Google I/O Is Back — Virtually — May 18-20

Google made it official yesterday: I/O 2021 is happening, and it’ll run May 18 through 20. No surprise on the format — it’s free and fully virtual again, same as pretty much every developer conference has been since last spring. What’s notable is just that it’s happening at all. Google didn’t do a virtual I/O last year; it canceled the whole thing outright in 2020 as the pandemic hit its worst early phase and nobody had figured out how to run a keynote over video yet. So this is really the first I/O in two years, which is a long time in software-years.

Google kept up its tradition of not just tweeting the dates but burying them in one of those little interactive web puzzles/games it likes to do for I/O announcements. It’s a nice touch and always gets developers poking around and sharing screenshots, even if the puzzle itself is usually pretty simple once you find it.

The bigger question is what’s actually going to be on stage (or, well, on screen). A few things I’ll be watching for:

Android 12. We’re already deep into the preview builds, so I/O should be where Google does the big public unveiling with the redesigned notification shade, widgets, and whatever “Material You” ends up meaning in practice — rumors point to a much more dynamic, personalized theming system than past Android releases.

Wear OS. It’s been quietly limping along for years while Apple Watch and Samsung’s Tizen-based watches ate its lunch. There’s been chatter about Google finally doing something bigger here, possibly folding in tech from the Fitbit acquisition that closed earlier this year. I/O would be the obvious venue.

AI and Assistant updates. Every I/O since roughly 2016 has had some flavor of “here’s our new AI thing,” whether that’s Duplex, on-device speech recognition, or Assistant improvements. I’d bet on more of the same this year, likely leaning into privacy-focused, on-device processing given how much scrutiny Google’s data practices have gotten.

Flutter and Fuchsia. Flutter’s been on a genuine roll as a cross-platform framework, and I wouldn’t be shocked to see more investment announced there. Fuchsia is the wildcard — it’s been shipping quietly on a Nest Hub for months now, and I keep expecting Google to either say more about its long-term plans or keep pretending it’s not happening.

What I’m less sure about is whether a virtual-only format actually works well for a conference like I/O, whose whole appeal used to be the hallway track — the random conversations with Google engineers at kiosks, the hands-on demo stations. Last year’s substitute content (prerecorded videos, blog posts) was fine but forgettable. If Google’s learned anything from a year of virtual events across the industry, hopefully it shows up in how I/O is actually produced this time, not just in the fact that it’s happening again.

Either way, mark the calendar. Six weeks out, and I expect the developer blogs to start filling in details well before the keynote itself.