[MUSIC PLAYING]
RETO MEIER: Hi, I'm Reto Meier.
I'm a developer advocate at Google,
I'm joined here today by the director of Android Wear, Dave
Singleton.
Hi, Dave, thank you for joining us today.
DAVID SINGLETON: It's a pleasure.
RETO MEIER: So we heard all about some of the new features
from Android Wear at the keynote this morning.
I was wondering if you could tell us,
what are some of the biggest highlights
from your perspective?
DAVID SINGLETON: Yes, so today's been really great.
This is our second time as part of the keynote
at Google I/O. Last year, obviously,
we announced that we were working on
Android Wear, and also the first couple of devices.
So what's been really great today
is that we really gave an update.
And we also talked about some of the new capabilities
of one of our latest updates.
So in terms of the update we gave,
it's been really great over the last year
to see the diversity of designs, and devices, and applications
coming out, which really gives everyone
who wants to use an Android Wear watch a lot of choice.
So when we announced last year, we had two models.
And we now have seven, with some others in the works.
So it's really cool to have lots of different shapes
and sizes of watch available.
And also apps-- so this time last year,
we'd been working with just a few folks that
had been helping us to make sure we had the right API's
in place, and that we were thinking about things
the right way.
Today, we were able to announce that we've
got over 40,000 apps specifically designed
for Android Wear.
It's been really great to see how much innovation developers
have brought to the platform.
I think it's really exciting.
This is kind of the first time that you
can wear a general-purpose computer on your wrist.
And by using the same tools and the same API's that
exist on Android for phones and tablets,
I think that's pretty powerful for developers.
At least, that's what I thought before we launched.
It's pretty powerful that folks could just kind of imagine
what they want to do with the completely new form factor,
and hopefully do it really quickly.
And it's amazing to see everything that's out there.
So some of what we talked about in the keynote today
were some of the apps that we've seen,
that really get us excited because they take advantage
of a lot of those capabilities.
One that I love is called Golf Swing Analyzer,
and it uses the accelerometer and the gyroscope
in your watch to kind of track your swing.
It's actually really cool.
So you start it.
It says, stand at the ball.
And you start taking a swing.
It realizes automatically that you've
started to take your swing.
And then it records the whole accelerometer gyro path.
And then you can play it back in your phone
to see how well you're doing.
I'm pretty bad at golf.
RETO MEIER: Not for long, right?
DAVID SINGLETON: Hopefully that's the case.
So that's an example.
But I think maybe something that folks watching this
might be most interested in are some
of the new capabilities of the platform
that we talked about on stage today
and we're just releasing in an update that's rolling out.
It's on some devices already, and it's
rolling out to the rest of the devices
over the next few weeks.
I think the most exciting feature is something
we call Always On apps.
So it's been possible with Android Wear watches
since the beginning to have an always-on display.
So it was either on by default or something you could enable,
so that you can always just glance down and look at time.
And obviously, at the end of last year,
we opened that up to developers because we publish
the API's for watch faces.
And there are over 1,500 watch faces, which is really cool.
Because you can have designs that help express your style.
But also, if you're an app developer who
has some really interesting information
that the user cares about, you can put that right
on the watch face.
So that's really cool.
But what we have on ice today is Always
On apps for regular apps.
So you can take an application like Maps or Citymapper--
things that the user starts the application,
and you know that they're still going
to want to refer back to it.
They're still kind of involved in this ongoing activity
in the real world.
And you can actually make your app stay
in the foreground, even when the user drops their wrist
and their device goes back in to the low-power, ambient mode.
And we showed a bunch of examples on stage,
but I think that something that's
going to be really exciting for developers.
RETO MEIER: Absolutely, I mean, one
of the things you were saying this morning
was that you can have full-blown apps effectively
running on the watch device itself, which
seems like it's an awesome opportunity for developers
to create things which are more than just an extension
of an app that runs on the phone,
but something which is unique to this different form factor.
When it comes to sort of the senses and things that
are on the device, do you think we've kind of hit a plateau
in terms of the sorts of things we're going to find on devices?
