Google’s I/O developers conference was canceled this year due to the coronavirus pandemic. Then a virtual event scheduled for last week also was dropped in the wake of social unrest.
Photo: Christoph Dernbach/Zuma PressWorking from home is taking on a whole new meaning for tech giants accustomed to drawing a crowd.
Google became the latest example on Wednesday, when the web search giant owned by Alphabet Inc. GOOG 0.67% released the beta version of Android 11—the latest iteration of its mobile operating system that powers the vast majority of the world’s smartphones. The company has typically done this during its I/O developers conference in May, but this year’s event was canceled due to the coronavirus pandemic. A virtual event scheduled for last week to showcase the release also was canceled in the wake of social unrest triggered by the killing of George Floyd.
Google’s operating system updates didn’t always qualify as hot news even when the company was able to draw thousands of developers and fans to its Silicon Valley headquarters. That is in part because whatever Google comes up with doesn’t seem to shift the landscape much. Android has powered about 85% of smartphones sold annually since 2014 with Apple Inc.’s iOS accounting for the rest, according to IDC. And while Google now makes its own line of hardware to help showcase the platform, its devices haven’t sold anything close to the numbers generated by Apple, Samsung and most other gadget makers.
But Android is still a key cog in Google’s giant search machine, which now generates more than $138 billion a year in advertising revenue. And the company has made steady progress over the last couple of years at remedying the platform’s fragmentation, in which updates trickle out slowly to the giant population of Android users. Android 10, last year’s update, is now operating on about 19% of compatible phones and tablets, according to Statcounter. Just two years ago, the then-latest version of Android was on less than 10% of compatible devices at the same point in its life cycle.
It is too early to tell if lack of a promotional push from a big event will affect adoption of this year’s Android. But Google can at least take some comfort in the fact that all of its tech peers are in the same boat. Apple will be holding a virtual version of its own developer conference later this month at which the company is expected to announce its first in-house chips for its Mac computers. Sony and Microsoft also have to draw attention for the new videogame consoles they plan to release this fall without the benefit of exposure from the E3 conference that had been scheduled to take place this week. Sony will be holding a virtual event for its PlayStation 5 on Thursday afternoon.
Big tech’s show must keep going on somehow.
Write to Dan Gallagher at dan.gallagher@wsj.com
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"Android" - Google News
June 11, 2020 at 06:42PM
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Google Makes Android a No-Show - The Wall Street Journal
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