I've been slogging my way through the videos, and I have to say, no one thing is showstopping. It's all incremental, and mostly in a good way. Highlights, at least from my perspective:

Google Photos: They've split out G+'s Photos (formerly Picasaweb) and rolled in some very interesting new features.

- Infinite free image backups (max 16MP stills or 1080p video)

- crazy cool machine learning to automatically cluster images without any need for tagging

- very easy to share with your friends, even if they're not on G+

Networking

- Apps can say "hey, I can handle any URL of the form http://www.yeahwhatever.com" (think: Twitter for tweets, NYTimes for news articles, etc.). To avoid random hijackings, your phone will download a magic file from the web server in question which has a hash of the app signing key. Clever.

- Full Internet privileges are now a *standard* privilege for any app. This is a serious problem if your WiFi is behind a firewall and you've got softer security on the inside. We're talking about data exfiltration from internal web servers, etc.


Performance / battery saving

- As always, "this time it's way better". Better compilation. Better power management. One thing that jumped out at me is that if your app hasn't been run by a user in a long while, Android will quietly disallow it to run in the background.

- There's a lot of attention to dealing with low-memory devices and low-bandwidth countries. Offline maps. Web sites compressed through proxies. And on and on. Notably absent from this discussion, any hint of how much bandwidth is blown on advertising. (More complaining about this below.)


Login / authentication / security

- There's full support for fingerprint recognition and also an API that basically just says "reauthenticate the user". There's a more general "smart lock" infrastructure that's part of the war on usernames/passwords. This is a good thing.

- Project Vault: There's a nifty microSD card, running its own OS with its own radio even, that can help with authentication. Somehow.

- They're abandoning the current ask-for-everything-up-front permission model for something closer to how iOS does it, allowing an app to make a permission request any time it wants, but now apps have to deal with users who say "no". Legacy apps don't need to make these requests, but users can go in and revoke permissions. This is not the same as what CyanogenMod's PrivacyGuard does, where it just lies to the app. "You want contacts? Here you go. Oh look, there are zero contacts." Nope, you try to read the contacts and it will just grenade on you.


Advertising

- My biggest gripe to Google, which I aired on my blog and to many Google people privately, is that advertisements are this monstrous thing that need to be treated as a first-class citizen in the Android world. Ads need to run as separate entities, with their own permissions, etc. But no! Instead, AdMob is now folding in quite a large number of different third-party ad providers (via syndication) and will load their content. Combine this with the everybody-gets-full-Internet-access thing, and I think they're crazy.


Miscellaneous

- USB-C support -- now your phone can charge somebody else's phone, among other configurable options.

- "Adopting" an SD card -- basically puts a real filesystem on it and merges it in with the regular filesystem somehow.

- The Roboto font, and all the tooling used to create it, is now completely open source

- A cloud service that, somehow, runs your Android app on a bunch of different virtual phones and sends you back crashlogs and screenshots.

- More widget support for all the snazzy Material design, and backward compatibility libraries to let new code run on ancient Android versions, all the way back to Android 2.1. Wow.

- The Play Store has some new tools to help devs experiments on their users (the example they use is trying out four different icons to see which users install more often). Also they're doing some sort of categorization and customization of search results. If this works, it will make all the Android Wear devs, who didn't manage to get "featured" much happier, since right now it's damn near impossible to otherwise find these apps.

- A new spin of Android Pay (nee Google Wallet)


Crazy far out, man

- They've doubled down on the Cardboard VR thing. Now they're planning to distribute content via Youtube, and they've rigged up a ring of 16 GoPros that can capture stereoscoping VR video.

- They've got this crazy tiny radar-on-a-chip that can be used to measure various gestures from your hands. They then crammed it into a wristwatch-ish thing and now you've got all these controls without ever needing to touch it.

- They're working with textile manufacturers to put conducting threads in common textiles. Think touchpads-in-your-clothes.


Notable for their absence

- No new hardware. No new phones, tablets, TVs, cars, watches, etc.

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