is
we wanted to go back to the core, go back to the basics,
and think about the core user experience.
Just like all the little things that we could do better.
And it's not really, bugs aside.
Of course, we're fixing bugs.
But it's more about, let's rethink
how certain things have worked since the beginning.
Can we make it better?
And if we do this across the board,
can we really come up with a very nice, polished release?
That's really what M's about, basically.
LAURENCE MORONEY: Cool, yeah.
I'm looking forward to it.
One of the crowd-pleasers yesterday
was the volume control.
DAVID BURKE: Right.
Yeah.
LAURENCE MORONEY: I have to say that is one of the things
that I'm really looking forward to having improved.
DAVID BURKE: Yeah, so I think we,
with Lollipop, we over-rotated on flexibility
and probably made it a little bit more complicated
than it should be.
So good news is we simplified it,
and it works as you'd expect.
But we also then did add a drop-down that
allows you to change the stream volumes, which
is pretty handy because often you'll want your media
volume different to your alarm volume,
different to your earpiece volume for a call.
So it's just a very quick way of getting it,
but it doesn't overcomplicate.
So it was one of those examples of a little thing we changed
that improves the experience.
LAURENCE MORONEY: Like when I'm listening to music on my phone,
and then I get a hangouts ding.
And at the same volume.
It's like-- Right, so it's good stuff.
Another really neat thing that I saw
was, I'm calling it granular app permissions.
I don't know what the actual proper name is.
But like, the way that you can actually,
first of all, on demand have the app
permissions instead of up front.
And then also the user can go in later on
and change all the permissions.
DAVID BURKE: Yeah, and I think when Android started out,
we would ask for the permissions up front before you install it.
I think if you look at what's happened over the last seven
years or so since we first launched the very first Android
device, mobile apps have gotten more and more complicated.
They do more and more.
They're location aware and user aware and what not.
And so as a result you're seeing apps
with more and more permissions.
And so the problem with asking all the permissions up front
is it's, as a user you start getting a little jaded.
You're like, am I even reading this?
LAURENCE MORONEY: There's a long list,
DAVID BURKE: There's a long list.
How do I select the things I do or don't want?
So we decided it was time to rethink it.
And so now we have basically two things we've done.
One is we've simplified the set of permissions
to a smaller number of easily understood things.
And we sort of re-architected the platform around
that so they fit into those buckets.
So things like microphone access or camera access or location
access.
And then the second thing we've done
is we now, rather than ask for them at installation time,
we ask for them at run time, when the app is actually
running.
And then we put a bunch of thought into little details
like, if the app asks and the user says
no, the second time if the app asks, we're going to say never,
user gets a chance to say, never ask again.
But we do that the second time because what can sometimes
happen is the user can accidentally
press the wrong thing.
Then the developer's stuck.
And so we put a bunch of thought into it.
The other nice side effect of it is
we've noticed that, if you have an app
and you're updating it on Play Store
and you needed to add a permission because you're
adding a new feature.
Let's say you were adding location awareness
to a traffic app or something in a later release.
Well, you'd have location at the beginning,
but let's just imagine.
What would happen is that the update would require the user
to go into Play Store and actually
say yes to the upgrade.
Now with the new permission model,
it will just update automatically.
And it's only when the user goes to use the app does
the permission come up.
So it's better for the developer, and it's better
for the user.
LAURENCE MORONEY: It makes more sense when you think about it.
It's like it's almost common sense.
And also like, sometimes a bad experience.
Like I pick a new app in the App Store,
and then it has this 100 permissions.
I don't even know what the app does yet and I have to give it.
So I really like that update.
So it's pretty cool.
DAVID BURKE: The other thing just to mention
is that you can also go into the Settings
and you can actually turn off permissions as well.
So after the fact.
LAURENCE MORONEY: Exactly.
So if I don't like that I've given this app permission,
I can change it.
That's really, really cool.
It certainly just makes for a much friendlier user
experience, which is great.
Now one of the other things that I really enjoyed
was the Doze, which is a nice name.
