Posted by Maru Ahues Bouza, Director, Android Developer Relations
Google I/O 2023 is just a week away, kicking off on Wednesday May 10 at 10AM PT with the Google Keynote and followed at 12:15PM PT by the Developer Keynote. The program schedule launched last week, allowing you to save sessions to your calendar and start previewing content.
To help you get ready for this year's Google I/O, we’re taking a look back at some of Android’s favorite moments from past Google I/Os, as well as a playlist of developer content to help you prepare. Take a look below, and start getting ready!
Modern Android Development
Helping you stay more productive and create better apps, Modern Android Development is Android’s set of tools and APIs, and they were born across many Google I/Os. Tor Norbye, Director of Engineering for Android, reflects on how Android development tools, APIs, and best practices have evolved over the years, starting in 2013 when he and the team announced Android Studio. Here are some of the talks we’re excited for in developer productivity at this year’s Google I/O:
From the launch of Android Auto and Android Wear in 2014 to last year’s preview of the Google Pixel Tablet, Google I/O has always been an important moment for seeing the new form factors that Android is extending to. Sara Hamilton, Developer Relations Engineer for Android, discusses how we are continuing to invest in multi-device experiences and making it easier for you to build for the entire Android device ecosystem. Sara shares her excitement for developers continuing to bring unique experiences to all screen sizes and types, from tablets and foldables, to watches and tvs. Some of our favorite talks at this year’s Google I/O in the multi-device world include:
From originally playing a smaller part in Google I/O keynotes in the early days to announcing 3 billion monthly active users in 2021, Dan Sandler, Software Engineer for Android, looks back at the tremendous growth of the Android platform and how it’s continuing to evolve. With a focus on helping you make quality apps, here are some of our favorite Android platform talks this year:
We can’t wait to show you all that’s new across Android in just under a week. Be sure to tune in on the Google I/O website on May 10 to catch the latest Android updates and announcements this year!
Posted by Joanne Truong, Student Researcher, and Wenhao Yu, Research Scientist, Robotics at Google
Teaching mobile robots to navigate in complex outdoor environments is critical to real-world applications, such as delivery or search and rescue. However, this is also a challenging problem as the robot needs to perceive its surroundings, and then explore to identify feasible paths towards the goal. Another common challenge is that the robot needs to overcome uneven terrains, such as stairs, curbs, or rockbed on a trail, while avoiding obstacles and pedestrians. In our prior work, we investigated the second challenge by teaching a quadruped robot to tackle challenging uneven obstacles and various outdoor terrains.
In “IndoorSim-to-OutdoorReal: Learning to Navigate Outdoors without any Outdoor Experience”, we present our recent work to tackle the robotic challenge of reasoning about the perceived surroundings to identify a viable navigation path in outdoor environments. We introduce a learning-based indoor-to-outdoor transfer algorithm that uses deep reinforcement learning to train a navigation policy in simulated indoor environments, and successfully transfers that same policy to real outdoor environments. We also introduce Context-Maps (maps with environment observations created by a user), which are applied to our algorithm to enable efficient long-range navigation. We demonstrate that with this policy, robots can successfully navigate hundreds of meters in novel outdoor environments, around previously unseen outdoor obstacles (trees, bushes, buildings, pedestrians, etc.), and in different weather conditions (sunny, overcast, sunset).
PointGoal navigation
User inputs can tell a robot where to go with commands like “go to the Android statue”, pictures showing a target location, or by simply picking a point on a map. In this work, we specify the navigation goal (a selected point on a map) as a relative coordinate to the robot’s current position (i.e., “go to ∆x, ∆y”), this is also known as the PointGoal Visual Navigation (PointNav) task. PointNav is a general formulation for navigation tasks and is one of the standard choices for indoor navigation tasks. However, due to the diverse visuals, uneven terrains and long distance goals in outdoor environments, training PointNav policies for outdoor environments is a challenging task.
