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- Google I/O is here and that means
we finally know what's happening with Android P.
Company's focusing on three things:
A simpler interface, an intelligent interface,
and this thing they're calling "digital well being".
What's that all about?
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So, the new Android P beta should be available
pretty much right away on a whole bunch of devices,
like seven or nine devices.
It's on the Google Pixel 2 XL, which I have here.
You can also get it on a OnePlus 6,
Nokia phones, et cetera, et cetera.
Anyway, I wanna show you the most obvious thing
you're gonna see on this beta of Android P
because, oh my god, they took the home button away.
So, what you do is you give it a little swipe up
and that takes you to the overview screen.
All of your apps are listed horizontally here.
They're even live, so you can, like, long press on something
and have it do a search for that thing,
or copy the text or whatever, which is kind of cool.
If you give it a longer swipe up, or a second swipe up,
it takes you to all of your apps.
And it lists your most-used apps or, sorry,
the AI-detected apps, what they think you're
gonna wanna use, right there at the top.
And that's also in this half swipe up down here
at the bottom, which is pretty neat.
There's a little tab, also, for your work apps.
So if you really want to, you can just
turn those damn things off, because who wants work apps?
One last little clever thing with that button,
if you just slide it over to the right,
you can get to that list of your most recent apps
to jump into them.
So it's a really quick way to switch between apps.
And then, of course, when you're in an app,
the home button is there.
To go home, you can just tap it to go home.
And, the good old back button is there, too,
if you want the back button.
Notifications: things are basically the same,
but there are some really nice updates.
So, if you start dismissing stuff a bunch,
eventually it'll ask you if you just wanna
stop seeing those notifications.
You can long press on a notification
instead of remembering that weird little
swipe over to get to settings.
And then there's just a plain old
"manage notifications" button at the bottom.
When you tap on that, it takes you to a list
of your most recent notifications
and then you can just turn those things off
because they've been annoying you lately.
So it's a much faster way to handle notifications.
Now, this is just some of the stuff on Android P.
There's a lot more.
There's all the stuff about digital well being,
there's a bunch of AI stuff.
And so I want to talk about that stuff now.
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Now, because this is Google and because Google
can't string more than five words together
without saying the words "AI",
we're talking about AI again.
AI is built into Android in a few different ways.
There's a new machine-learning kit
so that you can make your own intelligent apps,
and that works on both Android and iOS, actually.
But, in Android itself, AI is gonna watch
what apps you use and then shut them down intelligently
to save battery life.
It's also gonna adjust your
brightness automatically for you.
I don't know, saying that that's AI feels a little
bit buzz-wordy and a little bit overkill,
but it should, hopefully, give you better
battery life in the end.
What are some of the things that are more intelligent
that's happening on the phone now?
- Right, and so, there's the whole premise of this
is, you know, we think smart, we call them smart phones,
but, you know what, they could be a lot smarter.
- Okay. (laughs) - And they could be
a lot more intelligent and, you know, what does that mean?
Well, in our case, it's really we think
the phone should adapt to you.
One area that we've worked on which I like a lot
is what we call "adaptive battery".
It's a project we did with DeepMind.
It uses on-device machine learning
to figure out which apps you're gonna launch next
and which ones you're not gonna launch for a couple hours,
and which you may not do 'til the evening, if at all.
That's one example.
Another is auto brightness.
Now, in pretty much every modern smart phone today,
we'll look at, it has a light sensor
and it will adjust the brightness depending on the light.
But it doesn't take into account you're preferences, right?
Or your environment.
And so what we've done, it'll actually learn
how you move the brightness, given different
lighting conditions and then it will do it for you.
- So, one of the things that Google's doing in Android P
is they're introducing these new terms.
There's a "slice" and there's an "action".
And they're basically deep links, which means
that an app has got something you want to do
deep down inside the app, but you wanna do it
somewhere else in the operating system.
So if you do a search for Lyft,
it just surfaces a link to just go home
and it jumps right into the app to do that.
Or, if you want, if you are opening up your app drawer,
there's a couple little things inside the app row
at the top that lets you jump right into some action
you do all the time.
Like, you know, call your significant other
or open up Seamless when you get home
because, let's be honest,
you're gonna open up Seamless when you get home.
You're lazy as hell.
Those are all the whizbang features that
are gonna make you more productive with your phone
and use your phone more and they're all great.
But, Google's doing this whole other thing
that's designed to get you to use your phone less.
- Digital well being, for us, is a theme,
is a set of capabilities we're putting into Android
to help people become more aware
of how they're using their device.
And then be in control, have a set of controls,
where they can decide how they want
to change that behavior.
So one of the ways you're doing that is you have this thing.
What do you call it, the dashboard?
- [Sameer] Yeah, there's a dashboard.
- Is it just a lot more checkboxes
for people to have to look at?
Like, are you finding that people are actually
finding value in this thing?
- The first step is awareness.
And that dashboard is pretty straight forward.
It shows you how much time you spent on your phone each day,
what apps you spent that time in,
how many times you unlocked your phone,
how many notifications you've received.
And then it lets you drill down on those things.
And then the next piece of it is:
okay, so how can the software help me
if I want to change my behavior?
So that's where we're putting a bunch of capabilities
we're calling, you know, user controls.
So, you can set a time limit on the amount of time
you want to spend in an app.
And so I could say, for example, I only wanna spend
thirty minutes a day in YouTube or in Instagram,
or my favorite game, maybe Subway Surfer, right?
And another situation that we find people
really talked to us a lot about was
trying to be fully present for something.
And the phone, perhaps, not helping with that.
So, Do Not Disturb's being improved where I can...
When I turn on Do Not Disturb,
now all the visual interruptions go away.
- So it doesn't show notifications on lock screen.
Not only does it not vibrate, it doesn't
show anything at all. - No vibrations.
Basically, no interruptions.
- So after that really brief look at Android P,
what do I think?
Well, I'm kind of hopeful.
I really love the idea of exploding apps
out into the rest of the phone,
so that you can just do a search and jump
right to the thing you wanna do.
And, I'm really intrigued by the idea of using apps less
'cause, I don't know, I use Twitter way too much.
If you take those two ideas together, what's really
interesting is Google's trying to set up a system
where you think about your phone less.
Both because it does stuff for you automatically
through AI, and because you just use your phone less.
And maybe we could all stand to do that.
But even though I'm hopeful, that doesn't mean I'm naive.
Android has a huge update problem; it always has.
And the theory is that this new Treble system
they've developed is going to get it on more phones sooner.
We're making a good step here.
It's gonna shop up on, like, seven manufacturers
in beta right away.
And we should have it on a bunch of phones,
not just Pixel phones, by the end of the year.
But, Google has to execute because every year,
we see a great new version of Android
and then we have to wait to get it on the phones
that everybody buys: Samsung phones.
I would really like to see them fix that
this year with Android P.
Thank you so much for watching.
If you like this video, there's another video
over at Verge Science you should definitely watch.
It's about eye charts and are they actually useful
for helping you see if your vision's any good
and why they're always all the same.
You should go check it out.