 This is Josh from The Verge and we are live with Matthias Duarte from Google and Android and you guys have an announcement that you're making today. First off, are we live or is everything good Chad? I just want to make sure. We're good? Okay, cool. You just kind of hurried over here. You guys are making an announcement today and we're kind of getting first crack at it here. So what is it? What are you guys talking about? What's happening? That's right. So we're going to give you the first style guide for Android Ice Cream Sandwich. So today on the Android developer site, you'll find a blog post that describes what we've done and you'll also find a link to Android Design which is a document but it's also a living site that's going to be your one stop reference to find out how you can make beautiful, simple applications for Ice Cream Sandwich. So you haven't done this for earlier versions of Android? There's no... We've done an up to date style guide and so our mission for Ice Cream Sandwich was to make it beautiful, to make it simple, to make it powerful and there's really three parts to that. One we needed the OS, right? The OS and all the apps. That's a big part of it. The other part was the framework. It doesn't get noticed by people who buy the phones like Galaxy Nexus or who get the upgrade but the framework itself has changed. The framework itself makes it much easier to make beautiful, simple apps. And the part that was missing until today is a guideline that tells developers how to use that framework, how to follow the patterns and new conventions that we introduced in Ice Cream Sandwich, how they can make stuff that is beautiful and simple and powerful using the new capabilities of Ice Cream Sandwich. So you thought it was fairly necessary to start to say to developers, hey, you're doing great work, we like your apps but you could just make it a little bit more handsome, a little bit more beautiful. That would really be great. I mean you're a designer. You clearly put a focus on design and we've talked about this a bunch. We did an interview months ago and more recently on our show, we really focused on design. Ice Cream Sandwich is a big departure from the last version of Android for smartphones. It's because it's such a big departure that it's so important to provide guidance. In fact, all designers crave guidance, right? You need to have constraints and you need to know the environment that you're working in. Anytime you're doing a creative component that's part of a larger whole, like I'm sure The Verge has a style guide. Every publication out there in the world has a style guide. Every platform in the world also has a style guide. So for Ice Cream Sandwich, we needed to have that style guide as well. But you haven't up until this point have not had that style guide for the other versions. No, we didn't. That's pretty crazy, don't you think? Well, that's why we have one now. Is this something that you did? Is this like a mandate from a Matthias mandate? Is that a thing? Can I TM that? A Matthias mandate? Yeah. I don't know. If I get a stamp for it, maybe. Yeah. We will get you a stamp. I'm going to get a little stamp and then I'll start putting out some mandates. That sounds really good. Maybe you get a virtual, like a watermark. Yeah, it's going to be tough though because I don't do anything hard copy. You don't do a lot of paper, yeah. So is this something you said? Yeah, no. To my mind, Ice Cream Sandwich as a release is not complete until we get this style guide out. Right. And it's out today. So I can go get it, developers can go get it. What are you going to do to ensure that people are following, that they're actually taking this stuff to heart? I mean, because it's one thing to put it out there. It's another thing to actually get people to say, oh yeah, my stuff has been really ugly, let me fix it up. Oh, I get it Matthias, I've been making ugly apps and now I have to fix them up. I think that's putting the wrong spin on it. It's not about people doing stuff that's ugly. It's about people not understanding what they should do, right? There's plenty of times when it's important to break the rules, but you want to know that you're breaking the rules, right? It's one thing to be the audacious rebel who really knows what they're doing. It's another thing to turn down a one-way street because you just didn't notice that it was a one-way street. Right, right. The steering wheel's broken, basically. Or just there was no sign. Yeah, or there was no sign. So this is really about telling people what the rules of the road are. People of course are free to do whatever they want with it. We're going to follow this up with a lot of evangelism, right? The first round of this is press, obviously, and NCS is a great opportunity to do that, to get the word out that we have the design guidelines out, that we are engaging heavily, that we want to talk to designers and developers, and that this is just the beginning of these guidelines. Actually, we want to hear feedback from them. We want to know what more can we tell them, how more can we help them. Right. Is this a reaction to your competition? I mean, Microsoft has put a big focus on the design of Windows Phone. They've really talked about it quite a bit. And it's a beautiful product. I know you have your opinions of the, what did you call it, airport signage design. You don't want to repeat that, dude. I can see you're getting very uncomfortable. I'm making you very uncomfortable right now, aren't I? You don't have to answer that. The spotlight. The spotlight is... So hot. I mean, but Apple, clearly a design-focused company, iOS is a very design-focused operating system. Google has historically not been known for design. We talked about this a while ago. ICS, like I said, is very different. Is this in some way a reaction to what the competition is doing and how much emphasis they're putting on design? I mean, if you want to be serious about design, you have to do this stuff, right? Ice cream sandwich is Android getting serious about design, and this is part of that. Right. We're actually taking questions from, we're supposed to be taking questions from people, and I don't know if this is not working or not because I don't see any, but we're grabbing questions and we'll have some in a second. One thing we have, while we wait for those to come in or I figure out, actually, hey guys, can I get, sorry, this is live. We kind of threw this together last minute because you sprung it on us that you had an announcement you wanted to talk about. Can somebody come in here and grab this iPad and... Hold on one second. Okay, good. And just get some questions. Yeah, whatever would be fine. That's great. Are we getting questions in? I think so. Okay, cool. But I actually want to ask you before we get into the questions. We've seen a lot of ICS tablets here at CES. There have been no ICS phones. Do you know what the holdup is? I mean, it seems like your partners are being very slow on the uptake of... Honestly, I don't know. I haven't even really seen what's on the show floor. I've been so busy. So you don't know that there are no ice cream sandwich phones here? No. Is that what you're saying? I have like zero visibility right now into what's been announced and what hasn't been announced, tablets, phones, anything. Right. You're just here making the announcement and then back up north. I have a few other meetings. Really? Wasn't it just that you're coming here to the trailer to have this interview and then you're leaving? That's what I was told. So I have a couple questions. Got this worked out. Yes. How does the style guide fit into the whole fragmentation story? Is it a first step to enforce a certain consistency? That's a pretty good question. So is this something that you guys are doing kind of to start to try to crack down on the fragmentation of not only platforms and platform but apps? It's no secret that we hate it when people use the word fragmentation because it means so many different things to so many different people and it's like a word that intrinsically is negative. It's like, you know, it's like the, what are you going to do about the beating your wife problem, right? Like there's like. Well, that also I'm concerned. What is Google doing about the wife beating? Actually that one we're neglecting. Yeah. Neglect beating, I mean. Yeah. Very bad. So people mean so many different things when they talk about fragmentation. One of the kinds of things that they might mean, this style guide is intended to address and that's the way that applications work together, right? And the way that your experience in the operating system is kind of a cohesive harmonious whole, right? The reason why you have style guides and the reason why you have conventions within an operating system is because, you know, everything works better together if they all follow certain standards, if they all follow certain practices, if things are where you expect them to be. It's like when you buy a set of tools from one manufacturer, they all have a similar kind of grip, right? So they're tools for your kitchen or tools for your garage or whatever. So they tend to work better together. We want applications in Ice Cream Sandwich to take on the same benefits and the same attributes of the new applications that we launched in Ice Cream Sandwich. Right. So we want to show developers how they can do that. Exactly what they have to do, what metrics they have to follow, what patterns they can utilize, what new tools we've given them that they might not have realized, what things we've learned from the past that maybe didn't work so well that had been a convention that we're now saying, you know, maybe you should think about staying away from that. Do you have, is that, I mean, it sounds to me like you're saying everybody wants to do things or thinks, you know, when they're working on their app, maybe they have an idea for how you get to point from point A to point B. And there are some basic, there's some basic functionality you want people to gather around, sort of standardized, you know, here's how you, here's where your menu should be, here's where your back, you know. Yeah. Well, you don't have a back button because