Indoor-to-outdoor transfer
Recent successes in training wheeled and legged robotic agents to navigate in indoorenvironments were enabled by the development of fast, scalable simulators and the availability of large-scale datasets of photorealistic3D scansof indoorenvironments. To leverage these successes, we develop an indoor-to-outdoor transfer technique that enables our robots to learn from simulated indoor environments and to be deployed in real outdoor environments.
To overcome the differences between simulated indoor environments and real outdoor environments, we apply kinematic control and image augmentation techniques in our learning system. When using kinematic control, we assume the existence of a reliable low-level locomotion controller that can control the robot to precisely reach a new location. This assumption allows us to directly move the robot to the target location during simulation training through a forward Euler integration and relieves us from having to explicitly model the underlying robot dynamics in simulation, which drastically improves the throughput of simulation data generation. Prior work has shown that kinematic control can lead to better sim-to-real transfer compared to a dynamic control approach, where full robot dynamics are modeled and a low-level locomotion controller is required for moving the robot.
Left Kinematic control; Right: Dynamic control
We created an outdoor maze-like environment using objects found indoors for initial experiments, where we used Boston Dynamics' Spot robot for test navigation. We found that the robot could navigate around novel obstacles in the new outdoor environment.
The Spot robot successfully navigates around obstacles found in indoor environments, with a policy trained entirely in simulation.
However, when faced with unfamiliar outdoor obstacles not seen during training, such as a large slope, the robot was unable to navigate the slope.
The robot is unable to navigate up slopes, as slopes are rare in indoor environments and the robot was not trained to tackle it.
To enable the robot to walk up and down slopes, we apply an image augmentation technique during the simulation training. Specifically, we randomly tilt the simulated camera on the robot during training. It can be pointed up or down within 30 degrees. This augmentation effectively makes the robot perceive slopes even though the floor is level. Training on these perceived slopes enables the robot to navigate slopes in the real-world.
By randomly tilting the camera angle during training in simulation, the robot is now able to walk up and down slopes.
Since the robots were only trained in simulated indoor environments, in which they typically need to walk to a goal just a few meters away, we find that the learned network failed to process longer-range inputs — e.g., the policy failed to walk forward for 100 meters in an empty space. To enable the policy network to handle long-range inputs that are common for outdoor navigation, we normalize the goal vector by using the log of the goal distance.
Context-Maps for complex long-range navigation
Putting everything together, the robot can navigate outdoors towards the goal, while walking on uneven terrain, and avoiding trees, pedestrians and other outdoor obstacles. However, there is still one key component missing: the robot’s ability to plan an efficient long-range path. At this scale of navigation, taking a wrong turn and backtracking can be costly. For example, we find that the local exploration strategy learned by standard PointNav policies are insufficient in finding a long-range goal and usually leads to a dead end (shown below). This is because the robot is navigating without context of its environment, and the optimal path may not be visible to the robot from the start.
Navigation policies without context of the environment do not handle complex long-range navigation goals.
To enable the robot to take the context into consideration and purposefully plan an efficient path, we provide a Context-Map (a binary image that represents a top-down occupancy map of the region that the robot is within) as additional observations for the robot. An example Context-Map is given below, where the black region denotes areas occupied by obstacles and white region is walkable by the robot. The green and red circle denotes the start and goal location of the navigation task. Through the Context-Map, we can provide hints to the robot (e.g., the narrow opening in the route below) to help it plan an efficient navigation route. In our experiments, we create the Context-Map for each route guided by Google Maps satellite images. We denote this variant of PointNav with environmental context, as Context-Guided PointNav.
Example of the Context-Map (right) for a navigation task (left).
It is important to note that the Context-Map does not need to be accurate because it only serves as a rough outline for planning. During navigation,the robot still needs to rely on its onboard cameras to identify and adapt its path to pedestrians, which are absent on the map. In our experiments, a human operator quickly sketches the Context-Map from the satellite image, masking out the regions to be avoided. This Context-Map, together with other onboard sensory inputs, including depth images and relative position to the goal, are fed into a neural network with attention models (i.e., transformers), which are trained using DD-PPO, a distributed implementation of proximal policy optimization, in large-scale simulations.
