With Google I/O coming up in just a few days, it's time for a second edition of The Google Tracker, what we hope will be a bi-yearly look at what's going on at Google HQ. Just like last time, we'll have a potent mix of news, (good) rumors, and a bit of informed speculation thrown in. We're not personally guaranteeing all of this will show up at Google I/O—this is more of a to-do list of upcoming projects, most of which we aren't attaching an expected time frame to.

Still, with Google's product launch extravaganza just around the corner, it's a good idea to have a fresh set of potential announcements in your head. This year could see Google tackling everything from watches to TVs to enterprise computing.

Android Wear



One project that we definitely expect to launch at I/O is Android Wear, Google's big push into wearable computing. At the beginning of the year, all we had was a vague rumor about a Google smartwatch and the company's 2012 purchase of WIMM, an early smartwatch outfit. Since then, the company has officially announced Android Wear as basically Android-for-smartwatches. Google released an emulator which contained a ton of info about the new OS.

The best part of the wearable OS is that, while you can write apps specifically for Android Wear, out of the box it includes significant functionality for every Android app. By plugging into Android's built-in notification API, Android Wear displays every notification your phone gets. Any app that has buttons in its notification will automatically have those buttons displayed on the watch. The only thing that requires developer support is voice-to-text functionality, which is mostly just a tag informing Android Wear where the text goes.

This built-in compatibility with every Android app gives Wear a big leg up over Samsung's Tizen-based (and previously Android-based) smartwatches, which require handmade support for every app. You'll also most likely get full support from Google's apps with Android Wear, which is a big chunk of many users' app selection. And if Wear actually proves useful, it looks like it will dominate the market. Just like Android, Android Wear has almost no competition in the form of a rival manufacturer-agnostic OS. If you're LG, Sony, Motorola, Asus, HTC, or one of the hundreds of other device manufacturers who are not Samsung or Apple, Android Wear is your only choice of OS.

Also like Android, Wear-friendly hardware is a free-for-all that's up to the OEMs. So far we've seen entries from Motorola and LG, with the standout being the Moto360. Motorola's entry has a round LCD and steel body, which makes it much closer to a jewelry watch than any of Samsung's efforts. Samsung is expected to have an Android Wear smartwatch eventually, but right now the company's allegiance is torn between Google and its Tizen operating system.

We're expecting Wear to be the star product of Google I/O. Both Motorola and LG have pegged this summer for release dates, and there are three Android Wear sessions slated for Google I/O. Wear currently requires a companion app, but Google has already started integrating that functionality into Google Play Services in preparation for what looks like a mass release. Google is even asking for app submissions, which could get "exposure at I/O." Google usually hands out tons of hardware to attendees, and it wouldn't surprise us to see a watch among the goodies.

Android enhancements

64-bit support

Last I/O, Google didn't introduce a new version of Android, so seeing this at the show isn't a guarantee. Still, we've heard a lot of different places all say a new version of Android is due out at I/O. We've got a good handle on upcoming Android features—some of which could be in the next version, and some which could hypothetically be parted out to the Play Store or Google Play Services.

Apple shocked the SoC world when it unveiled the iPhone 5s, which brought a 64-bit processor and OS to market sooner than anyone expected. Qualcomm has a whole slate of 64-bit SoCs in the works, but the high-end 64-bit Snapdragon isn't planned to hit the market until next year.

Google's doing its part to make 64-bit happen, and we're expecting the next version of Android to fully support the new architecture. We like to keep an eye on the public Android source code repositories, and lately we've been seeing countless commits related to 64-bit support. While 64-bit support will allow Android devices to go above 4GB of RAM, it will also bring (on ARM chips) the ARMv8 instruction set, which, on the iPhone 5S, has proven to be as much as 33 percent faster in some benchmarks.

ART—Android RunTime

Dalvik, the engine that powers Android apps, is one of the oldest parts of the OS. Google is planning to dump Dalvik and go with a completely new runtime for Android called simply, "Android RunTime" or "ART."

We aren't sure what Google's goals with ART are (it's probably "speed"). The new runtime shipped as an optional mode in KitKat, but the company hasn't said much about the project. All that is due to change at I/O, where there will be a session dedicated to ART that should explain what the point of the project is and how it will be better than Dalvik. Interestingly, the session description mentions Google will talk about the "improvements" it has made to the Android Runtime. It's very easy to interpret that as a new version of ART, which would require a new version of Android, which means a new version of Android will be at I/O.

What we do know is that the version in KitKat isn't finished, so it's not right to draw many serious conclusions from it. ART will switch Android from a just-in-time (JIT) compiler to an ahead-of-time (AOT) compiler, meaning that compiling will go from happening every time an app is run, to just once when an app is installed. Dalvik was designed at the beginning of Android's life, and above all else it needed to be small—not fast or battery efficient. Dalvik needed to fit into the paltry storage of devices like the T-Mobile G1, which had half a gig of storage. The switch to AOT compiling and what will no doubt be a focus on speed and efficiency should boost the performance of Android devices quite a bit.