LAURENCE MORONEY: Hi.
Laurence Moroney here.
I'm in the Coffee With a Googler stage,
and I'm going to be chatting with Jason Titus.
He's the lead of the Developer Product group at Google,
and he had so many great announcements for developers
at the keynote yesterday.
So Jason, welcome, thanks for joining us.
JASON TITUS: Glad to be here.
LAURENCE MORONEY: So what kind of feedback
have you been hearing from developers?
What's been exciting?
JASON TITUS: It's been pretty cool.
It seemed like folks were really excited about the new things
in Android Studio, where we're now supporting C++.
LAURENCE MORONEY: That was pretty cool.
JASON TITUS: A lot of folks have been doing Native Development
Kit work for a while, and they really
wanted to be able to have that supported, so that that's
a big step.
We also made Cloud Messaging cross-platform,
so now you can use it not just on Android and Chrome
but also on iOS, and people seem pretty excited about that.
LAURENCE MORONEY: We added topics to that, as well, right?
JASON TITUS: Yes, so now it's a great way, essentially,
with topics and Cloud Messaging you can just,
without having to manage and track all the different users
that follow specific things, you can just on the client
say for an arbitrary topic you create,
like, I'm interested in the San Francisco Giants
or something like that.
You can subscribe the client, and that
could be happening across all your users.
And later on, you just do a single push notification,
say, new information about San Francisco Giants,
and it fans out to all of them across platform
without you having to do any sort of management.
LAURENCE MORONEY: And it's Android, iOS, and web?
JASON TITUS: Yeah.
LAURENCE MORONEY: And one of the neat things about GCM--
or Google Cloud Messaging-- is like if you've
got multiple devices, if you dismiss
the notification on one, it can be dismissed on all of them,
so you don't have that kind of clutter in your notification
tray.
That's pretty cool, right?
And it's free for developers as well.
JASON TITUS: And probably the other thing
that got the most excitement was around our cloud test lab.
So we recognize that there's a lot of developers
who are having problems going, hey, there's
all these different devices.
I don't have access to all of them.
I want to be able to test my stuff.
How do I do that?
And so we're going to be rolling something out
that actually allows you to upload your APK
and will run it across the top 20 devices
from around the world and give you a report saying like,
if we run into any issues, here's a screen
video of how we got there.
Here's crash logs, what happened,
And so you can very quickly know whether or not
you have any issues.
LAURENCE MORONEY: That's pretty cool.
I'm looking forward to trying that one out,
because it can be difficult to try on different devices,
or if you live in a country where a device isn't available,
then you can use the cloud lab for that,
so that's pretty cool.
Also Polymer 1.0 was announced yesterday.
JASON TITUS: Yeah, I think we did both Polymer 1.0
and then Elements on top of it, so you can actually
get libraries where a simple-- just insert an element,
and you can have a, map charts, toolbars, menus,
a bunch of stuff, and I think people
will start making some pretty nice web apps based on that.
LAURENCE MORONEY: Cool, that should be good.
Now, with all these little bits and pieces,
great releases here and great releases there,
but this all must be part of some bigger picture
to make developers' lives easier?
JASON TITUS: Yeah, the point of our group
and what we're looking at across the company
is how do we make it easier for developers to get up
and running?
How do we solve problems that developers actually have?
I've actually only been at Google a little bit more
than a year.
LAURENCE MORONEY: OK, same as me.
JASON TITUS: And so before that, I was at Shazam.
LAURENCE MORONEY: Oh, OK.
JASON TITUS: And so, I spent 3 and 1/2 years
like banging my head against the wall and kind of fighting
all the things you have to do to try and get
an app built and successful across different markets.
And I think we're doing a bunch of things
already, things we're doing in the Play Store
to let you AB test listings, making the developer
tools better, like on Android studio, on iOS releasing,
moving to CocoaPods to make using our libraries better.
These are all just about saying how do we make it so
when you have an idea or something you
want to build that it's easier to do it with our stuff?
And this is just the beginning.
I think what people she recognizes
this is the first round of just making it faster,
better, easier, and you'll see a lot more in the future.
LAURENCE MORONEY: Nice.
And one of the themes that you had in you
keynote, and we've seen in a lot of the talks
is really thinking for developers
this temple of developing, engaging, and earning.