The Context-Guided PointNav architecture consists of a 3-layer convolutional neural network (CNN) to process depth images from the robot's camera, and a multilayer perceptron (MLP) to process the goal vector. The features are passed into a gated recurrent unit (GRU). We use an additional CNN encoder to process the context-map (top-down map). We compute the scaled dot product attention between the map and the depth image, and use a second GRU to process the attended features (Context Attn., Depth Attn.). The output of the policy are linear and angular velocities for the Spot robot to follow.
Results
We evaluate our system across three long-range outdoor navigation tasks. The provided Context-Maps are rough, incomplete environment outlines that omit obstacles, such as cars, trees, or chairs.
With the proposed algorithm, our robot can successfully reach the distant goal location 100% of the time, without a single collision or human intervention. The robot was able to navigate around pedestrians and real-world clutter that are not present on the context-map, and navigate on various terrain including dirt slopes and grass.
Route 1
Route 2
Route 3
Conclusion
This work opens up robotic navigation research to the less explored domain of diverse outdoor environments. Our indoor-to-outdoor transfer algorithm uses zero real-world experience and does not require the simulator to model predominantly-outdoor phenomena (terrain, ditches, sidewalks, cars, etc). The success in the approach comes from a combination of a robust locomotion control, low sim-to-real gap in depth and map sensors, and large-scale training in simulation. We demonstrate that providing robots with approximate, high-level maps can enable long-range navigation in novel outdoor environments. Our results provide compelling evidence for challenging the (admittedly reasonable) hypothesis that a new simulator must be designed for every new scenario we wish to study. For more information, please see our project page.
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank Sonia Chernova, Tingnan Zhang, April Zitkovich, Dhruv Batra, and Jie Tan for advising and contributing to the project. We would also like to thank Naoki Yokoyama, Nubby Lee, Diego Reyes, Ben Jyenis, and Gus Kouretas for help with the robot experiment setup.
We’re introducing a new section in the admin console dedicated to managing spaces in Google Chat. Here, admins can see a list of all spaces in their domain, the members of those spaces, and take actions such as adding members or changing a members role.
View all of the spaces in your organization
See all members, including space managers, for a particular space
Adding members to a space via the Space Management tool
Assigning roles to a member via the Space Management tool
Add new members to a space and specify their role.
Who’s impacted
Admins
Why it’s important
Spaces in Google Chat are an essential part of collaboration and community building across organizations of all sizes. As such, it’s important for admins to easily view and manage their spaces to keep them productive and safe. You can look up specific spaces based on it’s ID or name and take actions such as reviewing members of each individual space, adding members or assigning new space managers.
Further, the space management tool gives admins the information that will allow them to better understand how spaces are used in their organization:
The number of members in the space
Whether conversation history is on or off for the space
Sharing permissions for a space
Active spaces and spaces with no recent activity
Additional details
This feature is available for all super admins by default. Delegated admins need to have the “Manage chat and space conversations” role to access space management — visit the Help Center to learn more about administrator roles.
Getting started
Admins: In the Admin console, navigate to Apps > Google Workspace > Settings for Google Chat > Manage spaces. Visit the Help Center to learn more about managing spaces in the Admin console.
Posted by Lyanne Alfaro, DevRel Program Manager, Google Developer Studio
Developer Journey is a monthly series to spotlight diverse and global developers sharing relatable challenges, opportunities, and wins in their journey. Every month, we will spotlight developers around the world, the Google tools they leverage, and the kind of products they are building.
What does Google I/O mean to you, and what are you looking forward to most this year?
To me, Google I/O is the paradise for embracing cutting-edge technologies. I have followed the keynotes online for two years, and it is so exciting that I will join in-person this year! I can’t wait to exchange thoughts with other amazing developers and listen to the game-changing AI topics.
