Category: Google

Ron Amadeo at Ars Technica has directions on how to to enable it. R.I.P., Chrome OS.

Hiroshi Lockheimer, SVP Android, Chrome OS and Chromecast, writing on the Google Chrome blog:

Over the last few days, there’s been some confusion about the future of Chrome OS and Chromebooks based on speculation that Chrome OS will be folded into Android. While we’ve been working on ways to bring together the best of both operating systems, there’s no plan to phase out Chrome OS.

Notice the dancing around in that paragraph. Either the WSJ got it wrong, over-stating the work to “bring together” the two OSes, or this is happening, and somehow “Chrome OS” will stick around.

Either that WSJ report is wrong, or Google is scrambling to keep the cat in the bag and not have its PC OS die too soon.

Google currently ships two OSes. Android, which powers everything from watches to smartphones to tablets and ChromeOS, which is designed to run on small, (mostly) affordable notebooks.

According to Alistair Barr at The Wall Street Journal, that may be about to change:

Google engineers have been working for roughly two years to combine the operating systems and have made progress recently, two of the people said. The company plans to unveil its new, single operating system in 2017, but expects to show off an early version next year, one of the people said.

This new version of Android would run on PCs. Instead of the it’s-mostly-just-a-browser experience ChromeOS users have now, they could enjoy the ever-growing ecosystem of Android apps and services.

I’m interested to see how this plays out.

Larry Page:

What is Alphabet? Alphabet is mostly a collection of companies. The largest of which, of course, is Google. This newer Google is a bit slimmed down, with the companies that are pretty far afield of our main internet products contained in Alphabet instead. What do we mean by far afield? Good examples are our health efforts: Life Sciences (that works on the glucose-sensing contact lens), and Calico (focused on longevity). Fundamentally, we believe this allows us more management scale, as we can run things independently that aren’t very related.

This is crazy. In short, Google will become a sibling to a bunch of other companies, and Alphabet will replace it as the parent organization, including on the stock market. Sundar Pichai will become Google’s next CEO, which is an obvious choice, and I think a good one.

Anil Sabharwal, Head of Google Photos:

Google Photos gives you a single, private place to keep a lifetime of memories, and access them from any device. They’re automatically backed up and synced, so you can have peace of mind that your photos are safe, available across all your devices.

And when we say a lifetime of memories, we really mean it. With Google Photos, you can now backup and store unlimited, high-quality photos and videos, for free. We maintain the original resolution up to 16MP for photos, and 1080p high-definition for videos, and store compressed versions of the photos and videos in beautiful, print-quality resolution.

There are some caveats to the “unlimited” storage bit, but all-in-all, it looks like this may give iCloud Photo Library a run for its money.[1]

New from Google: a pay-for-what-you-use, invite-only, Nexus 6-only cellular plan that stiches together service from Sprint, T-Mobile and a Wi-Fi networks.

I can’t think of anything more Google-like.

Eunice Kim, Product Manager for Google Play:

Several months ago, we began reviewing apps before they are published on Google Play to better protect the community and improve the app catalog. This new process involves a team of experts who are responsible for identifying violations of our developer policies earlier in the app lifecycle. We value the rapid innovation and iteration that is unique to Google Play, and will continue to help developers get their products to market within a matter of hours after submission, rather than days or weeks. In fact, there has been no noticeable change for developers during the rollout.

To assist in this effort and provide more transparency to developers, we’ve also rolled out improvements to the way we handle publishing status. Developers now have more insight into why apps are rejected or suspended, and they can easily fix and resubmit their apps for minor policy violations.

This has long been a point of humor of Apple fans, but that aside, I think this is a great move on Google’s part. The iOS App Store has its issues, but I firmly believe that having actual humans reviewing apps before putting them in the store is one one reason there have been so few security problems with iOS apps.

Sure seems like these Android Wear devices were rushed to market.