Google’s past failures were on full display at I/O 2022

Earlier this month, Google held its I/O conference, and for longtime Google watchers, the event felt like a session. Google CEO Sundar Pichai took the stage to give his keynote address and talk about long-dead Google products. “I heard… something about an Android tablet? And smart watches? he seems to have said.

By my reckoning, “resurrecting the past”accounted for about half of the company’s major announcements. In all of these cases, Google would have been in a much better position if it had stuck to a long-term plan and constantly improved it.

Unfortunately, there is no such top-down direction in the company. Instead, for most revived products, Google is trying to catch up with competitors after years of inactivity. In every ad, we should be asking the question, “Will it be different this time?”

Android tablets are back

How long have Android tablets been dead? Some companies like Samsung never gave up on the idea, but Google’s last tablet hardware was the Pixel C in 2015. The Android tablet user interface has long since disappeared. Its development peaked with the initial release of Android 3.0 Honeycomb in 2011, and each subsequent Android release and Google app update watered down the tablet’s interface until it disappeared. App developers took Google’s snub as a sign that they, too, should stop making Android tablets, and the ecosystem collapsed.

After releasing the Pixel C in 2015, Google pulled out of the tablet market for three years before releasing the Pixel Slate Chrome-OS tablet. He then retired from the tablet market for another three years. Now he’s back. Will the company’s new plans produce another one-year wonder like the Pixel Slate?

One of the biggest news about tablets coming out of the show was that Google is getting back into developing apps for tablets. The company announced that it will add tablet interfaces to more than 20 Google apps and showed screenshots of most of them. The exhibition featured tablet versions of Google Play, YouTube, Google Maps, Chrome and many other powerful applications. Google has even engaged some third parties to create apps for Android tablets, including Facebook, Zoom, and TikTok. All of this will help make the Android tablet worth investing in.

Google has also announced a new Pixel Tablet, slated for release sometime in 2023. It’s a widescreen, large tablet, and regular phone apps won’t look very good on it. I’m speculating here, but the Pixel Tablet looks cheap. I don’t say this as an insult to the product; I mean it seems to be aimed more at competing with Amazon Fire tablets than iPads.

The product only received a 30-second teaser at Google I/O, but Google showed off what looks like a thicker tablet, which is usually the hallmark of a cheaper device. The lone camera on the back looked like a cheap pinhole camera, and the back could even be plastic. If Google wanted to target the iPad, we’d probably see a thinner design and a bunch of accessories like a pen and keyboard.

Going for a Fire tablet would be smart. These are the most popular (forked) Android tablets on the market. Given the immaturity of Google’s tablet ecosystem, it would be easier to win people over with a cheaper product than charging premium fees right out the door. It won’t be anything new either, as the Nexus 7 line defined cheap tablets for several years until Google lost interest in them.

Google’s presentation also matched perfectly with the rumor that the company’s next “smart display”would be a detachable tablet. The last thing shown in the teaser was a set of pins that could have been for a smart display dock. Google also highlighted smart home support for the Google Nest camera, which is currently a smart display feature. Docked smart display mode is what Fire tablets do today, lending more credibility to the idea that Google wants to compete with Amazon products.

So far, all this work gives the impression that Google is trying to bring back what was thrown out shortly after the release of Honeycomb. In March, the company already released a tablet-centric Android update – Android 12L – but it was much less ambitious than the release of Honeycomb. Android 13 will continue to work with tablets.

The popularity of foldable devices has also changed the market and these devices need tablet apps to work well. If people with flagship Android phones suddenly have devices that turn into tablets, the tablet app market will be much stronger. Assuming the foldable future does indeed come, more and more devices will require big screen app design even if the standalone Android tablet fails completely.