Update: For those of you that want a transcript of our conversation it's right here.

MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA—In just a few weeks, Google will be pushing out one of its largest Android releases ever: Android 5.0, Lollipop. The update changes nearly every aspect of the OS—a new design for every app, a new runtime, lots of new features, and a focus on battery life. The company is also launching a pair of new Nexus flagships, the Nexus 6 and Nexus 9, aiming for a more premium market, and the first Android TV device, the Nexus Player. Together with the release of Google Inbox and a new Wear update, we're in the middle of a very busy few weeks.

We sat down with a few high-ranking members of the Android Team to get a better idea of what this new wave of Android devices will bring. At building 43 at Google's headquarters, Dave Burke, VP of engineering for the Android platform and Nexus devices; Brian Rakowski, VP of product management, and Gabe Cohen, the team's group product manager, were all gracious enough to talk to us about the future direction of Android.

Android is more popular than ever, so a lot of our talk focused on managing the massive ecosystem that Android has created. Carrier involvement, unbundling things from the main OS, and future proofing were among the topics of the day. We also got a little more insight into the new Nexus devices.

Developer previews

We began our conversation by talking about the developer preview. With Lollipop (formerly "Android L"), Google has been more open with the development process than it ever has. The company detailed much of the OS several months before release, and it even released flashable developer previews for the Nexus 5 and Nexus 7.

The Android L Developer Preview gave app developers several months to test their apps against Android 5.0 so they could have an idea of the new design style. The move was a first for Google, and the team indicated that they wanted to do a similar project again. "I think we learned a lot," Rakowski said. "At I/O, I think we said we had 5000 new APIs. That should have been how many APIs there were [in the final version], but now there are 7000+. So our eyes were bigger than our stomachs somewhat and we kept adding stuff."

The team said they got a lot of useful feedback from developers, and the new strategy of sharing early gave them the confidence to make even bigger changes in the future. The move should help with updates. "I think what you'll see this time around is more devices on L quicker than any release before, because they've had more time," Burke said. Google has previously shared early code with big OEMs through the Platform Developer Kit (PDK), but the group said the developer preview allows them to distribute the early code much more widely.

Unbundling apps from the OS

Speaking of distribution, next up was "Unbundling," or moving parts of Android from the core OS out to the Play Store or Google Play Services. This has been an ongoing process for Google since the Android 2.x days. And while it's often tough to get OEMs and carriers to push out over-the-air updates for the core OS, Google can now update Play Store apps or Google Play Services components any time it wants. It's Google's best weapon in the war on fragmentation.

Webview, the rendering engine that Android apps rely on to show Web content, has been a focus for Google lately. In Android 4.4, it was changed from a WebKit-based component to being Chromium-based, the same codebase Google Chrome uses. Chromium's engine, Blink, is a fork of WebKit, but it's something that Google fully controls. In Android 5.0, WebView has been unbundled and Google can release an update through the Play Store anytime it wants.

"Webview was a tough one, and a really important one because something like 70 or 80 percent of apps in the Play Store have a WebView for one reason or another," Burke said. "WebView encapsulates Blink (Chrome's rendering engine), which is a very large surface area, so you want to be able to constantly update that for performance and security reasons. That was a big initiative."

That point about security is a big one. WebView is basically a browser that runs within an app, and as part of the OS, it was previously only being updated once or twice a year. Running an outdated browser is a big security no-no, and we've seen several attacks on WebView over the years. Android 4.4 and lower would require an over-the-air update to fix a WebView bug, but in Android 5.0 users could theoretically get WebView updates as often as they get Chrome updates.

When asked if there are any other components headed to the Play Store, the group said no—"We haven't unbundled any other components." But Cohen added, "We've been laying groundwork all over the board to make certain parts of the system potentially into apps, but just groundwork. A significant portion of the lockscreen's functionality is now unbundled, at least the security aspects of it."

The new setup process

The future proofing continues in the initial device setup. The setup flow in Android Lollipop has been completely overhauled, and it now supports two-factor authentication right in the software. This part of Android has been a big focus for Google in Android 5.0, according to Cohen. "One of the really interesting and challenging things about stabilizing a platform is you have to live with what's in the setup process because you have to get through setup to get to anything else."

In Lollipop, Google made the setup process itself updatable. After acquiring Internet access, the first move is to check for updates. This is before the user even signs in. This update check can pull down OTAs and change the setup process. An Android device is the most "set in stone" product that Google makes, making it the hardest to bring up to compatibility should the company want to do something like upgrade the security of its sign-in system.

This new setup minimizes a lot of those problems, allowing Android's login process to be a little more future proof. If Google decides it wants to update its login encryption or support more forms of two-factor authentication, it's as easy as updating the setup process.

Setup in Lollipop is also taking on the responsibility of pre-installed carrier apps (aka crapware) with a new feature called "Play Auto Install." Rather than permanently storing carrier apps on the system partition, which currently is the only way to have apps persist across device wipes, Play Auto Install will download carrier apps during the setup process. This will put them in the data partition and allow them to be completely uninstalled by users. The download process then allows carriers to change the apps they would like to preload on a device without having to issue a system update. Pre-installed apps on carrier-controlled devices are never going away, but with Play Auto Install, Google is giving both sides more options. Everyone wins—assuming carriers stop installing things on the system partition.

Setup also supports restoring from device profiles now, allowing users to have different backed up sets of apps for their tablet and phone that they can easily select after logging in. If users are upgrading from one Android phone to another, they can tap the new phone against the old one during setup, and the entire process will complete. The phones will communicate with NFC, and the new phone will login and pull down apps and settings all from that tap. While the new phone requires Android 5.0, the old phone only requires the newest version of Google Play Services.