I/O

Following up on my (perhaps overly long) post regarding Lollipop, here are a few notes regarding Google I/O.

My overall feeling towards Android M is that they’re reaching a point of diminishing returns¹ - there’s only so much you can do at this point to improve any mobile platform, so they’re all slowly converging in terms of UX and feature sets.

Google Photos is a nice example of that – to the layperson, it’s virtually indistinguishable from iCloud Photo Library. And that’s how it should be, regardless of how you feel about trusting any of them with your photos in the first place (which, of course, is not really a problem for the average user). And the same goes for payments, etc. - they’re features to leverage (or retain) penetration at this point, and despite the iterative improvements, there’s hardly any innovation – at least this year.

Brillo is… cute. I’ve been tinkering with embedded boards for years (before IoT became a thing), and having a little more standardization would definitely help, but just bolting cloud services onto embedded Linux (which is what Android is in the first place) doesn’t seem very innovative.

As to the rest, well… I’m going to look into Polymer again if I find the time (which is dubious, all things considered). I expect the wearables peanut gallery will toss up a few interesting links over the next couple of days, but I’m not holding my breath – got enough on my mind as it is.