Android phones and
#USGS
gave Southern California residents an early warning to the 4.5 earthquake last night Here's what the phones' sensors, acting as seismometers, detected. Yellow and red concentric circles are expected locations of the P and S waves.
So... after 14 yrs leading Android engineering, I've decided it's time for a change. An awe-inspiring ride helping build the biggest OS on the planet (+ many Nexus/Pixel). I'm forever grateful for the opp. Continuing as advisor while figuring out what's next in AI/bio. More here:
Tragically, millions of people in Ukraine now rely on air strike alerts to try get to safety. Working with the Ukrainian government, we're rolling out a rapid Air Raid Alerts system for all Android phones in Ukraine. 1/3
Android 9 Pie is here! We just pushed the code to the Android Open Source Project and rollout to Pixel starts today. Big thanks to the 140,000+ beta users for sharing their feedback and to the Google teams who worked so hard on the release
In Android 13, about 21% of all new native code is in Rust. And it's the first release where a majority of the new code added is in a memory safe language.
Android 12 source code released today! Material You personalization, sophisticated privacy controls, Play as you Download, app hibernation & more. Huge thanks to the 225,000+ of you who tried the betas and reported issues: we couldn't do this without you.
It's been an intense and productive ~8 weeks of focus and hard work leading to today's launch of Google & Apple's exposure notification OS support. Look forward to continuing to work with public health agencies around the world in support of their apps.
Earthquake in SF Bay Area today. Yellow/red represents shaking Android phones acting as seismometers. Circles are our inferred estimate of P & S waves. Earthquake alerts sent instantaneously to surrounding phones before the waves hit
Pixelbot. AI bot with Android for its brain, connected via BT to Arduino body. Neural net with TensorFlow for object recognition. Complete with rude noises (my 6 yr old's idea). Code & schematic here
Google Pixel phones have an inbuilt car-crash detection system that will automatically call emergency services on your behalf if your are in an accident. Also, if you're wondering how we trained the ML models, I'll leave you with an image ;)
"Play as you Download": Start playing a 400MB game on Android in 10s. A new virtual file system (IncFS) enables an app to run while code pages & resources are still being downloaded. Memory access patterns crowdsourced to know which blocks to download when
Alright I've finally crunched the numbers on the Blind Smartphone Camera test this year - This time we tested 20 different smartphones, collected over 20 million votes and... the results are pretty wild
Full video:
The Transformer model is one of the most important contributions to modern AI. It powers Bard and is the "T" in ChatGPT. The 2017 Google paper, “Attention Is All You Need” is well written, but doesn't really explain how it works. So, here’s my "Transformers in a Nutshell”...
Android 12 is a landmark release. Super proud of the innovation and hard work by our designers, engineers, product managers, testers, etc. And thank YOU for trying the previews and giving feedback! Nice job today by all of our Android speakers at
#GoogleIO
@ArtemR
@Android
It's a priority, just a big job. We're working on a redesign with a different underlying data model (push vs pull) that will be much faster and nicer to use.
TLDR: if you want the best smartphone camera of 2017, get a Pixel 2 :). Proud of the talent & dedication of our engineers who sweated the details day and night to build a great product.
First Android 13 developer preview! 13 is both a fibonacci and prime number so we have that going for us... Over the next months, we'll be building on tablet/foldable work from 12L, privacy & security, and dev productivity.
That time when we showed the Queen how to get driving directions to Windsor Castle on an early version of Google Maps for phones. The Queen was super curious and engaging. My first & last royal focus group! Circa 2008.
This is huge milestone for speech recognition. An 80MB on-device RNN model that can do what a traditional 2GB server FST model does, only faster for the user.
Some epic engineering work to make the Android Java/Kotlin runtime updatable via Google Play system updates. Enabled us to improve app startup on old versions of Android by up to 30%. Great example of the power of modular OS system components
Android has a new look. Inspired by Material You, we’ve rethought the entire experience for
#Android12
, from colors to shapes, light and motion. It’s more personal and expressive — a one-of-a-kind design, just for you.
[Demystifying viruses for engineers, in 10 tweets]. In stressful situations, one of my coping strategies is to try to deeply understand the problem so I can better reason about it. In case it's helpful, here’s a quick guide to genomics and viruses...
The system starts rolling out today and will ramp up to target all Android phones in Ukraine over the next few days. Thankful to our eng/product/UX teams for racing to get to a soln in short order. 3/3
First developer preview for Android 14 posted this morning. We appreciate the feedback as always. Also that logo is 🔥
@dsandler
. Tweeps - can you explain it?!
Alright, the machine is greased, the cranks are turning, and we're out the gate on '12. Lots of exciting stuff in the works, which'll be landing in the dev previews and betas over the next few months...
✅ The first Developer Preview of
#Android12
is ready!
Learn about our improvements to trust and safety, new user experience tools, better app compatibility, and more →
The system leverages our low latency alert mechanism we built for earthquake alerts. The air raid system is supplemental to, and shares the same triggers used for, the country's existing air raid alert systems. 2/3
Android 14 - it's a wrap! The high level: . The deets: . Thanks to all of you who gave feedback on the betas. To celebrate, I got a new mini-me bugdroid 🤘
Love that Android's principles are as relevant today as a decade ago. 10 yrs ago, we set out to give developers a powerful SDK so their apps can run everywhere, open source code to enable device makers from entry to high-end, and an ever improving UX to delight people worldwide
We’re saying hello to the big 1-0. From users to developers to partners, it’s been an amazing decade. Tell us your favorite
#Android
memory using
#HBDAndroid
.
Nice read on Pfizer vaccine's genetic code. Masterful strokes include sub'ing modified U bases Ψ to evade the immune system on way in, and sub'ing two amino acids so the spike freestands. Nice reminder that great science stands on the shoulders of giants.
So sad to hear about Susan Wojcicki passing. I was lucky to be seated beside her at Google's 25th anniversary late last year. I remember her whispering an off-the-cuff but brilliant insight on how to use AI to help preserve endangered languages. Such a brilliant and kind person
TensorFlow Lite dev preview now available: . A crucial step toward enabling hardware-accelerated neural network processing across Android's diverse silicon ecosystem.
You’ve probably heard of text-to-image models like DALL-E, Stable Diffusion, and Google’s Imagen. But how do they work exactly? Here’s my “Diffusion Models in a Nutshell”...
Starting this week, we’re bringing Circle to Search to more Pixel and Samsung phones, foldables and tablets. And soon, you can use Circle to Search to instantly translate whatever’s on your screen without switching apps.
Jetpack Compose Alpha launches today! A modern way to build Material Design apps with Kotlin-based, reactive programming. With new Android Studio tooling and compatibility to phase in with existing views on your schedule. Can barely keep my composure 😉
Behold the full power of Android Q Gesture Navigation.
*With the right app,* you get a floating, barless gesture area, and it continuously samples the background and changes color to maintain contrast.
It is so slick. Try the I/O app.
We're working towards making Android more modular & updatable. Built-in apps & components like WebView update to stay ahead of security issues (cough!). Updatable Play services, OS modules, and more. Result is your phone gets better over time, even if you don't own the latest