I/O 2018
44 announcements tracked. Reality Score: 50% shipped substantially as promised.
Shipped 17
Adaptive Battery
A DeepMind-powered feature that learns which apps you actually use and throttles the rest to extend battery life.
Shipped in Android 9 Pie in August 2018 and is still on by default across Android. Independent reviewers found gains modest but real; the feature has quietly evolved across subsequent Android releases without fanfare.
One of the few I/O 2018 features that delivered at promised scope and is still actively maintained.
AI for Social Good + $25M Impact Challenge
A program funneling Google AI research toward humanitarian problems (flood forecasting, whale tracking) plus a $25M Google.org grant pool for nonprofits.
The $25M was awarded to 20 grantees in May 2019. Flood Hub launched to the public in 2022 and expanded to 80+ countries. Most of the original initiatives still exist in some form.
Money distributed and programs continue.
AI-powered diabetic retinopathy screening with Verily
Google/Verily showcased a deep-learning model that screens eye fundus photos for diabetic retinopathy, headed to clinics in India and Thailand.
Received CE mark, deployed at Aravind Eye Hospital (India) in 2019 and rolled out further in Thailand. By 2023 the algorithm had screened hundreds of thousands of patients; Verily continues to expand it.
Delivered at promised scope and still actively expanding.
Android App Bundle (AAB)
A new publishing format that lets Play deliver only the code/resources each device needs, shrinking download sizes.
Shipped at I/O 2018 and became mandatory for new apps on Google Play in August 2021. Over 1 million apps and the majority of the top 1,000 had adopted AAB by 2021; still the standard in 2026.
One of I/O 2018's only unambiguous wins.
Android Jetpack
A re-organized suite of libraries (AndroidX, WorkManager, Navigation, Paging, plus the existing Architecture Components) to standardize modern Android development.
AndroidX 1.0 shipped in September 2018 and Jetpack has only grown since — Compose, the modern UI toolkit, became part of Jetpack and is now the default for new Android apps in 2026.
Delivered at promised scope and still actively maintained.
Android P (Android 9 Pie)
The next Android release, billed as 'AI at the core of the OS,' with adaptive features and a new gesture navigation pill replacing the three-button bar.
Released to Pixel devices on August 6, 2018 — roughly on schedule. The pill gesture nav was widely criticized as a half-measure and was replaced in Android 10 (2019) by a swipe-based system closer to iOS. The OS itself shipped at promised scope.
The OS shipped on time; the specific pill-shaped gesture nav was killed one year later, but the release as a whole delivered.
Gboard Morse code input
Morse code as an accessibility input method in Gboard, developed with Tania Finlayson.
Beta on Android the day of the keynote, stable on Android and iOS by July 2018. Still available.
Niche but actually delivered and maintained.
Google Lens — real-time results, Smart Text Selection, Style Match
Lens upgrades: results overlaid live on the viewfinder, Smart Text Selection to copy real-world text, and Style Match to find clothes/decor visually.
Real-time results and Smart Text Selection shipped in late May 2018 as promised. Style Match shipped but the visual shopping use case migrated into Google Shopping and (later) Circle to Search, where it's been substantially more successful than the original Lens framing.
Delivered roughly on time; evolved into Circle to Search.
Google One (paid storage rebrand)
Announced in May 2018 as a rebrand/relaunch of Google Drive paid storage plans, with family sharing, member perks, and a unified subscription brand.
Rolled out in the US in August 2018 and globally through 2019. Has since absorbed Google's consumer VPN (launched 2020, then killed June 2024) and become the host for the AI Premium / Gemini Advanced tier in 2024–2026. Brand survives; some perks were quietly dropped.
Delivered and grown into Google's main consumer-subscription wrapper, though the included VPN was killed in 2024.
Google Photos document scanning / PDF conversion
Auto-detect a photo of a document and offer to convert it to a PDF.
Shipped within months in Google Photos and the Google Drive scanner. Still available and considerably improved with on-device ML.
Delivered at promised scope.
Google Photos Suggested Actions
AI suggestions inline on photos: share with the person it recognized, brighten, rotate, archive.
Shipped through 2018 and 2019 as promised; suggestions still appear on photos and have been quietly subsumed by Magic Editor / Gemini-powered editing features in 2024–2026.
Delivered at promised scope; still actively used.
Google Sans typeface
A new corporate typeface (an evolution of Product Sans) rolled out across Google products.
Shipped immediately on the I/O 2018 stage and is still Google's primary brand typeface across products and marketing.
Unambiguous win.
Google Tasks (relaunch)
A revived Tasks product with a dedicated Android/iOS app, integrated with the redesigned Gmail and Calendar.
Standalone apps shipped in April 2018; Tasks became a G Suite core service on June 28, 2018. Still available and has gained recurring tasks and starred lists; Reminders were merged into Tasks in 2022–2023.