you've got a back button, but, you know, here's how you get somebody from this screen to that screen. I mean, I know that you guys have instituted. Exactly. In Ice Cream Sandwich, this kind of panel, what do you call it, what you're swiping from? The View Pager. The View Pager? That's the API name. Can you set, you set that up a little bit. I didn't, I didn't name the API. But you've got this, like, this motif of swiping through layers of an application. The swiping, the horizontal swiping. Right, like in the People app, for instance, you've got your dialer. That's right. And you've got your lifestyle guide that talks about the pattern of when you should use that, when that's appropriate. What kinds of screens is that appropriate to use it for? Right. What kinds of screens, you know, what kinds of limits should you be aware of when you're using that? Right. You know, for certain applications, we work very hard to make sure that you never swipe further than three screens away. Well, I've noticed, is it three? Is that what you're trying to box it to? But not always, right? So we do that very deliberately in the Phone app and the People app, but you'll notice in Market, we actually have a much wider swath of swiping. And it all has to do with understanding what is the use case of the user in that application. So the style guide starts to give you that guidance, starts to give you the heuristics that lets you know, okay, if this is an application that I'm using a lot and I'm really jumping between these three different states a lot or these multiple states a lot, probably three is about the limit. And if it's an application where this is really intended to encourage exploration and browsing and it's not about I always want to get to one place really quickly, then it's okay to go broader. Like in Google Reader, I mean, Google Reader and Gmail, you have a constant swipe. Or music as well. Right. You're swiping further. I mean, really, it's actually less of you're moving between panels and something like Reader and you're just simply reading. Yes. Right? So it has dual use, that functionality, but you want people to understand that because obviously it's not something that's built in. I mean, the one, what's interesting about that is there's one app which is TweetDeck, which is a Twitter app that I use that had that functionality for a long time. It was the only one really until you guys brought it to market. Was that an influence at all? I mean, it was fairly unique when they did it. I'm actually not familiar with TweetDeck. Are you kidding me? No, I'm not kidding you. It's probably the best Twitter app for... I just use, I use the native Twitter client. The horizontal swiping was, I mean, it was basically born in the launcher of the original Android OS and then it was a pattern that was really first brought into our apps in the music app. Right. I don't know what release that was. You just think it's a really... That was like around the Froyo release. But it's a terrific pattern because it's a way to navigate that's much more engaging than pressing a button and waiting. Right. I mean, you just think it's more natural to... Having the ability to just kind of swipe between these spaces is really satisfying. Right. And it's also a great way to segment information because it naturally snaps to those pages. It's not like when you have a vertical scroll where you wanna get to the next page. Well, it doesn't scroll by page. So you're always in that like, okay, you know, like when you're in email. You don't have that same kind of confidence. You just can't kind of swipe it and then know that you're gonna get exactly to that next set of content you wanna read. Right. Right. You're a big fan of swiping. Yes. You did swiping in WebOS with the cards. And these things that people call gestures, these manipulations on the screen are much more satisfying to people than this cycle of you press, you release, and then you wait and see what happens. Right. Right. It's tied much more into the way that the real world works, right? Like our brains are wired for this. I mean, you... We see rocks, we bang them together, we push them around. And you can actually reveal... I mean, you can actually reveal information as you swipe. I mean, one of the things I noticed that you do it in the launcher is as you start to swipe over to the next screen in the launcher, you start to see the information coming in from... That's right. You know, you can say, hey, you know what? I'm halfway through this motion. I don't wanna go there. Exactly. Whereas like pressing the button and having it load up is like you're locked into that. Yeah. It is true that there's something... You get immediate feedback. You feel much more in control because as you say, if for whatever reason you realize that that's not what you want, you can cancel it. Now you almost never do that. Right. But it doesn't matter. It still gives you a greater sense of control. So you mentioned that you use the native Twitter app. Are you going to go to Twitter and say, here's what Ice Cream Sandwich looks like, here's the way it works? Because right now, Twitter is basically they have an iOS version, they have an Android version, they have a web version, they're all kind of the same. But ICS has design and functionality paradigms that are... That's a great question. This style guide is exactly for that. It's for people like Twitter to show them like these are the basics of making an Ice Cream Sandwich app really as good an Ice Cream Sandwich app as it can be. Right. And that doesn't mean that we don't want applications to have their own strong brand and their own strong design conventions. In fact, we want them to. I think it's actually a real problem if an application's brand is so closely tied to one platform that it looks like that one platform's set of buttons or widgets on every other platform because that means you're not doing a service to your own brand. You're tying your brand to somebody else's brand. Right. You're getting homogenized inside of that. On the web, you'd never see that. You wouldn't see like, hey, here's the verge with buttons that we actually took these buttons from Chrome. On the web, you'd customize your own buttons. But you do want a certain... You do want some navigational... I mean, this is the whole point because you wanna balance that. I mean, you want Twitter to be Twitter, but I think it would be your... I mean, I'm assuming it would be your preference that they utilize some of the motifs of Ice Cream Sandwich like the panel swiping or the... What do you call it? View pager? Yeah, the view pager is a technical name. Terrible name. Just call it panel swiping. Yeah, panel swiping. Page swiping is the way I call it. But again, the trick is what are the elements that are natural and native to the platform. There's two parts to this. This is the toolkit that this platform utilizes. You can pick and choose from it, but you should be aware of all the things that are on this menu. Right. And that's one of the functions of StyleGuide. Some people might not know about the view paging capability or how to use it or when to use it. The other part of it is like these are some of the conventions that make this platform feel cohesive. These are the metrics. These are the sizes. These are the corner radii. These are the conventions for how icons use. You don't have to follow them, but if you don't, your application is gonna stand out. It's not gonna look like... It's not gonna be branded necessarily. If it's standing out because it's branding towards your property, if it's branded towards the verge, then that's an okay kind of standing out. But if it's standing out because you just copied those elements from some other platform, that's not doing you any favors. So Twitter is a place where you'll wanna target getting some of this feel in there. Yeah, absolutely. All third parties, we want them to take a look at this. You might have to work extra hard in your relationship with Twitter right now, I think. Yes, a little sensitivity there. So I have a couple other questions. Actually, we're getting a bunch of questions. And I think I know the answer to this one. Are developers going to be required to adhere to these style guidelines or are they just suggestions? They're guidelines. They're guidelines. You're not forcing anybody to do it. I mean, this is the way it is for every platform. The human interface guidelines tend to be very high level guidelines. And what happens, and we've seen this on every platform, is that the value of them accrues as more people use them. So really the market pressures will make the applications that work the way people expect the ones that are more successful. Those are gonna rise to the top. Here's a question, and I think this is an interesting one. Will you also provide working code snippets, utility classes, optimization tips and such because UI inconsistencies does need a standard way to do common stuff like an endless adapter for getting data from web services. So are you gonna provide kind of packages, like plug and play packages? Right now, Android design is almost entirely focused on explaining the design patterns and providing tools purely for the designers. And it's linked with some examples back to the developer site. But we're going to continue to build this out very closely with the developer's site so that everything that we're talking about becomes as easy as possible for people to do. We've actually done a lot of work already in the framework for Ice Cream Sandwich to make it easier by default when you just instantiate a bunch of stuff to have it conform to these guidelines. Interesting. I am, I have a question here. I think I know the answer to this one too, but I'll ask it anyhow. Is this something you think should have been done early on in Android? I mean, had you been at the helm from version one, would you have instituted this? Is this, I guess maybe, and maybe to extrapolate from the question that we got here, is this something that is just sort of important to an operating system of this scale and needs to be there no matter what? Every platform needs to have this. But I can't cast blame on a platform for not having up-to-date versions of this