Good afternoon, everyone.

Welcome to this year's Android Fireside Chat.

My name is Reto Meier.

I'm part of the developer relations team at Google

and I'm joined by some of the most important people

on the Android Engineering, Design and Product teams.

The purpose of the fireside chat is basically

to let you guys ask questions from these people, all

of the stuff that you want to know about Android,

where it is, what we've announced today,

how things have been done, how some of those decisions

have been made, all of those sorts of things.

So it is a Q&A session.

We have mics at the front and middle of the room.

If you have a question, please line up, ask.

If there are no questions, it'll be a really short session.

We do have a few from online which

we've collected in the weeks leading up.

So I'm going to ask some of those as well.

While you guys are getting ready to ask questions yourself,

I'll ask the panel to introduce themselves,

just who you are and a little bit

about what you do at Google.

Maybe start with you, Gabe.

GABE COHEN: I'm Gabe Cohen.

I'm a product manager on the Android OS.

I also work on Google Play services

and a few other things.

XAVIER DUCROHET: Hello, I'm Xavier Ducrohet.

I'm the lead for the Developer Tool and the SDK.

ADAM POWELL: I am Adam Powell I'm

a framework engineer on the UI Toolkit.

RACHEL GARB: Hi.

I'm Rachel Garb and I'm an interaction designer

on the Android OS.

JHILMIL JAIN: Hi.

My name is Jhilmil Jain and I lead user research for Android.

CHET HAUSE: I'm Chet Hause.

I'm an engineer on the UI Toolkit team.

DIANNE HACKBORN: I am Dianne Hackborn.

I'm an engineer on the Android Core Framework team.

DAVE BURKE: Dave Burke.

Engineering Director.

I work on the Platform and Nexus devices.

FICUS KIRKPATRICK: I'm Kirkpatrick.

I work on the Play Store apps and games and hardware.

MILES BAR: I'm Miles Bar, I'm the engineering manager

for the apps part of Google Play.

RETO MEIER: Thanks everyone.

All right.

Let's get started.

We've got a line at the back.

So, why don't we start with you, sir.

AUDIENCE: My question is about Java 8.

Will it be coming to Android?

And if so, when?

And will it be supported on all the versions as well?

RETO MEIER: It's like a hot potato question.

Oh, the mic's going to Xav.

CHET HAUSE: Usually any question that has the word will in it,

you might want to think about it.

Because I'm not sure the answer is going to be what you want.

In general, can we say the general policy, which is,

we don't really talk about stuff that we will do in the future.

Just so you know.

Let's just lay the groundwork out there.

Xav, go.

RETO MEIER: Now, answer the question,

Xav, What will happen and when?

[LAUGHTER]

XAVIER DUCROHET: I have no comment.

[LAUGHTER]

RETO MEIER: Perfect.

All right.

Now you can all see me as well.

All right.

Let's try another question.

Hopefully one which we can actually answer.

AUDIENCE: Hi.

This is for Dianne.

First off, I really appreciate all

of the work you've done on Binder.

And I know that it sits at the heart of everything that

is Android at all.

And I just wanted to ask you, you've

been involved in Binder development

even before Android was Android.

Can you talk a little bit about the history of Binder

and your work with it?

DIANNE HACKBORN: OK.

Well, thank you.

Oh, well I, So Binder started out in BOS

and has been something that I was--

I was not main person who did Binder.

I worked on it as an engineer at BE, then at Palm Source.

And then we kind of adopted it just for IPC in Android.

But actually, I don't even think it's the core of Android.

It's a convenient way to do IPC on the Android.

Previous versions of the Binder were actually much more core

to the platform design.

So today it's a really nice way to do capability based IPC.

RETO MEIER: Fair enough.

Thank you.

All right, I'm going to ask one of the questions we received

online earlier.

I think material design is one of the most interesting things

that I saw come out of the keynote today.

So I was wondering, what sort of research

did we do to be able to come up with some of those ideas?

JHILMIL JAIN: Thanks.

I think for the first time at Google,

the researchers came together across the company

to work on medieval design.

So we had researchers from 15 different groups

and four different Google offices come together

to do research.

And we conducted research on four main areas.

The first was components, which is containers and elements,

patterns and layouts, which is like the floating action

button, motion and accessibility.

So some examples of the types of research

that we did, was first, we explored and validated

key design principles, such as really figuring out

the motion curve and speed.

Second was that we highlighted key usability issues

that designers should be mindful of.