Delivered at promised scope and consolidated rather than fragmented.
Material Theming (Material Design 2)
A refreshed Material Design system with a Theme Editor (Sketch plugin) and customizable color/typography/shape tokens.
Shipped at I/O 2018 and rolled out across Google's apps through 2018–2019. Material You/Material 3 succeeded it in 2021 and Material 3 Expressive in 2025 — the I/O 2018 system itself is obsolete but evolved into its successors rather than being killed.
Superseded but not killed — natural design-system evolution.
Smart Compose in Gmail
ML-powered phrase autocompletion that suggests the rest of your sentence as you type an email — pitched as a free, universal Gmail feature.
Rolled out to consumer Gmail in May 2018 and to G Suite in September 2018. Later expanded to Docs (2019), Android (2019), more languages. The free Smart Compose still works in Gmail today; the more ambitious next-gen 'Help me write' lives behind paid Gemini for Workspace tiers, but the original feature delivered at promised scope.
One of the few unambiguous shipped-at-promised-scope wins from I/O 2018.
TPU 3.0
Google's third-generation Tensor Processing Unit, 8x the performance of TPU v2 per pod, requiring liquid cooling for the first time.
Delivered to Google Cloud customers in 2018–2019. TPU v3 was followed by v4 (2021), v5 (2023), Trillium/v6 (2024), and Ironwood/v7 (2025).
Shipped at promised scope and still the backbone of Google's AI infrastructure roadmap.
Wireless Android Auto support
Wireless Android Auto would expand beyond Pixel/Nexus to any phone running Android 9.
Shipped with Android 9 Pie; expanded to all Android 11+ phones in 2020. The separate phone-screen Android Auto app was killed in 2022 in favor of Assistant Driving Mode (which itself was shut down in 2024). The car-display wireless variant is the surviving part.
The specific wireless-Android-Auto promise (head-unit casting) shipped and is widely used; adjacent products died.
Shipped late 1
Linux apps on Chrome OS (Crostini)
Native Linux app support on Chrome OS for Android and web developers.
Reached dev channel in fall 2018 and stable in Chrome OS 72 (February 2019). Still supported in 2026.
Stable launched ~9 months after I/O announcement — just inside the 'shipped' window but late enough to flag.
Scaled back 14
App Actions
A system that lets apps surface deep-link 'actions' (e.g., 'Call Mom on Duo') across the launcher, Search, Assistant, and Play Store based on context.
Shipped with Android 9 Pie's actions.xml schema, but adoption was thin and the Google Search integration promised in the keynote never materialized. Google moved developers to Android Shortcuts; the original actions.xml is officially deprecated and most Assistant built-in intents were sunset in 2023.
actions.xml deprecated; surviving as a thin wrapper over Android Shortcuts. The Search integration promise was never kept.
Continued Conversation
Talk to Assistant naturally without re-saying 'Hey Google' for follow-up questions.
Rolled out to Google Home and Nest in June 2018. Still works on legacy Assistant surfaces, but Google Assistant is being replaced by Gemini through 2026 and the feature's natural successor is Gemini Live's continuous conversation mode.
Lives in a product being sunset; capability is migrating to Gemini Live but the original product home is dying.
Digital Wellbeing (Dashboard, App Timer, Wind Down)
Tools to help users see and limit time on their phone: a usage Dashboard, per-app timers, Wind Down grayscale at night, and improved Do Not Disturb.
Launched in beta with Android 9 Pie in fall 2018 and rolled out broadly in 2019. Features still nominally exist but have received essentially no meaningful updates in years; 2026 coverage explicitly noted Google has let the suite stagnate while pivoting attention to Gemini.
Shipped on time but unambiguously de-emphasized — the marquee anti-addiction framing is gone.
Google Assistant Custom Routines
User-created scheduled and triggered routines (e.g., 'Good Morning' to turn on lights, read the news, and start a commute).
Shipped in summer 2018. Routines remain functional and the concept lives on in Google Home Automations, but the Assistant-branded version is being absorbed into Gemini / Google Home as Assistant is sunset.
Capability survives under different umbrellas; the Assistant-Routines branding is on its way out.
Google Duplex
An AI that calls businesses on your behalf, demoed booking a hair-salon appointment and restaurant reservation with shockingly natural speech (including 'um' and 'mm-hmm'). Pichai framed it as a glimpse at a future general-purpose conversational AI.
Launched on Pixel phones in November 2018, narrowly limited to restaurant reservations in a handful of US cities. A 'Duplex on the Web' expansion in 2019 was killed in December 2022. The voice-calling sliver still technically exists for restaurant bookings but never became anything close to the general-purpose conversational agent the demo implied — it's now a footnote next to Gemini.