throughout the past. I've been in the position where platforms I've worked on haven't had this when we launch either. It's very hard. The Android team is extremely talented but also extremely small. And I know not just from working at Android but working at other companies, what a challenge it is to produce an operating system from scratch. And even though this is absolutely essential, it's really hard to do. It's really hard to find the time. I would have loved to have done this in the Gingerbread time frame. I would have loved to have done this in the Honeycomb time frame. It just couldn't happen. And it didn't make sense to either because we'd have to revise so much of it for Ice Cream Sandwich. Now that we're here, I'm really happy to have it. You're doing it. You've got a lot of auto, you've got a style guide. It's all of a sudden it's a different Android. So what does this mean for Sense and TouchWiz and MotoBlur and all of these skins? So you're telling developers, hang on one second, hey, can somebody crack this door, by the way? It is just a billion degrees in here. I mean, I'm dying. I thought this was just part of the interrogation technique of interviewing. No, it's hot as hell in here. I apologize. This room gets very warm. Do you need any water or anything? Do you want some water? You have something? Yeah, I would love some water. Bring some cold water, something with ice in it. This is like, it really is like I'm interrogating you. Well this is an interesting contrast from last year where I believe you tried to freeze me to death. That is, you know what, I want, I'm trying to just get both extremes to see which one is more effective in getting answers out of you. So what happens, you're telling developers to do something very stringent. I mean, you're asking them to do something very stringent. You're saying we have design guidelines, we've got a style guide here and yet just walk it over. Oh, thank you. And I'll take one of those too, Michael. You jerk. How do you balance that? Because here you're going to have TouchWiz come along and throw out a bunch of ice cream sandwich stuff. Well there's actually two questions there. First of all, it's kind of a misconception to think that this is really something that's very stringent, right, for a designer. That might be the impression for somebody who's not a designer, it might be the impression of oh my gosh, a guideline, that's a constraint, that sounds like something terrible. Actually all designers want this. I mean, designers more than anybody else have been clamoring to understand what are our conventions, what is our style guide, what are our metrics, what's the grid, how should I design an icon, how do I make it consistent, right? People want this stuff. Yeah, no, I mean when we got our style guide, our developers were saying, you know, they wanted more information, they said what about this, what are these grids. Clearly you need that guidance. I mean, I actually feel bad about the version that we're publishing today. It doesn't have enough detail, it doesn't have enough examples, right? So we're going to be continually adding to that. So it's not actually, there's no tension between providing constraint and liberating people to customize stuff. And that's actually the answer for OEMs who want to customize stuff. So this is a great resource for third parties who want to build stuff that's consistent with the system. There's also a tool now that OEMs can understand exactly how ice cream sandwiches put together. So that when they do expansions to it, when they do customizations, when they are porting whatever layer of modification they want to it, it can be coherent and consistent with the system as much as they want it to be. It's not going to feel like there's a part of it that was customized and a part of it that wasn't customized. They now should have the tools to make their customizations really seamless without having to do everything, right? Which should be a boon to them. So just so I'm understanding what you're saying completely, this style guide is not just for app developers but it also applies to the partners that you work with who make, who do skinning or what did you call them, expansions? Customizations. Customizations. You're saying this will give you a guideline on how to do that so that it actually works with what we wanted to do with ice cream sandwich. Yeah, for example, like we talked about the metrics of things, the sizes of buttons, the height of the action bar, how the action bar should work. And so that applies for whether an OEM, for example, is customizing the launcher and wants to use the action bar patterns in the launcher, wants to use icon grids that are consistent with the icon grids everywhere else. Or if they're trying to create a custom skin for it, if you will, that make all the buttons look different, like a different material or have a different character. When they do that, they can see that they're gonna conform to the metrics of the other ice cream sandwich elements. They can understand exactly what the corner radii or lack of radii are so that they can make those decisions. Right. You know, do I wanna modify that? How much do I wanna modify that so that it's consistent with everything else? Have you shown this to any of the partners like HTC or Samsung and said, you know? No, we're announcing it. We're releasing this to everybody all at the same time. So right now there are guys from Samsung going, oh, crap. We gotta rethink our ICS skin that we've been working on. Hopefully now there's a bunch of guys from Samsung that are saying, oh, finally. Now I understand why the heck they did this. Yeah. Well, I hope that's the case. Here's another question from the viewers. How does this affect backwards compatibility for applications? Will the tools and guidelines work properly on old versions of Android? I'm guessing this is a, I don't wanna answer for you, but you tell me. Well, the style guide is for Ice Cream Sandwich. Unfortunately, we don't have a style guide for each previous version of it. We do have a section that gives advice on how you can adapt our best thinking patterns to previous versions of Android. Which patterns we think are appropriate and which stylistic choices we think are appropriate that you should start using regardless of which version of Android you wanna run on and which things you wanna be aware of might really only work inside Ice Cream Sandwich. Right. So in terms of tablets and phones moving into Ice Cream Sandwich territory for app developers, and this is a question here, how are you handling different size screens? Are you, and we've seen a lot of apps that kind of just scale up to a larger screen and just show you basically more empty space. What do you advocate for that? I mean, what is this? Well, so that's exactly one of the reasons why I have the style guide now. Now we have a section that talks about adapting to different size screens and what are some of the common patterns that you can utilize when you detect that you're a larger screen. Right. So in Honeycomb, we actually did a lot of exploration. We came up with a large number of different multi-panel or multi-pane layouts. But we didn't explain to anybody why we did them, how we chose them, what cases that would be appropriate, what cases that wouldn't be appropriate. We didn't give guidance as to what heuristics you should use to determine when your app should stop using a phone type UI to one of these multi-panel type UIs. Now we have sections in the guide that start to explain that. And again, we're gonna flush them out with more and more detail. And so that's gonna help ease the transition between, if I'm making an app and I want it to be, you know, be in both places, this style guide is going to be useful. The idea is that we've done a lot of this work. And so we wanna share the work that we've done so that other people can benefit from it. Right. Doesn't mean that people have to make the same decisions that we did, but they can at least understand the decisions that we did and don't have to repeat the same work that we did. Right. So somebody, and I know you have to get going in a little bit, so we'll do a couple more questions and then wrap it up. But, and I also know that you're gonna melt if you stay in here. You have a cold right now, right? Are you sick? Actually, I think this completely threw me. Is this just drying you out? This sauna type environment, I think, is very good for the cold. We try to present like a healing thing here. So somebody actually said, and I'm gonna jump off of their question a little bit, but they said, when do you think the design quality of Android apps will reach parity with iOS? But I wanna go a little bit further and say, I don't think that Android apps, I think that there are some great Android apps, but I think across the board, if you look at percentages of really high quality, smooth, beautiful apps that do a lot, I think that there are some holes in Android and some places where iOS is just kicking your ass, frankly. I know, I mean really, I mean, I hate to say it because I love your device. I like iOS. I like what you guys do. I mean, I'm a fan of both things, but when I see an app like GarageBand, which is an Apple developed app, incredibly powerful, I haven't seen anything that even, couldn't even come close on any of your devices, when are you gonna get there? When are you gonna say like we can go toe to toe on something as complex and as beautiful and as functional as GarageBand? Because to me, that's the high watermark for an iOS app personally. Can you do it? Will you do it? Is it this generation? Well, so I can't predict the future. I don't know what apps are out there, but I do know that in order to do it, this type of guidance is absolutely essential, right? I believe that we're gonna continue to push the platform and in Ice Cream Sandwich, we've pushed the platform a long way to enabling these types of experiences. And the style guide goes a long way to letting developers know how to create these kinds of experiences. One of the things I hope the style guide does is expand the conversation beyond just the people who normally pay attention to Android, but to all those other brilliant