If you’re like most people, you probably use your phone’s camera to snap vacation photos, brag about your latest kitchen creations, and obsess over your pets and kids. How cute. If Google has its way, you might as well be using a $3,000 commercial gas range to boil water for mac and cheese.
At Google I/O 2021, the company’s annual developer conference, the software behemoth showed off a range of new apps and tools that treat your smartphone camera less as a humble memory maker, and more as a supercharged tool for interacting with the world around you.
Take three quick shots of those weird red bumps that just emerged on your arm, for instance, and Google has a new tool that will search for matching dermatological conditions. It uses machine learning and a few cues from you (how old are you, how long have you had it?) to identify the likely culprit in seconds.
The steadily improving object recognition in Google Lens has allowed Google to recognize what’s in a photo for years, but advances in machine learning now allow you to do much more than simply ask, “What is this?” Taking a photo of your hiking boots and asking Google “Can I hike Mt. Fuji in these?” is now a quick way to answer a search query that doesn’t exactly lend itself to text. And naturally, Google would be happy to help you buy just about anything you can point a camera at.
Your camera can do everything from help you shop to help you diagnose a skin condition.
Augmented reality is also moving beyond its cutesy phase of adding hats to video chats, and transforming into a must-have tool. Hold your phone up when you’re on the hunt for a restaurant, for instance, and Google Maps Live View will superimpose directions on top of your camera’s viewfinder. Google introduced this feature to Maps in 2019, but expanded it to more than 100 countries this year, turning it from a proof of concept to a legitimate navigational aid. And now it will work indoors, for when you need to find your airport gate or an urgently needed bubble tea at the mall.
In Google’s camera-centric new world, you can even use a photo to transform the entire look of your phone’s operating system. A new feature in Android 12 will analyze the colors in your lock-screen image to generate a custom color palette for everything from backgrounds to buttons in your apps.
Not all of these features are new, but the widening scope of what is possible shows Google’s clear trajectory: A world where your camera is every bit as much an input device as the dusty mouse and keyboard next to your desktop. Just as voice assistants have made it second nature to ask Alexa aloud for calculations, cooking tips, and alarms, Google wants you to reach for your phone camera not just when you want to capture a memory, but when you have a question.
Privacy advocates may wince at giving Google yet another pipeline of precious data to poke and prod, slice and dice. And Google even admitted that some of these shopping technologies aim to “turn the world into your personal showroom.” But the next time your flight leaves in seven minutes and you can’t find your gate, you might not care as you whip open Google Maps to get there.
At the 2026 Android Dev Summit, Google has announced some interesting features coming to both Android XR and Android CLI. Developers can now build and test apps for smart glasses without owning the hardware, while Android's command-line tools are getting upgrades that help AI coding agents test applications and identify performance problems. Both announcements could eventually mean better apps for both Android and extended reality hardware users.
Building Android XR apps without owning smart glasses
Google updated its adaptive Compose skill to help developers adapt existing Android apps for laptops, foldable phones, tablets, and other form factors, including the upcoming Googlebook platform. The goal of this update is to help AI coding agents customize apps for different screen sizes and input methods without developers having to maintain separate codebases for different devices.
The new skill goes beyond responsive layouts, adding support for desktop-focused features and foldable-specific interface adjustments. Google is also signaling that adaptive app experiences will be more prominent on Google Play, with the company planning to pay more attention to how apps and games perform on foldable devices next year.
Meta wants to make its AI feel like a cute tiny friend through a newly launched pet journal app called Waddle World. Think of it as Tamagotchi, but the pixelated pet can actually chat with you and doodle little illustrations based on what you tell it about your day. Right now, this free app is available on iOS and Android only in the Philippines, with access limited to adults.
Waddle World is a pet that wants to know about your day