By Matt O’Brien / San Jose Mercury News
SAN FRANCISCO—Hoping to up its game against rivals, such as Apple, Google on Thursday announced a suite of new products and mobile features at its annual software developer conference, including a new smartphone payment system that can be used to buy products in more than 700,000 stores and restaurants from Macy’s and McDonald’s.
More than 5,500 software developers, analysts and others gathered for the keynote talk of a two-day conference that the search giant typically uses to build excitement among independent app developers about its open-source smartphone operating system.
Google also introduces new products at the event, and Android Pay was the most prominent new feature to debut on Thursday. Google has worked with big credit-card providers and three of the big four US wireless phone carriers to develop the system, formerly called Google Wallet, said Dave Burke, Android’s vice president of engineering.
Using their fingerprint to unlock their phones, consumers will be able to wave their devices to buy an item at physical retail stores that accept Android Pay, as well as within online stores and apps.
While Google has had difficulty spurring adoption of Google Wallet, Apple has managed to push retailers into offering mobile-payments options with its Apple Pay, included on the most recent iPhone.
Android Pay will work similarly, but with a much wider range of smartphones.
“Google has traditionally struggled in the area of mobile payments,” said Bryan Yeager, an analyst with eMarketer. “It’s been at the cutting edge but it’s had challenges getting people to use it, either on the merchant side or the consumer side.”
But Android Pay is likely to make Google a formidable player now in the mobile-payments market because of its technology, its partnerships and the huge number of people using Android, Weager said.
Google also showed off a new photo-storage and photo-sharing system called Google Photos (photos.google.com), which disentangles the company’s lauded photo system from its largely ignored Google+ social network. Rivaling an updated photo-sharing product from Yahoo!’s Flickr that touted automatic tagging and 1 terabyte of storage, Google on Thursday promised advanced tagging and organization features, along with unlimited storage.
“We want to take the work out of photos,” said Anil Sabharwal, Google director of product management, during Thursday’s event. The Google Photos smartphone app is now available on the Apple App Store and Google Play.
Guests at the conference loudly cheered the Google Photos announcement, along with improvements to Android and other products such as a battery-charging improvement called Doze that saves energy by going into a kind of sleep mode.
The latest generation of Android—so far just called Android M—will give users more control about what their apps are permitted to do. By promising users more safety and a better experience, Google is catching up to, and advancing, some of the features already offered in Apple’s iOS.
The battery advancement means “we’re going to see really fast charging of devices as standard,” Burke said.
Also introduced were updates to the AndroidWear watch, and HBO Now’s debut on Google Play and Google’s Chromecast streaming stick, after HBO’s Netflix rival originally debuted just for Apple devices and Apple TV.
Google also showed off new platforms for the Internet of Things, versions of Android specifically for embedded systems and connected home products called Brillo and Weave.
Another big crowd-pleaser was on the virtual reality front, where Google revealed upgrades to its year-old Cardboard viewing goggles, including a partnership with camera-maker GoPro to capture stereoscopic images and a feel-good program called Expeditions to get schoolteachers using the goggles to take their students on “field trips to anywhere.”
Security was high at the event and attendees were screened before entering, possibly to avoid the protesters who interrupted last year’s keynote speakers to rail against killer robots and San Francisco housing evictions. The conference continues on Friday. The same venue will host the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference beginning on June 8.