designers out there who would like to create beautiful apps, but have maybe been turned off by the fact that Android didn't have this kind of guidance, didn't give them a framework, didn't give them a context that they can understand. You think that you'll be able to bring some of these, maybe people have been standoffish about maybe coming over, porting something from iOS to Android to say like, look, we're taking this seriously. We've got design guidelines. This is a framework you can fit your app into, take a look at it. Absolutely. Are you going to ding people who don't follow these guidelines? Personally, I'm going to take a little hammer and go sting their car. No, but are you going to pull people aside? Can you do that? I know you guys are all about being open, but the store, you can kind of put whatever you want in there into the Android market. But will you, or even give users a way to say, hey, this app doesn't follow the guidelines and it's making it harder to use? Well, comments already provide a mechanism for reviews providing a guide. Are you guys scouting the comments? Reviews also provide, I'm sorry, not reviews, the ratings also provide a mechanism for that. And we hope that the community will become more sensitive to the patterns, will understand the guidelines, will help us do that kind of thing. I personally would like to see more positive incentives, right, so that we could extend a hand of friendship to developers who wanted personal attention in understanding the guidelines and understanding how they could take better advantage of them. What is positive encouragement there? Well, you know, we could, I don't know, I haven't even thought of it, but there could be things. You're just making this up right now. I am. I'm completely winging this. You announced here forthcoming positive encouragement for developers on how to make their apps better. But I mean, we could do, if we work with people, we could endorse them in various different ways. We could promote them in blog posts. We could promote them in the market. I see there's lots of potential positive mechanisms, which I'm a lot more excited about than negative mechanisms. We don't have any concrete plans for any of those things, which is why I sound so vague and uncomfortable about it. Right. No, no, I get that. But I'm just curious. I mean, Apple polices its store. It says, we'll let this in. We won't let this in. And I think that it has its pluses and its minuses. But Apple and other store makers also, one of the other things they do, which I think is much more impactful, is that they promote the really outstanding citizens. Right. And you're saying if something's really good, we'll want to put it on the front page of the market. Yeah. So that's the positive reinforcement. Exactly. But you're not going to be looking at people's apps and saying, hey, we noticed. I mean, do you guys do this? Hey, we noticed you're not using the guidelines and we think the app will be improved. I mean, is that something that you may consider doing? We don't want to get involved into that kind of regulation of the market. It would be somewhat helpful, though. I'm not even saying you can't have it in here. I think what I'd be delighted to do is offer some kind of workshops or office hours or some kind of model like that where developers who want feedback or critique, we'd be happy to give it to them. Right. I mean, I think you should. But I wouldn't want to do that as part of a punitive measure inside the market. I don't think that would be fair to what the market is supposed to be. Right. No, I agree. Two more questions, and then I'll let you go because you have a trip back to a whole different hotel. Thanks. This is my question. It's very personal. But you've got this limitation where if I download a game, and it's a big game, 600 megs or something, I get a little file that I downloaded, it's a couple megs, and then it says I open the app and there's another screen that says you have to download this big file. And it's a totally siloed company-specific way of getting that file. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. What's going on? Like when I download a game from the app store on my iPhone, it just downloads the game. And when it's finished, I play the game. With you guys, I download the game, it asks me to download another file. Sometimes it works or it doesn't. I just got a game that took me six tries to download the rest of the files. That's terrible. Well, this is, I think it was a Game Loft title. I mean, it's a major developer. It was the new Nova, Nova 2 HD or something. What are you doing about that? Are you going to get rid of this limitation where you can... So I have to look like a fool because I actually don't know the specifics of that. But you know what I'm talking about. I actually don't. There's a lot of stuff that we work on. So this is a topic I'm, what is it, tangentially familiar with. But I don't know actually what we're doing, what we've announced that we're doing. I don't know what the actual state of play of things is right now. So I can't really comment. But what I can say is all of these kinds of annoyances, all of these pain points in the market are things that we take really, really seriously. They're part of the growing pains of the market. You changed the market a lot in the last few months. Like the last six months has been a sea change for the way you guys are moving. And that's not slowing down. We recognize that there's still quite a lot we have to do to really kind of fulfill the promise of what market is as a one-stop destination for all of your media and entertainment. And so we're gonna keep doing that. Well, have the redesigns and implementing some of this ICS feel into the market? Has it changed sales? Has it changed the way people are getting apps and using apps? I mean, have you seen any? Can you talk about that? I actually don't know. And if I did, I probably couldn't talk about it. But I do know that Android market numbers and downloads are just rising continuously. It's like one of those cheesy hockey stick graph things that it keeps growing and growing. But I don't know. You can get the numbers from our PR people. You're so modest. Oh, it's a hockey stick. It's just shooting up. Yeah, it is. It's ridiculous. But it's not an upside-down hockey stick. No. It's a right-side-up hockey stick. Final question. Somebody wanted to know what the design guidelines of your shirt were. And I'm actually curious, too. You always have some pretty intense outfits. I mean, you're kind of a stylish dude. What is going on with your shirt? It's actually – I don't know if you guys can see this on camera, but it's like – it almost looks like it's machine-generated art. Is this just a random shirt you found somewhere? Is there a story behind it? There's no story behind it. You didn't think you were going to be asked about your shirt today, did you? It's just a shirt that I thought was beautiful. And I like beautiful shirts. It actually looks like a fractal in some way, like a weird – Yeah, it has. What I like about it is it's got this very geometric detailed pattern if you actually get up close to it. Yeah. But from a distance, it's just this kind of cloudy, wintery kind of – I'm guessing that's what they can see on camera. Yeah, I don't think they can see the – But up close, there's actually like triangles and squares and circles in here, and it's quite beautiful. Anyhow, Matthias, thank you so much for joining us. My pleasure. As always. Thanks for sharing the announcement with us. Yeah. And I think I'm going to want to talk to you more in the near future. My pleasure, always. And thanks to the people asking questions. I'm sorry we couldn't get to all of them. Yes, thank you, everybody. Please head over to Android Design and give us feedback and go make awesome stuff. Yeah, please make beautiful applications. Ice cream sandwich deserves it. Yes. In my opinion. All right. All right then.
 This is Josh from The Verge and we are live with Matthias Duarte from Google and Android
 and you guys have an announcement that you're making today.
 First off, are we live or is everything good Chad?
 I just want to make sure.
 We're good?
 Okay, cool.
 You just kind of hurried over here.
 You guys are making an announcement today and we're kind of getting first crack at it
 here.
 So what is it?
 What are you guys talking about?
 What's happening?
 That's right.
 So we're going to give you the first style guide for Android Ice Cream Sandwich.
 So today on the Android developer site, you'll find a blog post that describes what we've
 done and you'll also find a link to Android Design which is a document but it's also a
 living site that's going to be your one stop reference to find out how you can make beautiful,
 simple applications for Ice Cream Sandwich.
 So you haven't done this for earlier versions of Android?
 There's no...
 We've done an up to date style guide and so our mission for Ice Cream Sandwich was to
 make it beautiful, to make it simple, to make it powerful and there's really three parts
 to that.
 One we needed the OS, right?
 The OS and all the apps.
 That's a big part of it.
 The other part was the framework.
 It doesn't get noticed by people who buy the phones like Galaxy Nexus or who get the upgrade
 but the framework itself has changed.
 The framework itself makes it much easier to make beautiful, simple apps.
 And the part that was missing until today is a guideline that tells developers how to
 use that framework, how to follow the patterns and new conventions that we introduced in
 Ice Cream Sandwich, how they can make stuff that is beautiful and simple and powerful
 using the new capabilities of Ice Cream Sandwich.
 So you thought it was fairly necessary to start to say to developers, hey, you're doing
 great work, we like your apps but you could just make it a little bit more handsome, a
 little bit more beautiful.
 That would really be great.
 I mean you're a designer.
 You clearly put a focus on design and we've talked about this a bunch.
 We did an interview months ago and more recently on our show, we really focused on design.
 Ice Cream Sandwich is a big departure from the last version of Android for smartphones.
