It's that time of the year again—welcome to the Google Tracker! This is a bi-annual series where we recap every ongoing project (that we know about, at least) inside of Google's sprawling empire.

Though from now on, perhaps we should say, "Every ongoing project inside of Alphabet's sprawling empire." "Google" is now a mere company inside of "Alphabet," the newly formed umbrella company created by Google's founders. Most of the Google side projects we've been tracking in the past have been spun off into companies inside of Alphabet, but rest assured we're still keeping track of everything.

As always, the Tracker is a big roundup of previous announcements, rumors, and a bit of speculation. The 2015 entries worked out well—the Chromecast 2, Google On, Google Photos, YouTube Gaming, and tons of Android features were represented. We can't promise everything listed here will be released in 2016, but this is certainly a running list of everything we've heard about. If you've been slacking all of 2015 and not paying attention to the news, consider this your "Google CliffsNotes" for the upcoming year.

Table of Contents

The Alphabet Empire

2015 saw Google transform from a single company packed with side projects into a Berkshire Hathaway-style "company full of companies" known as "Alphabet." So what exactly is inside of Alphabet? An 8-K form filed during the initial Alphabet announcement flagged "search, ads, maps, apps, YouTube, Android and the related technical infrastructure," as "Google." Calico, Nest, Google Fiber, Google Ventures, Google Capital, and Google X were all identified as individual companies inside of Alphabet.

That list leaves out a ton of Google projects, though, so there is certainly more to Alphabet than what was initially revealed. We've compiled the above chart from news and reliable sources from around the Web, and we've tacked a few more companies onto Google's original list:

Google recently announced it was condensing its cloud businesses into a single unit led by Diane Greene, co-founder and CEO of VMWare. Is this a new division inside of Google or Alphabet? Does it have a name? We have no idea. Starting a new division with a superstar CEO definitely seems like the same model that created Calico, Sidewalk Labs, Replicant, and Verily, but we haven't heard of a name or anything official.

As Google's "moonshot factory," Google X houses a number of projects that seem like they could one day be Alphabet companies. A representative told us the group is in charge of Project Wing, Replicant (Google's robot division), and Google Self-Driving Cars, and this MIT Technology Review article says Google X is still in charge of Project Loon. Makani, Google's power-generating kit project, also seems to be part of Google X.

Update: We updated the above section a bit. Based on prior reports, we originally pegged Project Wing, Replicant, and Google Self-Driving Cars as Alphabet companies, but a Google X rep reached out to us and claimed ownership of all of them. Alphabet's exact layout is still very speculative, and we're hoping we'll get more official information during Google/Alphabet's next earnings call.

Listing image by Ron Amadeo