What's your favorite part about Google I/O?
I’m obsessed with live demos for new technologies. Daring to do a live demo shows Google developers’ strong confidence and pride in their work. It is also exciting to see what kinds of use cases are emphasized and what metrics are evaluated.
What Google tools have you used to build?
As a full-stack developer and cloud engineer, I have built progressive apps and distributed services with Chrome, Android Studio, BigQuery, Analytics, Firebase, Google Maps, YouTube, and Google Cloud Platform. Other than those, I love exploring AI and ML features with Google Colab, Cloud TPU, and TensorFlow.
Which tool has been your favorite? Why?
Chrome has been my favorite. To me, it is the best choice for web app development: great compatibility across OS platforms, feature-rich developer tools, and smooth mobile integration. ChromeDriver is a sweet bonus when accessing deployments and automating tests on a server.
Tell us about something you've built in the past using Google tools.
I collaborated with my friends to build a web app aimed at helping people understand and analyze soccer games easier and faster with pre-trained ML models. This app includes accessing YouTube video sources, detecting targets with Yolo-v3 in TensorFlow, accelerating computation with Colab GPU, and storing results in Google Cloud.
What advice would you give someone starting in their developer journey?
Actively discuss with people and listen to their ideas, especially if you are a student or a beginner. Participating in GDSC and GDG events is a great source to connect with peers and senior developers near you and across the globe. I benefit so much simply by chatting about random tech topics with others. Good communication will open your mind and guide your direction. Meeting interesting people will also make your journey as a developer much more colorful and enjoyable!
Jolina Li
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
GDSC Lead
Google Developer Student Club, University of Toronto St. George
What does Google I/O mean to you, and what are you looking forward to most this year?
It has been a dream for me since high school to attend Google I/O. In previous years, I would watch clips of the keynotes online and browse through creators’ YouTube vlogs to see all the incredible technologies at the hands-on stations. This May, I can’t believe I will be traveling to Mountain View and experiencing Google I/O 2023 for the first time live in person. For me, Google I/O is an opportunity to connect with passionate individuals in the developer community, including students, and experts from around the world. It is a full day of learning, inspiration, innovation, community, and growth. This year, I’m looking forward to hearing all the exciting keynotes in person, interacting with transformative technology, and making new connections.
What's your favorite part about Google I/O?
My favorite part about Google I/O is the technical sessions after the keynotes, where I can learn about innovative products from experts and engage in product demonstrations. I love seeing developments in machine learning, so I will definitely visit the TensorFlow station. I’m also excited to explore other Google technology stations, including Google Cloud and Google Maps Platform, and learn as much as I can.
What Google tools have you used to build?
I have used Android to build mobile apps for my software design course and a tech entrepreneurship competition. I have also used Google Colab, a cloud-based Jupyter notebook environment, for my research and deep learning engineering internships.
Which tool has been your favorite? Why?
I love using Google Colab because it’s an accessible and cost-free tool for students working on data science and machine learning projects. The environment requires no setup and offers expensive computing resources such as GPUs at no cost. It uses Python, my favorite language, and contains all the main Python libraries. The user interface features independent code segments you can run and test rather than running the entire script every time you edit code. There is also an option to add text segments between code to document various script components. Google Colab notebooks can be easily shared with anyone for collaboration and stored in Google Drive for convenient access.
Tell us about something you've built in the past using Google tools.
For my software design course project, a few teammates and I built a cooking recipe organizer app using Android Studio that allows users to discover new recipes and build their own portfolio of recipes. Users can save interesting recipes that they found, give ratings and reviews, and also upload their own recipes to the database. I designed a recipe sorting and filtering system that allows users to sort their saved recipes alphabetically, by interest keywords or rating, and filter their recipes by genre.
Android Studio allowed me to preview the mobile app development using an emulator that functions across all types of Android devices. This feature helped me to understand the app from a user’s perspective and develop the UI/UX more efficiently. We also used Google Firebase for its cloud storage, non-relational feature, and high compatibility with Android.