For example, when picking the color of the floating action

button, making sure that it doesn't

blend into the background like it was in some mocks

that we exploded earlier.

Or making sure that the fabs, the size of the fab

wasn't, or floating action button

wasn't like varying within the app

because that would confuse users.

And third is that we conducted a whole bunch

of accessibility studies that led

to a number of design changes.

And one such design change is that we

have now a much improved color palette, which

takes into account the color contrast that

is required between type and the background.

So now our low, vision impaired users

can actually read the text a lot better.

DAVE BURKE: If you're wondering what a floating action

button is, because I didn't know what it was until a week ago,

it's actually an image view.

It's where someone's called set elevation on the view.

Just thought you should know.

But it looks cool.

And it's round.

Does it have to be round?

So the dialer one's the floating action button.

We need a translation between you and engineering.

RETO MEIER: Question for Xav, I think.

I will quote it out to you.

Considering its performance, why not offer Genymotion

as the official emulator for Android?

[LAUGHTER AND CHEERS]

XAVIER DUCROHET: It's a good question.

First of all, I think it's a great product.

I think they are not quite free, though.

So there is a demo version.

I don't know exactly what the demo is.

But I think that's what I sense, that you

have to pay for to get some things.

So we can't quite distribute that.

The other thing is that, obviously, we

need to improve a lot, the story there.

We have, one other thing that we really want to do

is a low eliminating already, all the ecosystem.

And that means also AUM and MEEPS.

And they go mostly with x86 for performance reasons

which totally makes sense.

But we have to sleep on that.

And we do want to support a lot more hardware in the long term,

like Bluetooth, multi-touch, and things like that.

And it's a lot better, if we control

the own stack, the whole stack for that.

And so we want to keep all technology to do that.

But it's a great product.

You should definitely try it out and use it

if it fits your needs.

RETO MEIER: Thanks.

Let's take another question from the crowd, at the back.

AUDIENCE: Sure.

Just curious in Android L, what's

new with adaptive bit rate video and HLS support?

DAVE BURKE: OK.

So, let's see.

The most interesting thing we're doing.

And I'm not sure if it's launched yet

but it's imminent is, we're going

to open source something we call XO Player.

This is the player that's in YouTube and in Play Movies

and TV.

And it's built on MediaCodec, MediaDRM, and MediaExtractor,

MediaCrypto.

It's a really good adaptive bit rate player.

It uses Dash.

So that's one thing to know.

And then I'm pretty sure we've updated to the latest internet

draft of HLS in L. And that's all

I can remember that we've done so far.

AUDIENCE: Thank you.

RETO MEIER: From the front.

AUDIENCE: Hello.

I've seen the new UI and UX you have

prepared for the L release.

I was wondering, I've seen that in the action bar, where

we used to have the up navigation affordments, now

we have what looks like a back button.

What's going on there?

Is it changing?

Are we giving up on the app navigation?

So what's going to happen?

ADAM POWELL: So the short answer is that structurally nothing

is changing in that navigation.

Some of the stuff that was shown,

I think during the keynote, there

was a demo of multiple Chrome tabs opening

in different documents within recents as well.

So some of that is going to subtly change just

as a result of that new feature.

In terms of the iconography, unfortunately I

don't think we have a representative

from our visual design team here,

but Rachel do you want to talk to that?

RACHEL GARB: Yeah, I believe it's just that an arrow really

clearly says for most people, this is what I wanted to do.

want do what I was doing before.

Whether it's hierarchical or historical.

AUDIENCE: Don't we have the back button for that?

ADAM POWELL: There is.

And what, Go ahead Feel free.

So what we found is that, and again, even just

in terms of some of the research that we've done with this,

users tend to really think either in terms

of the system or the app at a given point in time.

And having that extra affordance be sitting there

in the app, very clearly in the app in the bar,

is something that they much more closely tie to,

I'm going to continue acting within the context of this app.

Whereas the Back button in the system

is really seen as more of kind of meta action

that can act between apps.

Even though a lot of users aren't

able to clearly articulate the difference between these two,

and even though the iconography is very similar, what we found

is a lot of users tend to develop this really intuitive

understanding of what to expect when they press either one.

Now, of course for developers, this is really interesting

because it means that there's a lot of subtlety to really get

this right.

And we're really hoping that some of the new functionality

that we've exposed to open documents in more recents tabs

will really help iron out some of the rougher cases that