There have been many credible rumours about the direction Google is taking Android after last year’s big update with Lollipop. While Material Design will be staying around, we’ve come to expect yearly updates to the mobile platform that include new releases that bring new features that may be front-facing or just for the developers to implement on the back-end. With promises for a smoother experience thanks to a new RAM management arrangement, Android M is expected to be announced tomorrow at Google I/O keynote address.
Google Vice President of Engineering Hiroshi Lockheimer just confirmed during an interview with Fast Company that indeed Android M exists and will be out sometime this year. While he didn’t mention Google’s developer conference as the launch venue, it has been the company’s preferred platform for such announcements since key partners (developers) are in attendance and get to hear first hand what is in store.
“So we’ve landed with sort of a yearly cadence of big releases, so, for instance, one year we release J, the next year we release K, and then the year after that L, and then this year we’ll launch M, and so you can predict what will happen next year.”