Although 2008 might not seem that long ago, the Android of 2013 is a world away from the 2008 version, when the Android Market was in its infancy, there were no native video playback capabilities, and the G1 had no multi-touch support. As the smartphone market has become more cut-throat, Google has had to keep innovating and improving its OS to stay competitive. Having witnessed the meteoric rise of Android over the past five years, and seen the new features and functionality that Google has added, coupled with the latest mobile trends and a decent idea of where smartphones are currently heading, we’ve taken a peek into the future to consider what Android might look like in the year 2020. In particular, we look at four key features we think could play the biggest part in Android’s ongoing evolution over the next seven years.
Apple’s Maps app may not have set the world alight when it launched, plagued at the time with glitches and missing features, but most of the faults have been rectified, and with a strong showing from Nokia’s offering, called Here, it means that Google needs to up its game to stay ahead. The 2013 Google Maps refresh brought a greater level of customization based on your personal searches, and this looks as though it will only increase.
With Google Now and Google Latitude tracking your every move, you’ll see directions to your favorite pub appear on screen every Friday lunchtime. If the pub in question has an Android-powered bar installed, you might even find your tipple of choice waiting for you when you arrive. Google Latitude, a successor of the SMS-powered Google Dodge-ball, was discontinued earlier this year. It used cellular and Wi-Fi positioning, along with GPS, to pinpoint the location of users and their phones. Does its discontinuation mean that we won’t see an advanced form of location services in 2020? Unlikely, because Google has started to implement similar technology into Google Plus. Google Now, on the other hand, is billed as an ‘intelligent personal assistant’, that analyses your past searches and mobile use, and can accurately predict what you’re going to search (or use your Android device) for next. With voice recognition and a natural language user interface, which lets you talk to your Android device as naturally as if it were a human, we’re already getting a glimpse of what interacting with our mobile devices in the future will be like.
As for all of the services hanging off Maps, Google is already hiring out the Street View cameras and enabling you to peek inside buildings, you can expect Android 2020 to offer better imagery of most public buildings, as well as tappable info as you move around, and much improved augmented reality integration. There might even be an option to enable Google to anonymously augment its Street View data with the snaps you take on your phone, to provide an even more up-to-date view of the world, similar to Microsoft’s Photosynth project that combines photos uploaded by people to build 3D representations of landmarks. See Photosynth for an example of Microsoft possibly beating Google to the punch.
Google has made its intentions clear with the Hangouts upgrade we got earlier this year. With Facebook, WhatsApp, FaceTime, Snapchat, Skype to battle against, there’s no doubt we’ll see Google push further into the universal messaging market, covering SMS, email, instant messaging and video calling with tools that are baked into Android.
You won’t need separate apps for each of these, because the UI will be unified in a way that will make it easy to seamlessly slip between each method of calling your friends and family anywhere in the world, making your Android device an essential tool for keeping in contact with loved ones. While Google’s interest in letting us keep in touch with the people who matter the most might be debatable, one thing is for certain: Google is determined to get us to use and rely on our Android devices more and more in the future. We might even get Google Voice in the UK by the time 2020 rolls around, though don’t hold your breath. How far Google can go depends on the networks and its competitors – it’s already launched an ultra-fast internet service in the US, so telecoms could be next. The company has been sniffing around unused wireless spectrum frequencies, too; could we see a Google alternative to Vodaphone, O2, Three or EE in the UK? It’s a possibility. Don’t be surprised to see free 5G video calling and texting between Android devices by 2020, with all of your conversations grouped by person rather than platform, and archived and searchable in Gmail.
Eric Schmidt, executive chairman of Google, predicts that every human will be online by 2020 (no doubt hoping that we’ll all have a Google+ page, too), and the more people his company can help get connected, the better for Google’s bottom line.
Over the next few years, our phones will become even more important for making payments, transferring money and verifying our identity. Everything from getting through the door at work to logging into Facebook could be completed with the Android device we carry around in our pocket.
The Google Authenticator app of 2020 could work with your device’s NFC (Near Field Communication) chip to automatically log you into Gmail when you sit down at your laptop, for example, or pay for your flight when you step on a plane. NFC works when two compatible devices are brought close together. Without even needing to touch, they can transfer data between each other. It’s clever stuff, and we’re already seeing an increase in the number of NFC devices available to buy. Apple also has Passbook, an application that creates barcodes that can be used for buying goods and paying for public transport, among other things. There’s no doubt that Google will want an equivalent in place, too.
We’ve seen tattoos and pills shown off as possible authentication triggers of the future, and Android 2020 will play a big part in proving you are who you say you are, whether it’s at a coffee shop or the Google I/O conference.Basic face recognition is already available, but in the years to come it has the potential to get much more accurate. It might even be joined by fingerprint or retina scanning built into Android’s camera app, or at least part of the phone, now that Apple has shown that fingerprint scanning is a viable option with its new Touch ID technology. The more information Google gets you to store on your Android device, the better security you’ll want to have, and you can be sure that Google will be looking into ways to make sure that Android is as secure as possible. Biometric data combines almost impossible-to-crack security technology with ease of use, and it relies on a lot of technology that is already built into our Android devices, such as microphones and cameras. It’s easy to imagine that Google will be looking to implement biometric security into Android in the near future.