What advice would you give someone starting in their developer journey?
When I began attending university, I had no experience in programming and had to start my computer science career from zero. I pursued computer science, however, because I was interested in learning about AI and building technology to solve global problems such as climate change.
I believe that when you are starting your career, it’s important to have a goal about what you want to achieve. There are so many possibilities in tech, and having a goal can help you make decisions and motivate you when you’re facing challenges. It’s also important to keep an open mind about different opportunities and explore multiple areas in tech to learn more about the field and discover your passions.
Another tip is to look for opportunities and resources to help you grow as a developer. Many opportunities and resources are available for beginners, including online courses, self-guided project tutorials, and beginner-friendly workshops.
Google has amazing developer communities, including student campus clubs (GDSC), professional developer groups (GDG), Google developer expert groups (GDE), and a women in tech community (WTM). You can also create your own opportunities by teaching a hands-on workshop to enhance your technical and soft skills, starting a local developer group to gain leadership and collaboration skills, or building projects to increase your knowledge and apply what you learn.
Learn a lot, discover new opportunities, gain new skills, connect with people in tech, and keep pursuing what you love about technology!
Maria Paz Muñoz Parra
Malmö, Sweden
Google Developer Groups Organizer and Women Techmakers Ambassador
What does Google I/O mean to you, and what are you looking forward to most this year?
Google I/O is an opportunity to stay up to date in Google technologies and initiatives. We get to witness innovation, connect with other developers and generate energetic conversations about what we are passionate about.
Besides Bard, this year I have a special interest in the WebGPU API. Currently, I work as a senior front-end developer on a Knowledge Graph project. There, one of the most powerful tools for ontologists and data scientists to model and understand data are the canvases. I’m curious about how we can boost the performance when rendering these graphs on the web, using the new features of WebGPU. Google I/O will surely be an inspiration for my work.
What's your favorite part about Google I/O?
It’s the perfect excuse to meet my colleagues and watch the event together, popcorn included! In the online realm, it’s always fun to follow the discussions on social media, and Google always finds a way to surprise us and keep us engaged in our learning process. I still remember the I/O Adventure platform of 2022. It was an outstanding virtual experience, interacting with people in the community booths. Later, I also followed the recorded talks. A gamified learning experience, top to bottom!
What Google tools have you used to build?
The devTools have been my everyday tools for the past 10 years. The ones that I have used the most are the Core Web Vital metrics, devTools for debugging (extra love for the ones to debug accessibility issues), and tools for testing CSS on the browser (i.e. the grid properties and the media queries emulation features).
Since last year, I’ve been testing the Instant Loading and Seamless APIs, and they have allowed me to deliver high-quality interfaces with intuitive navigation, as we are used to having in native mobile apps.
Which tool has been your favorite? Why?
Accessibility guidelines and tools are my favorite. Lighthouse, the accessibility scanner, and Material Design. These tools help us ensure that all users, including those with disabilities, can access and use content and services published on the web. With these tools integrated, other users can start educating themselves on the power of accessibility. My interest in this space started when I noticed that my mother, who has low vision and motor impairments in her hands, couldn’t easily access her favorite music on her phone. The voice search feature on YouTube was revolutionary for her, and probably for many other elders.
Many questions popped into my mind: “Who is considered a user with a disability? How are the interfaces I create used? Am I creating unintentional barriers?”
As a web developer, tools that allow me to test, audit, understand and improve are a must.
Tell us about something you've built in the past using Google tools.
I collaborated with my friends to build a web app aimed at helping people understand and analyze soccer games easier and faster with pre-trained ML models. This app includes accessing YouTube video sources, detecting targets with Yolo-v3 in TensorFlow, accelerating computation with Colab GPU, and storing results in Google Cloud.
What advice would you give someone starting in their developer journey?