The viral demo was effectively orphaned; Duplex on the Web was killed Dec 2022 and the rest has been swallowed by Gemini's voice features.
Google Lens built into OEM camera apps
Lens would be integrated into the camera apps of 10 phone makers — LG, Motorola, Xiaomi, Sony, Nokia, Transsion, TCL, OnePlus, BQ, Asus.
Integrations shipped through 2018, but most OEMs either replaced Lens with their own visual search or quietly removed the shortcut. Lens itself is now part of the Google app and the Pixel camera; the headline cross-OEM camera integration largely evaporated.
The 10-OEM cross-pollination story didn't last.
Google Maps AR walking directions (Live View)
AR walking navigation overlaying arrows on the camera view, powered by a new Visual Positioning System (VPS). Demo included flying animated butterflies as guides.
Beta launched August 2019 — over a year late — as 'Live View' for Pixel and select ARCore/ARKit devices. Broader rollout came in 2020. The flying butterflies never shipped. In 2024 Google began winding down some Live View features.
Late, lost the whimsical guide-character demo entirely, and is now being de-emphasized — scope materially less than promised.
Google News redesign (AI-powered)
A relaunched Google News app combining elements of Newsstand and YouTube, with AI-driven 'For You,' 'Newscasts' and 'Full Coverage' sections.
Shipped on schedule in May 2018 and replaced the old Google Play Newsstand. The app still exists but has been overshadowed by Google Discover and AI Overviews; 'Newscasts' as a distinct feature quietly faded. The ambitious AI-meets-journalism framing is gone.
Core app survives but is a husk of the I/O 2018 vision.
Google Pay (Android Pay + Google Wallet merger)
Google folded Android Pay and Google Wallet into a single 'Google Pay' brand in early 2018, with I/O 2018 expanding it to ticketing and airline boarding passes.
Rebrand shipped in February 2018. But in 2022 Google revived 'Google Wallet' as the pass-storage app while keeping Google Pay for P2P — partially undoing the consolidation. By 2024 Google Pay's standalone US app was discontinued in favor of Wallet, effectively reversing the I/O 2018 merger.
The consolidation pitched at I/O 2018 was unwound — Wallet absorbed Pay's functions in the US and the standalone Pay app was killed.
Google Photos black-and-white Colorize
An AI feature that automatically colorizes old black-and-white photos — demoed live on stage as a near-term consumer feature.
Promised at I/O 2018 with no date. David Lieb confirmed at I/O 2019 it was 'still coming.' A limited beta finally surfaced in October 2019; broader availability didn't arrive until 2021–2022 and even then required a Google One subscription. Eventually folded into Magic Editor / Gemini photo tools.
Three-plus years late and ended up paywalled behind Google One — far less than the I/O 2018 demo implied.
Multilingual Google Assistant
Assistant would understand two languages at once on the same device — initially English/French/German/Spanish/Italian/Japanese.
Rolled out in August 2018 with English/French/German first, expanded later. Still works on Assistant, but the product is being replaced by Gemini, which handles multilingual interactions natively.
Feature delivered but rides the Assistant ship into the Gemini sunset.
Multiple Actions
Chain commands in one sentence: 'Turn off the lights and play jazz.'
Shipped the day of the keynote. Still technically works on Assistant, but the entire Assistant product is being replaced by Gemini, whose multi-step reasoning makes this 2018 feature a quaint footnote.
Feature still works but lives in a product Google is actively killing.
Six new Google Assistant voices (WaveNet)
Six new Assistant voices built with DeepMind's WaveNet for more human-sounding speech.
Shipped on day one of I/O 2018. The WaveNet voice stack is still used, but the Google Assistant product itself is being supplanted by Gemini through 2025–2026, with explicit sunset messaging on Android and Nest devices. The voices technically still work; the product they live in is on death row.
Feature shipped, but it lives inside a product Google is actively winding down for Gemini.
Waymo commercial self-driving service (Phoenix, late 2018)
Waymo would launch the world's first commercial robotaxi service in Phoenix later in 2018 — the I/O 2018 framing strongly implied a true driverless service.
Waymo One launched December 5, 2018 — just barely on time — but with safety drivers behind the wheel and limited to early-rider members. Truly driverless public rides didn't open broadly until 2020; meaningful expansion (Phoenix airport, SF, LA, Austin) came in 2024–2025.
Demo implied immediate full driverless service; reality was safety-driver chaperoned rides for an invite-only group. Capability eventually arrived but years later.
Rebranded 4
ARCore Cloud Anchors
Shared AR experiences across Android and iOS by anchoring virtual objects to cloud-synced positions in the real world.
Shipped in ARCore 1.2 in May 2018. The original Cloud Anchor API cloud endpoint was deprecated and shut down on August 31, 2023, replaced by a newer ARCore API. Functionality continues under a new name.
