Interview with Android manager: Why the app-free cell phone is far away

There's not a single stand that isn't talking about AI: at the MWC in Barcelona, cell phones are once again dominated by artificial intelligence. Heise online spoke to Seang Chau, General Manager of the Android platform at Google, about what this means for Android and whether current cell phones will soon be overtaken.

Mr. Chau, it's easy to lose track of all the new AI functions for Android. Which features actually bring the most benefits?

What we focus on in the Android team and what we use a lot ourselves are “Actions” – i.e., asking the cell phone to do things: Set an alarm clock, set a timer, play music or enter appointments in the calendar. We have integrated Gemini with apps such as Spotify, but also applications from other manufacturers such as Samsung, so that we can execute cross-app commands. This really saves time because you don't have to take detours via different apps and copy things back and forth.

That sounds like the beginnings of a cell phone without apps, as some tech companies envision. In this vision, you no longer need individual applications because a central AI interface simply takes care of everything. Is this the future of Android?

Personally, I think it will take a while for something like this to happen. People still want to do some tasks directly in the apps. They still want to touch their phone. So in a healthy ecosystem, there will still be room for apps. Developers also want this so that they can continue to reach their users directly.

And Google itself certainly does too, after all, the Android business system is also based on apps.

We are guided by what users want. And at the moment, behavior hasn't changed to the point where the app model is at an end.

While Google now promises years of software updates, you have to take a very close look at new AI features to see which phones now support what. Will the AI features of tomorrow eventually be denied to the phones of today?

That always depends on whether these AI functions run on the device or in the cloud. For example, we can also make the switch from Google Assistant to Gemini on older devices and not just the new flagships because Gemini primarily runs in the cloud.

Other features that we are bringing to Pixel phones, for example, require new models. Our Nano 2 model with multimodality that we brought to the Pixel 9 is a pretty big voice model. It would be very difficult for us to bring this model with all its parameters to the Pixel 8, which has less RAM. The four GB of additional RAM on the Pixel 9 simply gives us more room to maneuver. So we can't promise to bring all future features to today's devices. But we will continue to put many of them in the cloud so that they also work on older phones.

In the past, new Android versions were named after sweets, brought great innovations and caused a lot of media hype. Today, the updates are spread out over the year and the big bang effect of the past no longer really exists. Will there still be a need for a new Android version number every year in the future?

In general, we have changed our release strategy a little. We have pushed the major new version forward by one quarter so that new devices are also launched on the market with a new Android version. In addition, we have another version for developers in between to add new functions with new APIs if required. Our aim is to release new functions more quickly. The market moves very quickly, and we have to do the same.

Incidentally, new Android versions are still named after sweets, Android 16 is called “Baclava”. But we now mainly use these names internally.

And what will change with Android 16?

We can't yet say which functions are coming. But the main pillars of Android 16 are compatibility between different device types, privacy and security. We also want to suggest more useful AI features in the future, for example by displaying suitable text from screenshots via the Google keyboard. We are therefore becoming more proactive with our AI functions.

(dahe)