Many developers who start their journey come from other areas of expertise or industries. Imagine a journalist, nurse, or primary school teacher who wants to start a developer journey. They may feel they need to throw away all the knowledge they have acquired.
On the contrary, I believe prior knowledge is key to standing out as a developer. Every person has a different combination of interests, talents, and skills. Master the basics, and shine with your own story.
From meeting talented developers to exciting keynotes, there’s so much to look forward to at Google I/O 2023. To optimize your experience, create or connect a developer profile, and start saving content to My I/O to build your personal agenda. Share your experience with us by using #GoogleIO across your social media so we can find you!
Building upon that feature, users will now see a checkmark icon for senders that have adopted BIMI. This will help users identify messages from legitimate senders versus impersonators.
Who’s impacted
Admins and end users
Why it matters
Strong email authentication helps users and email security systems identify and stop spam, and also enables senders to leverage their brand trust. This increases confidence in email sources and gives readers an immersive experience, creating a better email ecosystem for everyone.
To take advantage of BIMI for your outgoing emails to Gmail and other platforms, ensure that your organization has adopted DMARC, and that you have validated your logo with a VMC, issued by a Certification Authority such as Entrust or DigiCert.
End users: There is no end user setting for this feature.
By: Arnar Birgisson and Diana K Smetters, Identity Ecosystems and Google Account Security and Safety teams
Starting today, you can create and use passkeys on your personal Google Account. When you do, Google will not ask for your password or 2-Step Verification (2SV) when you sign in.
Passkeys are a more convenient and safer alternative to passwords. They work on all major platforms and browsers, and allow users to sign in by unlocking their computer or mobile device with their fingerprint, face recognition or a local PIN.
Using passwords puts a lot of responsibility on users. Choosing strong passwords and remembering them across various accounts can be hard. In addition, even the most savvy users are often misled into giving them up during phishing attempts. 2SV (2FA/MFA) helps, but again puts strain on the user with additional, unwanted friction and still doesn’t fully protect against phishing attacks and targeted attacks like "SIM swaps" for SMS verification. Passkeys help address all these issues.
Creating passkeys on your Google Account
When you add a passkey to your Google Account, we will start asking for it when you sign in or perform sensitive actions on your account. The passkey itself is stored on your local computer or mobile device, which will ask for your screen lock biometrics or PIN to confirm it's really you. Biometric data is never shared with Google or any other third party – the screen lock only unlocks the passkey locally.
Unlike passwords, passkeys can only exist on your devices. They cannot be written down or accidentally given to a bad actor. When you use a passkey to sign in to your Google Account, it proves to Google that you have access to your device and are able to unlock it. Together, this means that passkeys protect you against phishing and any accidental mishandling that passwords are prone to, such as being reused or exposed in a data breach. This is stronger protection than most 2SV (2FA/MFA) methods offer today, which is why we allow you to skip not only the password but also 2SV when you use a passkey. In fact, passkeys are strong enough that they can stand in for security keys for users enrolled in our Advanced Protection Program.
Creating a passkey on your Google Account makes it an option for sign-in. Existing methods, including your password, will still work in case you need them, for example when using devices that don't support passkeys yet. Passkeys are still new and it will take some time before they work everywhere. However, creating a passkey today still comes with security benefits as it allows us to pay closer attention to the sign-ins that fall back to passwords. Over time, we'll increasingly scrutinize these as passkeys gain broader support and familiarity.
Using passkeys to sign in to your Google Account
Using passkeys does not mean that you have to use your phone every time you sign in. If you use multiple devices, e.g. a laptop, a PC or a tablet, you can create a passkey for each one. In addition, some platforms securely back your passkeys up and sync them to other devices you own. For example, if you create a passkey on your iPhone, that passkey will also be available on your other Apple devices if they are signed in to the same iCloud account. This protects you from being locked out of your account in case you lose your devices, and makes it easier for you to upgrade from one device to another.
