Between Pixel's AirDrop "truce" and the beta snafu, it's clear that Android is no longer the main stage.
When I was a baby smartphone user, just as I was about to jump ship from an LG enV Touch (VX11000) with a resistive (!!) touchscreen, I promised myself I would choose the path that felt most like me. At the time, I was staunchly a Windows girlie because a) it was the antithesis of everyone else around me sporting an aluminum clamshell MacBook and classic click-wheel iPod at the time, b) I liked gaming, so I went with what naturally felt like the companion mobile operating system for a lifestyle that involved manually picking the dust bunnies out of tiny exhaust fans (the lengths I went through to keep air flowing through that PC case).
I was attracted to Android because it seemed like it was for the misfits. It had cool names like "Incredible" and licensing rights to Star Wars—the Motorola Droid 2 was a nod to R2-D2. It was also the "freest" of the two operating systems, allowing you to root it and install app packages from wherever you wanted. How incredibly anti-establishment! And, well, how incredibly dorky.
Like PC gaming, Android's influence on culture hardly expanded beyond nerd circles. It wasn't until the notion of Green Bubbles took off, nearly a decade into Android's existence, that people came out as Android users, though they were met with shame rather than reverence. Android phones weren't the kind of devices people aspired to have, even though they were more malleable than the rest. Unlike the iPhone, an Android smartphone has never even had the kind of cultural cache that warranted parody in the media.
I thought about this legacy when Google revealed the dates for its annual Google I/O developer conference this week. I've already got my reservation for May 19-20 in Mountain View. And as I reflect on Android's changing guard, I realize there isn't the same jovial air around it, because it's no longer the block party it used to be. The week will be about what's new with Gemini and how AI will infuse every part of the Google ecosystem. It will be about agentic bots that help you code faster and more efficiently, so apps and products get out faster. If we're lucky, we'll hear about Android in a separate event again, though it might be less about the phone and more about putting it on your face.
After the event date was announced, Google also quietly revealed that it had made Apple's AirDrop file-sharing capability backward compatible with the Pixel 9 and 9 Pro. Another example of how the mobile operating system has been quietly complying. After last week's "will they won't they?" Android 17 Beta snafu—Google still hasn't directly addressed exactly what happened—it's clear that Android is slowly becoming a background character to Gemini's Big Game.
This is the year we'll see a major cultural shift in our beloved Android operating system. It's no longer the Chariot leading the way for the rest of Google's plans; it's now merely a serving platter for Gemini's agentic abilities, in a convenient, consumer-friendly package. The writing's been on the wall for the past couple of years, but this year it feels like reality rushing in with a punch to the gut.
I noticed the billboards in downtown San Francisco are no longer about the Pixel hardware, but about Gemini being the helpful assistant in Google's ecosystem. This is the product now, the way to live the "Google life." Whether this will help Google expand its cultural footprint beyond the search engine everyone uses will depend on Gemini being packaged as something other than just another chatbot.