Sundar Pichai admits to being a GS4 owner, says I/O will be more developer focused this year

BY Stefan Constantinescu

Published 13 May 2013

Sundar Pichai, the guy who replaced Andy Rubin as the head of Android, was recently interviewed by Wired. It’s not a long piece, but long enough that most of you probably aren’t going to make it to the bottom, which is a shame, because that’s where the meat of the interview is.

Here’s the quote that stands out, to me at least:

What can we expect from I/O this year?

It’s going to be different. It’s not a time when we have much in the way of launches of new products or a new operating system. Both on Android and Chrome, we’re going to focus this I/O on all of the kinds of things we’re doing for developers, so that they can write better things. We will show how Google services are doing amazing things on top of these two platforms.

Did he just say I/O is going to be boring this year? Because that’s what I took from it. Now granted, he could just be downplaying I/O in order to lower people’s expectations, because right now they’re off the charts. Ask an Android phone what’s going to happen at I/O this year, and he might tell you that Google is going to announce a cure for cancer.

All kidding aside, there were a few other nuggets in there, namely that Pichai uses a Galaxy S4, though he admits to never, ever, playing with all those fancy eye tracking gestures.

I wouldn’t blame him.