 It's because it's such a big departure that it's so important to provide guidance.
 In fact, all designers crave guidance, right?
 You need to have constraints and you need to know the environment that you're working
 in.
 Anytime you're doing a creative component that's part of a larger whole, like I'm sure
 The Verge has a style guide.
 Every publication out there in the world has a style guide.
 Every platform in the world also has a style guide.
 So for Ice Cream Sandwich, we needed to have that style guide as well.
 But you haven't up until this point have not had that style guide for the other versions.
 No, we didn't.
 That's pretty crazy, don't you think?
 Well, that's why we have one now.
 Is this something that you did?
 Is this like a mandate from a Matthias mandate?
 Is that a thing?
 Can I TM that?
 A Matthias mandate?
 Yeah.
 I don't know.
 If I get a stamp for it, maybe.
 Yeah.
 We will get you a stamp.
 I'm going to get a little stamp and then I'll start putting out some mandates.
 That sounds really good.
 Maybe you get a virtual, like a watermark.
 Yeah, it's going to be tough though because I don't do anything hard copy.
 You don't do a lot of paper, yeah.
 So is this something you said?
 Yeah, no.
 To my mind, Ice Cream Sandwich as a release is not complete until we get this style guide
 out.
 Right.
 And it's out today.
 So I can go get it, developers can go get it.
 What are you going to do to ensure that people are following, that they're actually taking
 this stuff to heart?
 I mean, because it's one thing to put it out there.
 It's another thing to actually get people to say, oh yeah, my stuff has been really
 ugly, let me fix it up.
 Oh, I get it Matthias, I've been making ugly apps and now I have to fix them up.
 I think that's putting the wrong spin on it.
 It's not about people doing stuff that's ugly.
 It's about people not understanding what they should do, right?
 There's plenty of times when it's important to break the rules, but you want to know that
 you're breaking the rules, right?
 It's one thing to be the audacious rebel who really knows what they're doing.
 It's another thing to turn down a one-way street because you just didn't notice that
 it was a one-way street.
 Right, right.
 The steering wheel's broken, basically.
 Or just there was no sign.
 Yeah, or there was no sign.
 So this is really about telling people what the rules of the road are.
 People of course are free to do whatever they want with it.
 We're going to follow this up with a lot of evangelism, right?
 The first round of this is press, obviously, and NCS is a great opportunity to do that,
 to get the word out that we have the design guidelines out, that we are engaging heavily,
 that we want to talk to designers and developers, and that this is just the beginning of these
 guidelines.
 Actually, we want to hear feedback from them.
 We want to know what more can we tell them, how more can we help them.
 Right.
 Is this a reaction to your competition?
 I mean, Microsoft has put a big focus on the design of Windows Phone.
 They've really talked about it quite a bit.
 And it's a beautiful product.
 I know you have your opinions of the, what did you call it, airport signage design.
 You don't want to repeat that, dude.
 I can see you're getting very uncomfortable.
 I'm making you very uncomfortable right now, aren't I?
 You don't have to answer that.
 The spotlight.
 The spotlight is...
 So hot.
 I mean, but Apple, clearly a design-focused company, iOS is a very design-focused operating
 system.
 Google has historically not been known for design.
 We talked about this a while ago.
 ICS, like I said, is very different.
 Is this in some way a reaction to what the competition is doing and how much emphasis
 they're putting on design?
 I mean, if you want to be serious about design, you have to do this stuff, right?
 Ice cream sandwich is Android getting serious about design, and this is part of that.
 Right.
 We're actually taking questions from, we're supposed to be taking questions from people,
 and I don't know if this is not working or not because I don't see any, but we're grabbing
 questions and we'll have some in a second.
 One thing we have, while we wait for those to come in or I figure out, actually, hey
 guys, can I get, sorry, this is live.
 We kind of threw this together last minute because you sprung it on us that you had an
 announcement you wanted to talk about.
 Can somebody come in here and grab this iPad and...
 Hold on one second.
 Okay, good.
 And just get some questions.
 Yeah, whatever would be fine.
 That's great.
 Are we getting questions in?
 I think so.
 Okay, cool.
 But I actually want to ask you before we get into the questions.
 We've seen a lot of ICS tablets here at CES.
 There have been no ICS phones.
 Do you know what the holdup is?
 I mean, it seems like your partners are being very slow on the uptake of...
 Honestly, I don't know.
 I haven't even really seen what's on the show floor.
 I've been so busy.
 So you don't know that there are no ice cream sandwich phones here?
 No.
 Is that what you're saying?
 I have like zero visibility right now into what's been announced and what hasn't been
 announced, tablets, phones, anything.
 Right.
 You're just here making the announcement and then back up north.
 I have a few other meetings.
 Really?
 Wasn't it just that you're coming here to the trailer to have this interview and then
 you're leaving?
 That's what I was told.
 So I have a couple questions.
 Got this worked out.
 Yes.
 How does the style guide fit into the whole fragmentation story?
 Is it a first step to enforce a certain consistency?
 That's a pretty good question.
 So is this something that you guys are doing kind of to start to try to crack down on the
 fragmentation of not only platforms and platform but apps?
 It's no secret that we hate it when people use the word fragmentation because it means
 so many different things to so many different people and it's like a word that intrinsically
 is negative.
 It's like, you know, it's like the, what are you going to do about the beating your wife
 problem, right?
 Like there's like.
 Well, that also I'm concerned.
 What is Google doing about the wife beating?
 Actually that one we're neglecting.
 Yeah.
 Neglect beating, I mean.
 Yeah.
 Very bad.
 So people mean so many different things when they talk about fragmentation.
 One of the kinds of things that they might mean, this style guide is intended to address
 and that's the way that applications work together, right?
 And the way that your experience in the operating system is kind of a cohesive harmonious whole,
 right?
 The reason why you have style guides and the reason why you have conventions within an
 operating system is because, you know, everything works better together if they all follow certain
 standards, if they all follow certain practices, if things are where you expect them to be.
 It's like when you buy a set of tools from one manufacturer, they all have a similar
 kind of grip, right?
 So they're tools for your kitchen or tools for your garage or whatever.
 So they tend to work better together.
 We want applications in Ice Cream Sandwich to take on the same benefits and the same
 attributes of the new applications that we launched in Ice Cream Sandwich.
 Right.
 So we want to show developers how they can do that.
 Exactly what they have to do, what metrics they have to follow, what patterns they can
 utilize, what new tools we've given them that they might not have realized, what things
 we've learned from the past that maybe didn't work so well that had been a convention that
 we're now saying, you know, maybe you should think about staying away from that.
 Do you have, is that, I mean, it sounds to me like you're saying everybody wants to do
 things or thinks, you know, when they're working on their app, maybe they have an idea for
 how you get to point from point A to point B. And there are some basic, there's some
 basic functionality you want people to gather around, sort of standardized, you know, here's
 how you, here's where your menu should be, here's where your back, you know.
 Yeah.
 Well, you don't have a back button because you've got a back button, but, you know, here's
 how you get somebody from this screen to that screen.
 I mean, I know that you guys have instituted.
 Exactly.
 In Ice Cream Sandwich, this kind of panel, what do you call it, what you're swiping from?
 The View Pager.
 The View Pager?
 That's the API name.
 Can you set, you set that up a little bit.
 I didn't, I didn't name the API.
 But you've got this, like, this motif of swiping through layers of an application.
 The swiping, the horizontal swiping.
 Right, like in the People app, for instance, you've got your dialer.
 That's right.
 And you've got your lifestyle guide that talks about the pattern of when you should use that,
 when that's appropriate.
 What kinds of screens is that appropriate to use it for?
 Right.
 What kinds of screens, you know, what kinds of limits should you be aware of when you're
 using that?
 Right.
 You know, for certain applications, we work very hard to make sure that you never swipe
 further than three screens away.
