Google is launching another new feature to switch between all android devices in your life a little easier. Media advisories, announced at THOSE, will allow you to transfer car audio to your phone, headphones, phone and smart home devices based on proximity. It’s Google’s latest effort to bring its Android ecosystem up to par with Apple’s when it comes to connectivity and cohesion between devices.
The way Apple’s products connect seamlessly with each other has helped it become the second smartphone maker and best seller smart watches and wireless headphones. The launch of Media Notifications is Google’s latest attempt to show that products don’t have to be made by the same company to work together. Google has been moving towards this goal for years by introducing features such as Phone Hub, Share Nearby and Quick pair. Additions like these have become all the more important now that Android and iOS have taken a bigger place in our cars, our ears and our wrists.
“It’s an ongoing investment,” Erik Kay, Google’s vice president of engineering for Android, told CNET exclusively ahead of CES. “We’re getting to the point where pretty much any feature that shows up on the phone or on a watch is inherently going to be cross-device functionality over time.”
Spotify and YouTube Music will be among the first apps to support media notifications. Google is also working with Spotify to help manage playback between Spotify Connect devices in Android 13 new media player – another move to improve consistency across Android devices.
Google has yet to say when either of these updates will roll out, or which products the media notifications will be compatible with. But since the goal is to make it easier to move between devices, Google says users probably won’t have to do any legwork in the settings menu to enable media notifications. The prompts should just pop up automatically when you get close to a compatible device.
“It all happens naturally through little nudges and prompts in the UI,” Kay said when describing how media notifications work.
Media notifications will not require Ultra-wide band, a connectivity protocol that has made its way into new high-end smartphones over the past three to four years, as it relies on signals from various sources such as Bluetooth and Wi-Fi. But it will probably work specifically if you’re using a UWB-enabled device, according to Kay. Since UWB can provide accurate proximity calculations, its presence in phones improves tasks such as file and content sharing between devices and digital car key functionality. It’s also the same technology Apple uses to point you in the right direction of a lost AirTag.
“UWB is something we are passionate about,” Kay said. “But it’s one of those things that’s going to take a long time to really become ubiquitous in the market.”
An illustration showing what Google’s new media notifications feature might look like.
Google’s announcements come after Apple gradually added new connectivity features to its ecosystem of iPhones, iPads, AirPods, Apple Watch and Macs. Apple brought the ability to exchange FaceTime calls between your iPhone, iPad and Mac in its most recent operating system updates, for example. The ability to transfer audio from your iPhone to the HomePod Mini Proximity-based was also a standout feature when Apple introduced its miniature speaker in 2021.
But unlike Apple, Google doesn’t use features like media notifications to push its proprietary hardware. Instead, Google wants swapping between Android devices to be consistent and easy, whether you’re using products from Google, Samsung, JBL, or one of its other partners.
It’s a goal Google has to balance with promoting its own Pixel devices, which are only part of the global smartphone market. You might wonder why Google doesn’t just keep features like media notifications exclusive to its Pixel phones, Pixel headphones, and Nest smart home devices to make its devices stand out in the Android landscape. If Google wants to emulate Apple’s ecosystem approach, that would definitely be one way to do it.
The answer is simple: improvements like these are only useful if they are available everywhere.
“Every feature you create is a network effect feature, so it depends on having a wide variety of devices to support the feature,” Kay said. “So if you build something [and] try making it exclusive to a device, or a partner, or even our own stuff, it won’t be as successful because there aren’t as many devices it can work with.”
As smartwatches and wireless headphones have become more popular, phone makers like Apple and Samsung have increasingly focused on these ancillary products as complementary selling points for their smartphones. Global smartwatch shipments grew 13% year-over-year in 2022, according to Search for counterpointwhile Canalys reports that true wireless headphones were the only personal audio category to show growth in Q3 2022. Google is the latest smartphone maker to jump on this bandwagon and launched its first smartwatch, the Pixel Watch, in October, Google plans to introduce a new Pixel tablet next year.
Getting watches, headphones, and smart home devices to work together more seamlessly isn’t just about convenience. Some experts believe that accessories like these will play an important role in the future of the smartphone, as the phone’s yearly upgrades seem incremental.
“The smartphone’s next quest is to figure out what it will connect to next,” said Runar Bjørhovde, an analyst at market research firm Canalys, in an earlier interview for a separate story. “Because the smartphone hasn’t necessarily reached its potential yet, but as a standalone device, I think the smartphone is getting closer and closer to the edge.”
