Sundar Pichai, Google’s CEO, has told investors to expect “significant product updates and announcements” at the company’s developer conference later this month. Last year, Google opted to Skip out of this event, dubbed Google IO, due to the Covid-19 pandemic. The two-day conference attracts software and hardware developers from around the world to speak with Google engineers about the company’s latest features, gadgets, and updates.
Google has previously used its keynote address to announce new smart home gadgets, such as the first-generation Google Home smart speaker, as well as entirely new applications, such as Google Photos. 
On-stage at the event, Google Chrome, Google Maps, Gmail, YouTube, and, of course, Android all debuted new features.
Developer conferences are important because they enable the teams responsible for software and hardware to test new features leading up to rolling them out to millions of users worldwide. Android device manufacturers, such as Samsung and Sony, must test new updates on their devices to ensure that the latest tricks do not break a critical feature. Similarly, new tricks for the Google Nest smart home kit must be tested with the wide variety of smart lightbulbs, robot vacuum cleaners, routers, and smart TVs that customers may have installed in their homes.
While Google CEO Sundar Pichai did not provide additional information to investors about what to expect on stage at this year’s Google IO, we can make an educated guess. Google has already released an extremely early beta version of Android 12 – the next major mobile operating system for millions of smartphones and tablets worldwide – so we’d expect the Californian company to save some of the most exciting features for the Google IO keynote.
