LAURENCE MORONEY: Hi.
Laurence Moroney here.
I'm in the Coffee
With a Googler stage,
and I'm going to be
chatting with Jason Titus.
He's the lead of the Developer
Product group at Google,
and he had so many great
announcements for developers
at the keynote yesterday.
So Jason, welcome,
thanks for joining us.
JASON TITUS: Glad to be here.
LAURENCE MORONEY: So
what kind of feedback
have you been hearing
from developers?
What's been exciting?
JASON TITUS: It's
been pretty cool.
It seemed like folks were really
excited about the new things
in Android Studio, where
we're now supporting C++.
LAURENCE MORONEY:
That was pretty cool.
JASON TITUS: A lot of folks have
been doing Native Development
Kit work for a while,
and they really
wanted to be able to have
that supported, so that that's
a big step.
We also made Cloud
Messaging cross-platform,
so now you can use it not
just on Android and Chrome
but also on iOS, and people
seem pretty excited about that.
LAURENCE MORONEY: We added
topics to that, as well, right?
JASON TITUS: Yes, so now it's
a great way, essentially,
with topics and Cloud
Messaging you can just,
without having to manage and
track all the different users
that follow specific things,
you can just on the client
say for an arbitrary
topic you create,
like, I'm interested in
the San Francisco Giants
or something like that.
You can subscribe
the client, and that
could be happening
across all your users.
And later on, you just do
a single push notification,
say, new information about
San Francisco Giants,
and it fans out to all
of them across platform
without you having to do
any sort of management.
LAURENCE MORONEY: And it's
Android, iOS, and web?
JASON TITUS: Yeah.
LAURENCE MORONEY: And one of
the neat things about GCM--
or Google Cloud Messaging--
is like if you've
got multiple devices,
if you dismiss
the notification on one, it can
be dismissed on all of them,
so you don't have that kind of
clutter in your notification
tray.
That's pretty cool, right?
And it's free for
developers as well.
JASON TITUS: And
probably the other thing
that got the most excitement
was around our cloud test lab.
So we recognize that
there's a lot of developers
who are having problems
going, hey, there's
all these different devices.
I don't have access
to all of them.
I want to be able
to test my stuff.
How do I do that?
And so we're going to
be rolling something out
that actually allows
you to upload your APK
and will run it across
the top 20 devices
from around the world and
give you a report saying like,
if we run into any
issues, here's a screen
video of how we got there.
Here's crash logs,
what happened,
And so you can very
quickly know whether or not
you have any issues.
LAURENCE MORONEY:
That's pretty cool.
I'm looking forward to
trying that one out,
because it can be difficult
to try on different devices,
or if you live in a country
where a device isn't available,
then you can use the
cloud lab for that,
so that's pretty cool.
Also Polymer 1.0 was
announced yesterday.
JASON TITUS: Yeah, I think
we did both Polymer 1.0
and then Elements on top
of it, so you can actually
get libraries where a simple--
just insert an element,
and you can have a, map
charts, toolbars, menus,
a bunch of stuff,
and I think people
will start making some pretty
nice web apps based on that.
LAURENCE MORONEY: Cool,
that should be good.
Now, with all these
little bits and pieces,
great releases here and
great releases there,
but this all must be part
of some bigger picture
to make developers'
lives easier?
JASON TITUS: Yeah,
the point of our group
and what we're looking
at across the company
is how do we make it easier
for developers to get up
and running?
How do we solve problems that
developers actually have?
I've actually only been at
Google a little bit more
than a year.
LAURENCE MORONEY:
OK, same as me.
JASON TITUS: And so before
that, I was at Shazam.
LAURENCE MORONEY: Oh, OK.
JASON TITUS: And so, I
spent 3 and 1/2 years
like banging my head against
the wall and kind of fighting
all the things you have
to do to try and get
an app built and successful
across different markets.
And I think we're
doing a bunch of things
already, things we're
doing in the Play Store
to let you AB test listings,
making the developer
tools better, like on Android
studio, on iOS releasing,
moving to CocoaPods to make
using our libraries better.
These are all just about
saying how do we make it so
when you have an
idea or something you
want to build that it's easier
to do it with our stuff?
And this is just the beginning.
I think what people
she recognizes
this is the first round
of just making it faster,
better, easier, and you'll
see a lot more in the future.
LAURENCE MORONEY: Nice.
And one of the themes
that you had in you
keynote, and we've seen
in a lot of the talks
is really thinking
for developers
this temple of developing,
engaging, and earning.
