The start of Google I/O 2024 is scheduled for May 14th. To prepare us all, Google has released the event schedule. If you’re a developer or just an Android/Google ecosystem nerd, you might want to pay attention.
My understanding of I/O 2024 is that Google will show two live keynotes (Google Keynote and Developer Keynote) for everyone to see on May 14th. These are the big keynotes where we often hear from the biggest names at Google about new operating system versions and their key features. There are years when we also get hardware announcements and announcements, so these Day 1 keynotes are worth tuning in to.
Outside of these two live keynotes, Google is planning two days of additional keynotes, sessions and technical chats, which will be released to everyone in video form on May 16th. If you look at the schedule today, you can see that two major keynotes have their times listed next to them, while the rest simply have “video available after live event” listed.
We’ll do our best to cover news coming out of I/O, and there are some special sessions we should all pay attention to. Here are a few that Google is teasing us with for now:
- What’s new in Android?: For this session, Google says they will “present the latest developments in Android development, spanning generative AI, Android 15, form factors, Jetpack, Compose, tools, performance, and more.” In previous years, this event may have been quite technical and developer-focused, but it often tells us more about the new version of Android. I/O should present us with another Android 15 beta and this session could tell us more about all the related announcements from the big keynote.
- Wear OS 5: Google has now confirmed that Wear OS 5 will appear at Google I/O, saying in the description of the “Building for the Future of Wear OS” technical session that “we will discover the new features of Wear OS 5” and that Wear OS 5 “Includes advances in the watchface format and how to design and build for the increasing range of device sizes.”
- New version of Android TV operating system: Google will unveil the “next Android TV OS platform update” at a technical session. The session will be about developing apps for TVs, but we also hope to see big improvements to them other TV platform.
- Google TV improvements: In the above session, Google also plans to unveil “new user experience improvements” for Google TV. Is there any chance they’ll also show a new Google TV device at this point?
- Google Wallet features: There is an entire session dedicated to Google Pay and Wallet. For Wallet, Google says they “
is expanding its capabilities in the world of payments and digital assets.” They also plan to talk about new partnerships that reduce fraud and expand payment options.
And these are the big sessions that have caught our attention so far. None of this is surprising, but it all gives us areas to focus on while keeping our fingers crossed for big surprises.
The rest of the I/O schedule can be found here.