And that, in many ways, is the workflow for a developer.
You have your idea, and if you have your idea,
you want to be able to express that.
What kind of things are we doing to help them express
that and help them to learn?
JASON TITUS: On the develop front,
it's how do we make it easy for you
to build your code like with development tools like Android
Studio?
How do we make it easy for you to sign up for anything
you need to use?
We have a new flow to sign up for analytics and messaging
and all that, that we think gets rid of a lot of the pain there.
And then we redid the entire Google Developer
site, google.com site.
Hopefully folks will find it much more useful.
LAURENCE MORONEY: I see that just launched, right?
JASON TITUS: Yes, that just came out,
and that's a redesign of the entire site.
So that's all things around how to make it easier to develop.
On the engage side, we're recognizing that folks really
want to get new users.
You've got your app done.
You upload it to the Store.
Like, how am I going actually find folks?
So both making it easier on the Play
Store to try and find the best way to pitch it.
Like, how do you describe the app?
Try two or three different texts for your listing,
try different icons, see what works best,
giving you the ability once somebody's
sold your app, making it really easy to message with them
and do notifications.
And then for our folks who actually
want to start buying app, install ads, and try and buy
distribution, I think maybe it's been harder than it should have
been with us, and so we're starting
the process of getting it like here
is a single place you can go.
It'll be in the Google Play Developer Console.
You can buy across all of Google.
You can just say, I'm willing to spend $200 a month,
and I'll pay this amount per install, and we'll just do it,
set up the campaign for you.
And I think that's the kind of thing you should
expect to see more from us.
It's just ways to make it easier,
fewer knobs and dials, more straight to the meat
of the things you need done.
LAURENCE MORONEY: Sounds good.
And for engaging, there was one technology
that I really enjoyed.
It's the app invites.
JASON TITUS: Yeah.
LAURENCE MORONEY: Because, for me, we had a talk about it
yesterday.
I discover most apps from friends.
Magnus was my co-speaker, and he sends me all these crazy hockey
apps, and my son sends me all these games.
When you've got friends sending you apps that you can trust,
the the app invite technology is really good to help engage.
JASON TITUS: Yeah, and that came out of saying,
what are the main things developers are trying to do?
We see again and again and again developers build invite flows,
and it's like like, OK, how are we going to get it?
Most app installs are happening from word of mouth.
How are we going to do that?
Oh, we'll build an app invite flow.
It turns out that we actually have bunch of data
that we can use to make it more useful for a particular user.
Like if you use Google services, we
have a better sense of across your 1,000 contacts,
you are the ones you actually communicate with,
and we can sort of bubble those to the top
and make it easier for you to share with folks
you're more likely to share with.
And that's something that would be
very hard to do as a third-party developer,
but we can provide that to you as a service,
and we think it'll make it easier, and then over time,
just reduce the friction, make it easier for the install flow
to work, all that.
LAURENCE MORONEY: And If I'm a developer,
I can then focus on my domain expertise,
instead of trying to roll an app invite.
JASON TITUS: The reality is that most developers are coming
at something where they say, I know
I have a better way of doing this
than other people have done.
I'm going to build this app.
it's going to make it easier to organize a block party
or sell these things or whatever.
And they shouldn't have spent a bunch of time rewriting things
that everybody else has written, and they
shouldn't have to spend forever gearing up and signing
up, and configuring things.
They should be able to say, OK, I need notifications.
Boom, it's in.
I need this.
It's set up for me.
Now I spend my time working on the part that's
unique to my app.
LAURENCE MORONEY: Cool.
So there's a wealth of new stuff that you've announced,
and there's a whole lot of stuff that we're actually working on,
particularly like a lot of iOS stuff that we've announced.
But you're only just getting started, right?
JASON TITUS: Like I said, I think
you're seeing these as the beginnings of sanding down
the sharp edges, taking the things that we've
gotten feedback that are hard and making them easier.
But we have a lot more in store in the future
that we think will be great for developers.
LAURENCE MORONEY: Cool.
Well, thank you so much, Jason, and thank you everybody.
Remember the new developers.google.com is live.
Go and check it out, and you can learn about some
of these great technologies that we were talking about.
Thank you so much.
And thanks again.
JASON TITUS: Thank you.