So I think we learnt a lot from Google’s 2 hour keynote at it’s developers conference but the overarching impression I got is that Google just wants people to use it’s apps and services – it wants mass market.
Almost everything they announced were cloud services or apps, rather than embedded Android features. This isn’t a bad thing though, the apps and services announced looked very polished and very useful, the majority are also available on iOS (again proving they want mass market).
One could almost say that Google doesn’t really care about Android – it doesn’t care what hardware it goes on, it doesn’t care what’s in its app store or how much revenue it could make from it, it doesn’t care what version consumers use (btw <10% are on the latest version – Android L), it doesn’t even care about adding major new features – again, nearly all the new features were separate apps.
What it does care about though is that people are using Android rather than using Windows or iOS or any other operating system. The reason Google cares? They’re a data company and they want (need) to know everything they can about it’s users and the world around them, and they need mass market to do this well. Why? So they can deliver advertising to those users.
Now these aren’t criticisms of Google, I think they’re a fantastic company, but when people talk (positively and negatively) about Google as a business and it’s products and services they forget that everything it does is to gather data to enable them to serve better adverts… and that’s not a bad thing really.
James Saye 