Or is this something that you expect
is going to continue to expand?
DAVID SINGLETON: I definitely don't
think we've hit a plateau.
I think that when we started thinking about Android Wear
and what we could do in this space,
we realized that all technology that we were seeing
in phones and tablets was on this amazing path
of miniaturization.
And that really, last year was the first time
that you could put everything together
into a package that was small enough
and power-efficient enough to wear on your body all day
long, and have it continue to work all day long.
And a lot of the sensors that are in today's devices
obviously started in mobile phones,
where they had to be low-power and small.
But now that there's this kind of explosion
in wearable devices, I think we're
going to see a lot more innovation in the sensors
that you would have here.
And I'm really excited by some of the technology
that you hear about in research labs
and in even computer science and engineering departments
in universities around the world,
and how those will now start to become miniaturized, and go
into wearable devices.
It's going to be cool.
RETO MEIER: That's incredible.
I mean, what do you think?
If you're a developer and you're out there
and you think, this is kind of interesting,
what do you think are the biggest
opportunities for someone who's thinking maybe
I want to move past the smartphones.
I want to move into something completely new.
Maybe this wearable thing is a thing.
What are the biggest opportunities,
do you think, for [INAUDIBLE]?
DAVID SINGLETON: Right, so I actually
think that the Always On apps' functionality
that we announced today is actually
probably one of the biggest opportunities for developers
in this space to have come along any time,
really, since we started the platform.
Because if you think about it, if you
want to build a special-purpose wearable
for a specific application-- for instance,
maybe you want to have a remote control that figures out
which room of your house you're in, and controls your lighting
or your TV or whatever.
That's a really great idea.
Wouldn't it be awesome if you could
build a dedicated wearable that does that?
And I think a couple years ago, maybe even just a year ago, you
would have had to hire a design team, an industrial design
team, an electrical engineering team,
or somehow find people that had all of those skills.
And you'd have to probably do it a Kickstarter, some kind
of crowd funding to get your initial seed capital,
fund manufacturing, go through multiple runs of iteration,
just to produce the device so that you could bring that use
case to life.
But with Always On apps, you can take advantage
of all of the sensors, and the fact
that you have a general-purpose compute platform here,
and have your applications stay in the foreground
the whole time while the user's engaged in that activity.
And so for that example I suggested,
it would be possible to build a remote-control application that
maybe starts when you tap your watch as you enter your home,
and then just stays there all the time.
And so you actually can turn your watch from a watch
that you could go in and do very quick interactions on-- which
is still a very core part of the Android Wear
experience-- into a watch that, when you want it to,
can become this very special purpose device for as long
as you need it to be.
And for developers, I think that means you go from the idea
that these use cases are important,
or this particular problem you want to solve
is valuable, to a real, fully fledged special purpose
device really quickly.
So I'm really excited about that.
And I'm really excited to see what people are going to build
on top of these API's.
RETO MEIER: Absolutely.
It seems like there's a great opportunity
to weave this wearable computing stuff into the internet
of things things which we heard about as well,
with Brillo and Weave.
DAVID SINGLETON: Right, definitely
very excited about that.
So a lot of what they've announced
are making some of the processes of getting
set up with internet of things devices really seamless.
And I'm excited about how watches and other kinds of form
factors of wearable are going to be able to work that over time.
It's definitely going to be a great area
to see people innovating.
RETO MEIER: Fantastic.
Thank you so much for coming and speaking with us.
I feel like I have to ask you before you leave us.
What Android Wear watch are you wearing at the moment?
DAVID SINGLETON: So right now, I'm wearing the Moto 360.
This is the one that I was wearing on the stage earlier.
I love the Moto 360.
In fact, you see the band here?
This is a nice, Horween leather band,
but I've actually had it laser etched
with a little Android of my own, which was a lot of fun.
The watch that we were doing the demos on on stage today
is the LG Watch Urbane, which was the latest
one to come to market.
And it's really great just to see the diversity
of designs and styles.
RETO MEIER: All right, thank you very much for your time.
DAVID SINGLETON: Thank you.
It's been great talking.