API moved; capability preserved.
ML Kit for Firebase
An on-device ML SDK packaged inside Firebase for text, image, face, barcode and label recognition.
Shipped in May 2018 as a Firebase beta, but in June 2020 Google split it: on-device APIs were spun out as the standalone ML Kit SDK, and the Firebase-branded on-device APIs were deprecated. The capability survived; the Firebase branding did not.
Capability preserved under new name — clean rebrand.
TensorFlow Lite for mobile/edge
Heavily featured at I/O 2018 as the production-ready way to run ML models on phones and edge devices, with new optimizations and partner integrations.
Shipped and matured into the standard mobile ML runtime for Android. In 2024 Google rebranded TensorFlow Lite as 'LiteRT' under the broader AI Edge umbrella, signaling a pivot away from TF-centric branding toward a multi-framework runtime (including JAX/PyTorch).
Capability preserved as LiteRT; TF-Lite branding effectively retired.
Wear OS (rebrand of Android Wear)
Android Wear was renamed Wear OS in March 2018 and got new I/O attention with a darker, more battery-friendly UI.
Shipped as a rebrand. Wear OS stagnated badly until the 2021 Samsung partnership produced Wear OS 3 on the Galaxy Watch 4. Now it powers Pixel Watch and Galaxy Watch lines, though the I/O 2018 era of the platform was effectively a three-year fallow period.
Three lost years between rebrand and Samsung relaunch; capability ultimately preserved.
Vapor 1
Slices
Interactive snippets of app UI that would appear inline inside Google Search and Assistant — e.g., a Lyft Slice showing ride prices right in Search.
The androidx.slice APIs technically shipped, but the marquee Google Search integration — the entire point of the announcement — was quietly paused around 2021 and never returned. By Android 13 the feature was effectively invisible to users; the App Actions integration was marked deprecated.
APIs exist as a developer ghost-town. The promised Search integration never reached users — textbook vapor at promised scope.
Killed 7
Actions on Google / third-party Conversational Actions investment
I/O 2018 hyped a thriving third-party 'Actions' ecosystem on Assistant — apps, games, and businesses building voice experiences, with new tooling and discovery surfaces.
The third-party Conversational Actions program was fully shut down on June 13, 2023. Google forcibly migrated remaining developers to App Actions / Android Shortcuts, and many businesses' voice apps simply ceased to exist.
Entire third-party voice ecosystem Google spent years promoting was unceremoniously killed.
Android Things 1.0
A stripped-down Android-based OS for IoT devices, finally reaching 1.0 with partner devices from JBL, Lenovo and LG.
Within nine months (February 2019) Google had narrowed scope to smart speakers/displays only. In December 2020 Google announced shutdown; the console stopped accepting new devices Jan 5, 2021 and stopped distributing updates Jan 5, 2022.
Classic killed-by-Google trajectory.
Google Maps 'For You' tab
A personalized recommendations tab in Maps surfacing new restaurants and places matching your taste.
Rolled out in June 2018 in five countries and expanded to 130+ markets in December 2018. The tab was quietly removed/merged in late 2022 as Google replaced the bottom-nav with 'Explore' and 'You'.
Shipped, then unceremoniously folded into other surfaces.
John Legend celebrity voice for Assistant
John Legend would lend his voice to Google Assistant — the first 'celebrity cameo' voice.
Shipped April 2019 — almost a year late — and was removed March 23, 2020. Other cameo voices (Issa Rae) followed similar short lifespans. The whole 'cameo voice' concept was abandoned.
Always pitched as time-limited, but the splashy I/O demo glossed over that. Dead within a year.
Pretty Please
An optional family mode that thanks kids for saying 'please' to Assistant.
Rolled out in November 2018 for Family Link accounts. Nominally still available but Google has barely mentioned it since 2019; many smart-display surfaces no longer expose the toggle. With Assistant being replaced by Gemini, the feature's death is essentially scheduled.
De facto abandoned and on track to disappear with the broader Assistant sunset.
Sceneform
A 3D rendering library for ARCore so Java developers could build AR without learning OpenGL.
Shipped May 2018. In August 2020 Google announced Sceneform would no longer receive new features; the open-source repo was archived. Replaced by community fork SceneView.
Abandoned to the community.
Third-party Smart Displays with Google Assistant
Showcased third-party Assistant-powered smart displays from Lenovo, JBL, LG, and Sony — a category to rival Amazon's Echo Show.
Lenovo Smart Display launched July 2018, JBL Link View and LG WK9 followed. Google stopped major development on the underlying OS in February 2019, shifted to its own Nest Hub line, and in April 2023 stopped issuing software updates to those third-party displays entirely.
Third-party displays effectively abandoned; even Google's own Nest Hub line faces a murky future as Assistant is replaced by Gemini.