Tech consumers won’t see Google build its own smartphones anytime in the near future, according to company CEO Sundar Pichai.
“Our plan is still to work with OEMs to make phones,” said Pichai in an interview with legendary tech reporter Walt Mossberg during Re/code‘s annual Code Conference.
Disappointing news, I know, but what Pichai did promise is that his company will “be more opinionated about the design of the phones.”
The executive also said Google would do what was needed to “push the devices forward,” saying, “You’ll see us hopefully add more features on top of Android on Nexus phones.”
Pichai didn’t provide explicit details on how his company plans to accomplish that lofty goal, especially with so many disparate OEMs contributing to the Android ecosystem, but based on his responses to Mossberg’s questions, the plan is to develop and showcase best practices for upcoming mobile technologies.
We’ve already seen Google do this in a way. For instance, when Google unveiled the Nexus 5X and 6P last fall, the company spent a lot of its presentation talking up the benefits of Nexus Imprint, its new fingerprint authentication platform. Since the release of those two devices and the newest version of the company’s mobile operating system, almost all Android OEMs have adopted Marshmallow’s stock fingerprint authentication API, unifying what was once a mess of custom implementations into a single user experience that’s the same across every Android device.
So while we may never see a Google-made Nexus device, the good news is we’ll likely see the company do something interesting with its next pair of Nexus devices.
You can watch Mossberg’s entire chat with Pichai on The Verge.
[source]The Verge[/source]