 Well, I've noticed, is it three?
 Is that what you're trying to box it to?
 But not always, right?
 So we do that very deliberately in the Phone app and the People app, but you'll notice
 in Market, we actually have a much wider swath of swiping.
 And it all has to do with understanding what is the use case of the user in that application.
 So the style guide starts to give you that guidance, starts to give you the heuristics
 that lets you know, okay, if this is an application that I'm using a lot and I'm really jumping
 between these three different states a lot or these multiple states a lot, probably three
 is about the limit.
 And if it's an application where this is really intended to encourage exploration and browsing
 and it's not about I always want to get to one place really quickly, then it's okay to
 go broader.
 Like in Google Reader, I mean, Google Reader and Gmail, you have a constant swipe.
 Or music as well.
 Right.
 You're swiping further.
 I mean, really, it's actually less of you're moving between panels and something like Reader
 and you're just simply reading.
 Yes.
 Right?
 So it has dual use, that functionality, but you want people to understand that because
 obviously it's not something that's built in.
 I mean, the one, what's interesting about that is there's one app which is TweetDeck,
 which is a Twitter app that I use that had that functionality for a long time.
 It was the only one really until you guys brought it to market.
 Was that an influence at all?
 I mean, it was fairly unique when they did it.
 I'm actually not familiar with TweetDeck.
 Are you kidding me?
 No, I'm not kidding you.
 It's probably the best Twitter app for...
 I just use, I use the native Twitter client.
 The horizontal swiping was, I mean, it was basically born in the launcher of the original
 Android OS and then it was a pattern that was really first brought into our apps in
 the music app.
 Right.
 I don't know what release that was.
 You just think it's a really...
 That was like around the Froyo release.
 But it's a terrific pattern because it's a way to navigate that's much more engaging
 than pressing a button and waiting.
 Right.
 I mean, you just think it's more natural to...
 Having the ability to just kind of swipe between these spaces is really satisfying.
 Right.
 And it's also a great way to segment information because it naturally snaps to those pages.
 It's not like when you have a vertical scroll where you wanna get to the next page.
 Well, it doesn't scroll by page.
 So you're always in that like, okay, you know, like when you're in email.
 You don't have that same kind of confidence.
 You just can't kind of swipe it and then know that you're gonna get exactly to that next
 set of content you wanna read.
 Right.
 Right.
 You're a big fan of swiping.
 Yes.
 You did swiping in WebOS with the cards.
 And these things that people call gestures, these manipulations on the screen are much
 more satisfying to people than this cycle of you press, you release, and then you wait
 and see what happens.
 Right.
 Right.
 It's tied much more into the way that the real world works, right?
 Like our brains are wired for this.
 I mean, you...
 We see rocks, we bang them together, we push them around.
 And you can actually reveal...
 I mean, you can actually reveal information as you swipe.
 I mean, one of the things I noticed that you do it in the launcher is as you start to swipe
 over to the next screen in the launcher, you start to see the information coming in from...
 That's right.
 You know, you can say, hey, you know what?
 I'm halfway through this motion.
 I don't wanna go there.
 Exactly.
 Whereas like pressing the button and having it load up is like you're locked into that.
 Yeah.
 It is true that there's something...
 You get immediate feedback.
 You feel much more in control because as you say, if for whatever reason you realize that
 that's not what you want, you can cancel it.
 Now you almost never do that.
 Right.
 But it doesn't matter.
 It still gives you a greater sense of control.
 So you mentioned that you use the native Twitter app.
 Are you going to go to Twitter and say, here's what Ice Cream Sandwich looks like, here's
 the way it works?
 Because right now, Twitter is basically they have an iOS version, they have an Android
 version, they have a web version, they're all kind of the same.
 But ICS has design and functionality paradigms that are...
 That's a great question.
 This style guide is exactly for that.
 It's for people like Twitter to show them like these are the basics of making an Ice
 Cream Sandwich app really as good an Ice Cream Sandwich app as it can be.
 Right.
 And that doesn't mean that we don't want applications to have their own strong brand and their own
 strong design conventions.
 In fact, we want them to.
 I think it's actually a real problem if an application's brand is so closely tied to
 one platform that it looks like that one platform's set of buttons or widgets on every other platform
 because that means you're not doing a service to your own brand.
 You're tying your brand to somebody else's brand.
 Right.
 You're getting homogenized inside of that.
 On the web, you'd never see that.
 You wouldn't see like, hey, here's the verge with buttons that we actually took these buttons
 from Chrome.
 On the web, you'd customize your own buttons.
 But you do want a certain...
 You do want some navigational...
 I mean, this is the whole point because you wanna balance that.
 I mean, you want Twitter to be Twitter, but I think it would be your...
 I mean, I'm assuming it would be your preference that they utilize some of the motifs of Ice
 Cream Sandwich like the panel swiping or the...
 What do you call it?
 View pager?
 Yeah, the view pager is a technical name.
 Terrible name.
 Just call it panel swiping.
 Yeah, panel swiping.
 Page swiping is the way I call it.
 But again, the trick is what are the elements that are natural and native to the platform.
 There's two parts to this.
 This is the toolkit that this platform utilizes.
 You can pick and choose from it, but you should be aware of all the things that are on this
 menu.
 Right.
 And that's one of the functions of StyleGuide.
 Some people might not know about the view paging capability or how to use it or when
 to use it.
 The other part of it is like these are some of the conventions that make this platform
 feel cohesive.
 These are the metrics.
 These are the sizes.
 These are the corner radii.
 These are the conventions for how icons use.
 You don't have to follow them, but if you don't, your application is gonna stand out.
 It's not gonna look like...
 It's not gonna be branded necessarily.
 If it's standing out because it's branding towards your property, if it's branded towards
 the verge, then that's an okay kind of standing out.
 But if it's standing out because you just copied those elements from some other platform,
 that's not doing you any favors.
 So Twitter is a place where you'll wanna target getting some of this feel in there.
 Yeah, absolutely.
 All third parties, we want them to take a look at this.
 You might have to work extra hard in your relationship with Twitter right now, I think.
 Yes, a little sensitivity there.
 So I have a couple other questions.
 Actually, we're getting a bunch of questions.
 And I think I know the answer to this one.
 Are developers going to be required to adhere to these style guidelines or are they just
 suggestions?
 They're guidelines.
 They're guidelines.
 You're not forcing anybody to do it.
 I mean, this is the way it is for every platform.
 The human interface guidelines tend to be very high level guidelines.
 And what happens, and we've seen this on every platform, is that the value of them accrues
 as more people use them.
 So really the market pressures will make the applications that work the way people expect
 the ones that are more successful.
 Those are gonna rise to the top.
 Here's a question, and I think this is an interesting one.
 Will you also provide working code snippets, utility classes, optimization tips and such
 because UI inconsistencies does need a standard way to do common stuff like an endless adapter
 for getting data from web services.
 So are you gonna provide kind of packages, like plug and play packages?
 Right now, Android design is almost entirely focused on explaining the design patterns
 and providing tools purely for the designers.
 And it's linked with some examples back to the developer site.
 But we're going to continue to build this out very closely with the developer's site
 so that everything that we're talking about becomes as easy as possible for people to
 do.
 We've actually done a lot of work already in the framework for Ice Cream Sandwich to
 make it easier by default when you just instantiate a bunch of stuff to have it conform to these
 guidelines.
 Interesting.
 I am, I have a question here.
 I think I know the answer to this one too, but I'll ask it anyhow.
 Is this something you think should have been done early on in Android?
 I mean, had you been at the helm from version one, would you have instituted this?
 Is this, I guess maybe, and maybe to extrapolate from the question that we got here, is this
 something that is just sort of important to an operating system of this scale and needs
 to be there no matter what?
 Every platform needs to have this.
 But I can't cast blame on a platform for not having up-to-date versions of this throughout
 the past.