If you want to sign in on a new device for the first time, or temporarily use someone else's device, you can use a passkey stored on your phone to do so. On the new device, you’d just select the option to "use a passkey from another device" and follow the prompts. This does not automatically transfer the passkey to the new device, it only uses your phone's screen lock and proximity to approve a one-time sign-in. If the new device supports storing its own passkeys, we will ask separately if you want to create one there.
In fact, if you sign in on a device shared with others, you should not create a passkey there. When you create a passkey on a device, anyone with access to that device and the ability to unlock it, can sign in to your Google Account. While that might sound a bit alarming, most people will find it easier to control access to their devices rather than maintaining good security posture with passwords and having to be on constant lookout for phishing attempts.
If you lose a device with a passkey for your Google Account and believe someone else can unlock it, you can immediately revoke the passkey in your account settings. If your device supports the option to remotely wipe it, consider doing that as well, especially if it also has passkeys for other services. We always recommend having a recovery phone and email on your account, as it increases your chance of recovering it in case someone gains access.
To start using passkeys on your personal Google Account today, visit g.co/passkeys.
How does this work under the hood?
The main ingredient of a passkey is a cryptographic private key – this is what is stored on your devices. When you create one, the corresponding public key is uploaded to Google. When you sign in, we ask your device to sign a unique challenge with the private key. Your device only does so if you approve this, which requires unlocking the device. We then verify the signature with your public key.
Your device also ensures the signature can only be shared with Google websites and apps, and not with malicious phishing intermediaries. This means you don't have to be as watchful with where you use passkeys as you would with passwords, SMS verification codes, etc. The signature proves to us that the device is yours since it has the private key, that you were there to unlock it, and that you are actually trying to sign in to Google and not some intermediary phishing site. The only data shared with Google for this to work is the public key and the signature. Neither contains any information about your biometrics.
The private key behind the passkey lives on your devices and in some cases, it stays only on the device it was created on. In other cases, your operating system or an app similar to a password manager may sync it to other devices you own. Passkey sync providers like the Google Password Manager and iCloud Keychain use end-to-end encryption to keep your passkeys private.
Since each passkey can only be used for a single account, there is no risk of reusing them across services. This means that your Google Account is safe from data breaches across your other accounts, and vice versa.
When you do need to use a passkey from your phone to sign in on another device, the first step is usually to scan a QR code displayed by that device. The device then verifies that your phone is in proximity using a small anonymous Bluetooth message and sets up an end-to-end encrypted connection to the phone through the internet. The phone uses this connection to deliver your one-time passkey signature, which requires your approval and the biometric or screen lock step on the phone. Neither the passkey itself nor the screen lock information is sent to the new device. The Bluetooth proximity check ensures remote attackers can’t trick you into releasing a passkey signature, for example by sending you a screenshot of a QR code from their own device.
Passkeys are built on the protocols and standards Google helped create in the FIDO Alliance and W3C WebAuthn working group. This means passkey support works across all platforms and browsers that adopt these standards. You can store the passkeys for your Google Account on any compatible device or service.
The same standards and protocols power security keys, our strongest offering for high risk accounts. Passkeys inherit many of their strong account protections from security keys, but with convenience that is suitable for everyone.
Today's launch is a big step in a cross-industry effort that we helped start more than 10 years ago, and we are committed to passkeys as the future of secure sign-in, for everyone. We hope that other web and app developers adopt passkeys and are able to use our deployment as a model. Developers can learn more about passkey support on our Chrome and Android platforms here.
Posted by Maru Ahues Bouza, Director, Android Developer Relations
Checks takes the complexity out of compliance, using AI to help companies quickly discover, communicate and fix issues.
Posted by 
Google Registry is launching all new .dad, .phd, .prof, .esq, .foo, .zip, .mov, and .nexus top-level domains.
We’ve begun rolling out support for passkeys across Google Accounts on all major platforms as an additional option that people can use to sign in.
Check out Waze’s latest driving experience with the Jonas Brothers.