Google I/O 2022 – Pixel 6a, Android 13 and all the big announcements

The annual developer conference held by Google in Mountain View, California, took place last night, offering insights into new technologies, tools and frameworks at the keynote event.

While there was a definite hardware focus to the May 11th announcements, Passenger’s Android developers and Mobile team spotted plenty of intriguing updates to software and services. 

Maps

Interactive Maps for both Android and iOS will be introduced when they push out the SDK and will show users the weather as well as traffic, opening up exciting possibilities for journey planners. Google Maps is getting a cool immersive search feature (like Apple’s Flyover mode, but promising to be even better), while Search will introduce an expansion of its recently launched multi-search feature that incorporates location. We were also impressed by the new scene exploration tool coming to Google Search. 

Google Wallet 

Passenger’s Product team are already looking into the possibility of using both Apple and now Google wallet for tickets or subscriptions. It securely stores payment cards, but there will also be room for passes, student IDs, vaccine information and all the other kinds of information you’d keep in your physical wallet. 

Pixel devices

Google’s new budget phone, the Pixel 6a, will feature the Tensor chip to enable new features like Magic Eraser. The phone arrives July 28, with pre-orders starting July 21. The Pixel 7 will be coming this autumn, and from what we saw last night, the horizontal camera bar remains, but the lenses look a lot different on the model coming this fall.

Nick Watson, Mobile Lead at Passenger said “We have always developed cutting edge apps for both Google and Apple, and eagerly followed along with last night’s announcements.  It is so exciting to see Google invest in enhancing the Maps experience and of course, the potential of AR has exciting use cases for the future of transit”.