 I've been in the position where platforms I've worked on haven't had this when we launch
 either.
 It's very hard.
 The Android team is extremely talented but also extremely small.
 And I know not just from working at Android but working at other companies, what a challenge
 it is to produce an operating system from scratch.
 And even though this is absolutely essential, it's really hard to do.
 It's really hard to find the time.
 I would have loved to have done this in the Gingerbread time frame.
 I would have loved to have done this in the Honeycomb time frame.
 It just couldn't happen.
 And it didn't make sense to either because we'd have to revise so much of it for Ice
 Cream Sandwich.
 Now that we're here, I'm really happy to have it.
 You're doing it.
 You've got a lot of auto, you've got a style guide.
 It's all of a sudden it's a different Android.
 So what does this mean for Sense and TouchWiz and MotoBlur and all of these skins?
 So you're telling developers, hang on one second, hey, can somebody crack this door,
 by the way?
 It is just a billion degrees in here.
 I mean, I'm dying.
 I thought this was just part of the interrogation technique of interviewing.
 No, it's hot as hell in here.
 I apologize.
 This room gets very warm.
 Do you need any water or anything?
 Do you want some water?
 You have something?
 Yeah, I would love some water.
 Bring some cold water, something with ice in it.
 This is like, it really is like I'm interrogating you.
 Well this is an interesting contrast from last year where I believe you tried to freeze
 me to death.
 That is, you know what, I want, I'm trying to just get both extremes to see which one
 is more effective in getting answers out of you.
 So what happens, you're telling developers to do something very stringent.
 I mean, you're asking them to do something very stringent.
 You're saying we have design guidelines, we've got a style guide here and yet just walk it
 over.
 Oh, thank you.
 And I'll take one of those too, Michael.
 You jerk.
 How do you balance that?
 Because here you're going to have TouchWiz come along and throw out a bunch of ice cream
 sandwich stuff.
 Well there's actually two questions there.
 First of all, it's kind of a misconception to think that this is really something that's
 very stringent, right, for a designer.
 That might be the impression for somebody who's not a designer, it might be the impression
 of oh my gosh, a guideline, that's a constraint, that sounds like something terrible.
 Actually all designers want this.
 I mean, designers more than anybody else have been clamoring to understand what are our
 conventions, what is our style guide, what are our metrics, what's the grid, how should
 I design an icon, how do I make it consistent, right?
 People want this stuff.
 Yeah, no, I mean when we got our style guide, our developers were saying, you know, they
 wanted more information, they said what about this, what are these grids.
 Clearly you need that guidance.
 I mean, I actually feel bad about the version that we're publishing today.
 It doesn't have enough detail, it doesn't have enough examples, right?
 So we're going to be continually adding to that.
 So it's not actually, there's no tension between providing constraint and liberating people
 to customize stuff.
 And that's actually the answer for OEMs who want to customize stuff.
 So this is a great resource for third parties who want to build stuff that's consistent
 with the system.
 There's also a tool now that OEMs can understand exactly how ice cream sandwiches put together.
 So that when they do expansions to it, when they do customizations, when they are porting
 whatever layer of modification they want to it, it can be coherent and consistent with
 the system as much as they want it to be.
 It's not going to feel like there's a part of it that was customized and a part of it
 that wasn't customized.
 They now should have the tools to make their customizations really seamless without having
 to do everything, right?
 Which should be a boon to them.
 So just so I'm understanding what you're saying completely, this style guide is not just for
 app developers but it also applies to the partners that you work with who make, who
 do skinning or what did you call them, expansions?
 Customizations.
 Customizations.
 You're saying this will give you a guideline on how to do that so that it actually works
 with what we wanted to do with ice cream sandwich.
 Yeah, for example, like we talked about the metrics of things, the sizes of buttons, the
 height of the action bar, how the action bar should work.
 And so that applies for whether an OEM, for example, is customizing the launcher and wants
 to use the action bar patterns in the launcher, wants to use icon grids that are consistent
 with the icon grids everywhere else.
 Or if they're trying to create a custom skin for it, if you will, that make all the buttons
 look different, like a different material or have a different character.
 When they do that, they can see that they're gonna conform to the metrics of the other
 ice cream sandwich elements.
 They can understand exactly what the corner radii or lack of radii are so that they can
 make those decisions.
 Right.
 You know, do I wanna modify that?
 How much do I wanna modify that so that it's consistent with everything else?
 Have you shown this to any of the partners like HTC or Samsung and said, you know?
 No, we're announcing it.
 We're releasing this to everybody all at the same time.
 So right now there are guys from Samsung going, oh, crap.
 We gotta rethink our ICS skin that we've been working on.
 Hopefully now there's a bunch of guys from Samsung that are saying, oh, finally.
 Now I understand why the heck they did this.
 Yeah.
 Well, I hope that's the case.
 Here's another question from the viewers.
 How does this affect backwards compatibility for applications?
 Will the tools and guidelines work properly on old versions of Android?
 I'm guessing this is a, I don't wanna answer for you, but you tell me.
 Well, the style guide is for Ice Cream Sandwich.
 Unfortunately, we don't have a style guide for each previous version of it.
 We do have a section that gives advice on how you can adapt our best thinking patterns
 to previous versions of Android.
 Which patterns we think are appropriate and which stylistic choices we think are appropriate
 that you should start using regardless of which version of Android you wanna run on
 and which things you wanna be aware of might really only work inside Ice Cream Sandwich.
 Right.
 So in terms of tablets and phones moving into Ice Cream Sandwich territory for app developers,
 and this is a question here, how are you handling different size screens?
 Are you, and we've seen a lot of apps that kind of just scale up to a larger screen and
 just show you basically more empty space.
 What do you advocate for that?
 I mean, what is this?
 Well, so that's exactly one of the reasons why I have the style guide now.
 Now we have a section that talks about adapting to different size screens and what are some
 of the common patterns that you can utilize when you detect that you're a larger screen.
 Right.
 So in Honeycomb, we actually did a lot of exploration.
 We came up with a large number of different multi-panel or multi-pane layouts.
 But we didn't explain to anybody why we did them, how we chose them, what cases that would
 be appropriate, what cases that wouldn't be appropriate.
 We didn't give guidance as to what heuristics you should use to determine when your app
 should stop using a phone type UI to one of these multi-panel type UIs.
 Now we have sections in the guide that start to explain that.
 And again, we're gonna flush them out with more and more detail.
 And so that's gonna help ease the transition between, if I'm making an app and I want it
 to be, you know, be in both places, this style guide is going to be useful.
 The idea is that we've done a lot of this work.
 And so we wanna share the work that we've done so that other people can benefit from
 it.
 Right.
 Doesn't mean that people have to make the same decisions that we did, but they can at
 least understand the decisions that we did and don't have to repeat the same work that
 we did.
 Right.
 So somebody, and I know you have to get going in a little bit, so we'll do a couple more
 questions and then wrap it up.
 But, and I also know that you're gonna melt if you stay in here.
 You have a cold right now, right?
 Are you sick?
 Actually, I think this completely threw me.
 Is this just drying you out?
 This sauna type environment, I think, is very good for the cold.
 We try to present like a healing thing here.
 So somebody actually said, and I'm gonna jump off of their question a little bit, but they
 said, when do you think the design quality of Android apps will reach parity with iOS?
 But I wanna go a little bit further and say, I don't think that Android apps, I think that
 there are some great Android apps, but I think across the board, if you look at percentages
 of really high quality, smooth, beautiful apps that do a lot, I think that there are
 some holes in Android and some places where iOS is just kicking your ass, frankly.
 I know, I mean really, I mean, I hate to say it because I love your device.
 I like iOS.
 I like what you guys do.
