Google announces complete cancellation of I/O, including online events

Google announced on Friday the complete cancellation of the annual I/O developer conference.

On March 3 this year, due to growing concerns about the spread of the new coronavirus, Google decided to cancel live events and switch to online meetings. These online meetings have now been cancelled.

Previously, Facebook, Microsoft, and Apple have moved similar developer events to online-only status, but Google is the first large tech company to completely cancel the event.

This is not a trivial exercise, because Google often uses I/O developer conferences and the cancelled Google Cloud Next conference to let developers, customers, partners and other interested parties know what new features they will launch in the coming year. ,product and service.

Without large-scale events like this, it will be harder for companies to publish information about these new products and services, and it will be harder to gain the power of networking provided by these meetings.

But this year, all of them have retreated to secondary status due to concerns over the new coronavirus epidemic.

Google said in a statement on the I/O website:

Out of concern for the health and safety of our developers, employees, and local communities — and in line with recent “shelter in place” orders by the local Bay Area counties — we sadly will not be holding I/O in any capacity this year.

Right now, the most important thing all of us can do is focus our attention on helping people with the new challenges we all face. Please know that we remain committed to finding other ways to share platform updates with you through our developer blogs and community forums.

Take care of yourselves. We'll continue to do everything we can to help our communities stay safe, informed, and connected.

Google typically uses its I/O developer conferences to release software updates and sometimes showcase new hardware products.

Last year, Google talked about updates to the Android system and Google Search, and also released the Nest Hub Max and Google Pixel 3a and Pixel 3a XL phones. Thousands were expected to attend this year's event.

It is expected that Google will announce iterative products for these phones at this year's event and may use this opportunity to discuss the new features of Android 11 in more depth. Google launched a beta version of Android 11 to developers in February.

However, Google usually releases its brand-new Android in the fall, so if it decides to do so instead of holding a compelling online event, it has plenty of time for a smaller product update launch.