And that, in many ways, is
the workflow for a developer.
You have your idea, and
if you have your idea,
you want to be able
to express that.
What kind of things are we
doing to help them express
that and help them to learn?
JASON TITUS: On
the develop front,
it's how do we make
it easy for you
to build your code like with
development tools like Android
Studio?
How do we make it easy for
you to sign up for anything
you need to use?
We have a new flow to sign up
for analytics and messaging
and all that, that we think gets
rid of a lot of the pain there.
And then we redid the
entire Google Developer
site, google.com site.
Hopefully folks will
find it much more useful.
LAURENCE MORONEY: I see
that just launched, right?
JASON TITUS: Yes,
that just came out,
and that's a redesign
of the entire site.
So that's all things around how
to make it easier to develop.
On the engage side, we're
recognizing that folks really
want to get new users.
You've got your app done.
You upload it to the Store.
Like, how am I going
actually find folks?
So both making it
easier on the Play
Store to try and find
the best way to pitch it.
Like, how do you
describe the app?
Try two or three different
texts for your listing,
try different icons,
see what works best,
giving you the ability
once somebody's
sold your app, making it really
easy to message with them
and do notifications.
And then for our
folks who actually
want to start buying app,
install ads, and try and buy
distribution, I think maybe it's
been harder than it should have
been with us, and
so we're starting
the process of
getting it like here
is a single place you can go.
It'll be in the Google
Play Developer Console.
You can buy across
all of Google.
You can just say, I'm willing
to spend $200 a month,
and I'll pay this amount per
install, and we'll just do it,
set up the campaign for you.
And I think that's the
kind of thing you should
expect to see more from us.
It's just ways to
make it easier,
fewer knobs and dials,
more straight to the meat
of the things you need done.
LAURENCE MORONEY: Sounds good.
And for engaging, there
was one technology
that I really enjoyed.
It's the app invites.
JASON TITUS: Yeah.
LAURENCE MORONEY: Because,
for me, we had a talk about it
yesterday.
I discover most
apps from friends.
Magnus was my co-speaker, and he
sends me all these crazy hockey
apps, and my son sends
me all these games.
When you've got friends sending
you apps that you can trust,
the the app invite technology
is really good to help engage.
JASON TITUS: Yeah, and
that came out of saying,
what are the main things
developers are trying to do?
We see again and again and again
developers build invite flows,
and it's like like, OK,
how are we going to get it?
Most app installs are
happening from word of mouth.
How are we going to do that?
Oh, we'll build an
app invite flow.
It turns out that we
actually have bunch of data
that we can use to make it more
useful for a particular user.
Like if you use
Google services, we
have a better sense of
across your 1,000 contacts,
you are the ones you
actually communicate with,
and we can sort of
bubble those to the top
and make it easier for
you to share with folks
you're more likely
to share with.
And that's something
that would be
very hard to do as a
third-party developer,
but we can provide that
to you as a service,
and we think it'll make it
easier, and then over time,
just reduce the friction, make
it easier for the install flow
to work, all that.
LAURENCE MORONEY: And
If I'm a developer,
I can then focus on
my domain expertise,
instead of trying to
roll an app invite.
JASON TITUS: The reality is
that most developers are coming
at something where
they say, I know
I have a better
way of doing this
than other people have done.
I'm going to build this app.
it's going to make it easier
to organize a block party
or sell these
things or whatever.
And they shouldn't have spent a
bunch of time rewriting things
that everybody else
has written, and they
shouldn't have to spend
forever gearing up and signing
up, and configuring things.
They should be able to say,
OK, I need notifications.
Boom, it's in.
I need this.
It's set up for me.
Now I spend my time
working on the part that's
unique to my app.
LAURENCE MORONEY: Cool.
So there's a wealth of new
stuff that you've announced,
and there's a whole lot of stuff
that we're actually working on,
particularly like a lot of iOS
stuff that we've announced.
But you're only just
getting started, right?
JASON TITUS: Like
I said, I think
you're seeing these as the
beginnings of sanding down
the sharp edges, taking
the things that we've
gotten feedback that are
hard and making them easier.
But we have a lot more
in store in the future
that we think will be
great for developers.
LAURENCE MORONEY: Cool.
Well, thank you so much,
Jason, and thank you everybody.
Remember the new
developers.google.com is live.
Go and check it out, and
you can learn about some
of these great technologies
that we were talking about.
Thank you so much.
And thanks again.
JASON TITUS: Thank you.