 I mean, I'm a fan of both things, but when I see an app like GarageBand, which is an
 Apple developed app, incredibly powerful, I haven't seen anything that even, couldn't
 even come close on any of your devices, when are you gonna get there?
 When are you gonna say like we can go toe to toe on something as complex and as beautiful
 and as functional as GarageBand?
 Because to me, that's the high watermark for an iOS app personally.
 Can you do it?
 Will you do it?
 Is it this generation?
 Well, so I can't predict the future.
 I don't know what apps are out there, but I do know that in order to do it, this type
 of guidance is absolutely essential, right?
 I believe that we're gonna continue to push the platform and in Ice Cream Sandwich, we've
 pushed the platform a long way to enabling these types of experiences.
 And the style guide goes a long way to letting developers know how to create these kinds
 of experiences.
 One of the things I hope the style guide does is expand the conversation beyond just the
 people who normally pay attention to Android, but to all those other brilliant designers
 out there who would like to create beautiful apps, but have maybe been turned off by the
 fact that Android didn't have this kind of guidance, didn't give them a framework, didn't
 give them a context that they can understand.
 You think that you'll be able to bring some of these, maybe people have been standoffish
 about maybe coming over, porting something from iOS to Android to say like, look, we're
 taking this seriously.
 We've got design guidelines.
 This is a framework you can fit your app into, take a look at it.
 Absolutely.
 Are you going to ding people who don't follow these guidelines?
 Personally, I'm going to take a little hammer and go sting their car.
 No, but are you going to pull people aside?
 Can you do that?
 I know you guys are all about being open, but the store, you can kind of put whatever
 you want in there into the Android market.
 But will you, or even give users a way to say, hey, this app doesn't follow the guidelines
 and it's making it harder to use?
 Well, comments already provide a mechanism for reviews providing a guide.
 Are you guys scouting the comments?
 Reviews also provide, I'm sorry, not reviews, the ratings also provide a mechanism for that.
 And we hope that the community will become more sensitive to the patterns, will understand
 the guidelines, will help us do that kind of thing.
 I personally would like to see more positive incentives, right, so that we could extend
 a hand of friendship to developers who wanted personal attention in understanding the guidelines
 and understanding how they could take better advantage of them.
 What is positive encouragement there?
 Well, you know, we could, I don't know, I haven't even thought of it, but there could
 be things.
 You're just making this up right now.
 I am.
 I'm completely winging this.
 You announced here forthcoming positive encouragement for developers on how to make their apps better.
 But I mean, we could do, if we work with people, we could endorse them in various different
 ways.
 We could promote them in blog posts.
 We could promote them in the market.
 I see there's lots of potential positive mechanisms, which I'm a lot more excited about than negative
 mechanisms.
 We don't have any concrete plans for any of those things, which is why I sound so vague
 and uncomfortable about it.
 Right.
 No, no, I get that.
 But I'm just curious.
 I mean, Apple polices its store.
 It says, we'll let this in.
 We won't let this in.
 And I think that it has its pluses and its minuses.
 But Apple and other store makers also, one of the other things they do, which I think
 is much more impactful, is that they promote the really outstanding citizens.
 Right.
 And you're saying if something's really good, we'll want to put it on the front page of
 the market.
 Yeah.
 So that's the positive reinforcement.
 Exactly.
 But you're not going to be looking at people's apps and saying, hey, we noticed.
 I mean, do you guys do this?
 Hey, we noticed you're not using the guidelines and we think the app will be improved.
 I mean, is that something that you may consider doing?
 We don't want to get involved into that kind of regulation of the market.
 It would be somewhat helpful, though.
 I'm not even saying you can't have it in here.
 I think what I'd be delighted to do is offer some kind of workshops or office hours or
 some kind of model like that where developers who want feedback or critique, we'd be happy
 to give it to them.
 Right.
 I mean, I think you should.
 But I wouldn't want to do that as part of a punitive measure inside the market.
 I don't think that would be fair to what the market is supposed to be.
 Right.
 No, I agree.
 Two more questions, and then I'll let you go because you have a trip back to a whole
 different hotel.
 Thanks.
 This is my question.
 It's very personal.
 But you've got this limitation where if I download a game, and it's a big game, 600
 megs or something, I get a little file that I downloaded, it's a couple megs, and then
 it says I open the app and there's another screen that says you have to download this
 big file.
 And it's a totally siloed company-specific way of getting that file.
 Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.
 What's going on?
 Like when I download a game from the app store on my iPhone, it just downloads the game.
 And when it's finished, I play the game.
 With you guys, I download the game, it asks me to download another file.
 Sometimes it works or it doesn't.
 I just got a game that took me six tries to download the rest of the files.
 That's terrible.
 Well, this is, I think it was a Game Loft title.
 I mean, it's a major developer.
 It was the new Nova, Nova 2 HD or something.
 What are you doing about that?
 Are you going to get rid of this limitation where you can...
 So I have to look like a fool because I actually don't know the specifics of that.
 But you know what I'm talking about.
 I actually don't.
 There's a lot of stuff that we work on.
 So this is a topic I'm, what is it, tangentially familiar with.
 But I don't know actually what we're doing, what we've announced that we're doing.
 I don't know what the actual state of play of things is right now.
 So I can't really comment.
 But what I can say is all of these kinds of annoyances, all of these pain points in the
 market are things that we take really, really seriously.
 They're part of the growing pains of the market.
 You changed the market a lot in the last few months.
 Like the last six months has been a sea change for the way you guys are moving.
 And that's not slowing down.
 We recognize that there's still quite a lot we have to do to really kind of fulfill the
 promise of what market is as a one-stop destination for all of your media and entertainment.
 And so we're gonna keep doing that.
 Well, have the redesigns and implementing some of this ICS feel into the market?
 Has it changed sales?
 Has it changed the way people are getting apps and using apps?
 I mean, have you seen any?
 Can you talk about that?
 I actually don't know.
 And if I did, I probably couldn't talk about it.
 But I do know that Android market numbers and downloads are just rising continuously.
 It's like one of those cheesy hockey stick graph things that it keeps growing and growing.
 But I don't know.
 You can get the numbers from our PR people.
 You're so modest.
 Oh, it's a hockey stick.
 It's just shooting up.
 Yeah, it is.
 It's ridiculous.
 But it's not an upside-down hockey stick.
 No.
 It's a right-side-up hockey stick.
 Final question.
 Somebody wanted to know what the design guidelines of your shirt were.
 And I'm actually curious, too.
 You always have some pretty intense outfits.
 I mean, you're kind of a stylish dude.
 What is going on with your shirt?
 It's actually – I don't know if you guys can see this on camera, but it's like – it
 almost looks like it's machine-generated art.
 Is this just a random shirt you found somewhere?
 Is there a story behind it?
 There's no story behind it.
 You didn't think you were going to be asked about your shirt today, did you?
 It's just a shirt that I thought was beautiful.
 And I like beautiful shirts.
 It actually looks like a fractal in some way, like a weird –
 Yeah, it has.
 What I like about it is it's got this very geometric detailed pattern if you actually
 get up close to it.
 Yeah.
 But from a distance, it's just this kind of cloudy, wintery kind of –
 I'm guessing that's what they can see on camera.
 Yeah, I don't think they can see the –
 But up close, there's actually like triangles and squares and circles in here, and it's
 quite beautiful.
 Anyhow, Matthias, thank you so much for joining us.
 My pleasure.
 As always.
 Thanks for sharing the announcement with us.
 Yeah.
 And I think I'm going to want to talk to you more in the near future.
 My pleasure, always.
 And thanks to the people asking questions.
 I'm sorry we couldn't get to all of them.
 Yes, thank you, everybody.
 Please head over to Android Design and give us feedback and go make awesome stuff.
 Yeah, please make beautiful applications.
 Ice cream sandwich deserves it.
 Yes.
 In my opinion.
 All right.
 All right then.