Because I have exactly the scenario that you mentioned.
I have a tablet, and I'll sometimes leave the tablet.
And maybe I didn't close the cover right
on the tablet or something like that, and suddenly I come back,
and it's 20% battery left.
That kind of stuff.
So Doze is really cool for that.
DAVID BURKE: Yeah, it's kind of trading off.
Android's pretty amazing at that.
It's sort of almost overoptimized in freshness.
Everything's always the latest information.
But I think what we realized was that, especially
for the tablet use cases, users were actually willing to have,
it's OK if it's out of date for, like, 10 seconds.
I'd rather that, but my tablet lasts twice as long.
And so the idea with Doze is basically
we use significant motion detection
to detect if the device has been left alone for a long time.
And then we start exponentially backing off.
Basically it'll go asleep, wake up for a little bit,
then it will go asleep for a longer period of time,
wake up for a little bit, and then
go asleep for a longer period of time.
So it backs off.
And what that does is it reduces the standby current that's
been drawn on the battery.
And so it will extend the battery life significantly.
So we're seeing-- and we mentioned
this in the keynote-- we're seeing up to two times
longer in standby if you just leave the devices alone.
And so we're still working on it, by the way.
That's the other thing to remember.
This is a preview, really.
This is not launched.
And so we're still tweaking and making it better.
But initial results are looking really good.
LAURENCE MORONEY: For a preview it still looks pretty good.
DAVID BURKE: Yeah, we're pretty happy.
LAURENCE MORONEY: It's kind of solid.
So it's cool.
So then one of the other things you were talking about
was Type-C USB?
DAVID BURKE: Right.
LAURENCE MORONEY: And we're beginning
to see that in lots of places now, right?
DAVID BURKE: Yeah.
The number one, actually, it think
it was like the biggest cheer I got
was for not having to do this.
Which side is it?
So because USB Type-C, of course, is flippable.
It's symmetric, right?
And so we've been working with a bunch of manufacturers and sort
of helping this.
We actually had a lot of people in Google work
on the standards for USB Type-C. So it's
something we've been very heavily involved
with from the very start.
And it's got a couple other nice features.
You can run DisplayPort over it for VideoEdge
if the device supports that.
You can charge much more quickly.
So basically what you do, rather than the old school USB being,
like, 5 volts and relatively low current, now what you do
is you actually step the voltage up.
And you have higher current and voltage there
for higher powers.
You can charge more quickly.
Like up to three times faster, which is pretty cool.
And then we had to do a couple little tweaks to the OS
because you might have, like, a phablet and a tablet.
And you plug them into each other.
Who's charging who?
And so you can now choose the direction of the current flows.
LAURENCE MORONEY: That was the thing.
I never even thought of that scenario
where I could use my tablet to charge my phone if I
need to make a phone call.
I was like, kind of cool.
Because I usually carry one of those little battery
packs as well as my tablet and my phone.
But now I can get rid of that stuff I need to.
That's pretty cool stuff.
So much stuff that you're announced.
And it's only a preview.
DAVID BURKE: Right.
LAURENCE MORONEY: So I'm sure there's
a whole lot more good stuff.
And I know we can't talk about it now,
but I'd encourage folks to go out and download the preview.
Have a play with it.
Download the SDKs when they're available.
Have a play with Developing for Android
M. And any last messages on Android M?
Any last--
DAVID BURKE: No.
Please do exactly what you said.
Download it, try it out.
Find some bugs, file some bugs.
We want to fix as many things as possible.
Try the new features.
And like you said, there's lots of things we can talk about
that we've added.
Bluetooth stylus support, MIDI support,
there's just a bunch of really cool things.
LAURENCE MORONEY: There's MIDI support?
DAVID BURKE: MIDI support, yeah.
So you can plug your drum kit in.
So rock out on M.
LAURENCE MORONEY: OK, cool.
So thanks very much, Dave.
And thanks, everybody, for watching.
Go ahead, download Android M Preview today.