Google I/O 2025 proved to be a landmark event that catapulted artificial intelligence into the spotlight like never before. This year’s conference was brimming with transformative announcements designed to reshape our digital experiences—from intelligent search to groundbreaking creative tools. Let’s take a deeper look into the major highlights unveiled at the event.

Gemini AI Takes Center Stage

At the heart of many announcements was the continued evolution of Gemini, Google’s powerful AI model. We saw:

Agent Mode: An experimental feature for Google AI Ultra subscribers, Agent Mode allows Gemini to understand a high-level goal and then perform the necessary actions across various applications. Think of it as your personal digital assistant, truly taking the initiative.

Gemini 2.5 and DeepThink: The latest iteration, Gemini 2.5, boasts significant improvements in reasoning, multimodal understanding, and long-context capabilities. Even more exciting is “DeepThink,” an experimental mode for Gemini 2.5 Pro, designed for highly complex mathematical and coding problems. It’s clear Google is pushing the boundaries of what AI can “think” about.

Gemini in Search (AI Mode): This was arguably the biggest news for everyday users. Google Search is getting an “AI Mode” that fundamentally changes how we get information. It allows for longer, more complex queries, uses a “query fan-out” technique to break down searches, and can even incorporate “Personal Context” from your other Google products to give you truly tailored results. Imagine asking Google to plan your week, taking into account your calendar and past searches!

Gemini Live: The conversational capabilities of Gemini are expanding, with Gemini Live now allowing natural language interactions and the ability to use your phone’s camera to “show” Gemini things in your real-world environment. Plus, it’s now available on both Android and iOS, with screen sharing!

Creativity Unleashed: Veo 3 and Imagen 4

For creators and developers, I/O 2025 delivered a treasure trove of new tools:

Developer-focused AI: Google is making it easier than ever for developers to integrate AI into their apps. Updates include new ML Kit GenAI APIs, an agentic Colab experience, and enhancements to Gemini Code Assist for more intuitive coding. They even introduced “Jules,” an asynchronous coding agent that can tackle your backlog of bugs and even take the first cut at building new features!

Veo 3 and Flow: Google’s text-to-video capabilities are evolving rapidly with Veo 3, which can now generate video with audio and produce 4K footage. Building on this, Flow is a new AI-powered filmmaking app that allows users to create AI-generated video clips from text prompts or images, with tools to stitch them together for longer narratives.

Imagen 4: Google’s text-to-image model is getting even better, generating more photorealistic images with enhanced detail and better handling of tricky elements like typography.

Stitch UI Design Tool: For designers, Stitch is a game-changer. This AI-powered tool can create high-quality UI designs and frontend code from simple text prompts, accelerating the design workflow significantly.

Android XR and Immersive Experiences

Google is making a serious play in the extended reality (XR) space:

Android XR Smart Glasses: After years of experimentation, Google unveiled its Android XR platform, specifically highlighting new smart glasses developed in partnership with companies like Gentle Monster and Warby Parker. These aren’t just notification machines; they promise features like live translation, directional navigation, and the ability to view immersive 360-degree videos, all powered by Gemini.

Google Beam: This is straight out of a futuristic movie! Google Beam is a new platform that uses AI to transform standard 2D video calls into incredibly realistic 3D experiences, making it feel like you’re in the same room as the other person. HP and Zoom are already on board to bring the first Google Beam devices to market.

Creative Tools and Developer Delights

For creators and developers, I/O 2025 delivered a treasure trove of new tools:

Veo 3 and Flow: Google’s text-to-video capabilities are evolving rapidly with Veo 3, which can now generate video with audio and produce 4K footage. Building on this, Flow is a new AI-powered filmmaking app that allows users to create AI-generated video clips from text prompts or images, with tools to stitch them together for longer narratives.

Imagen 4: Google’s text-to-image model is getting even better, generating more photorealistic images with enhanced detail and better handling of tricky elements like typography.

Stitch UI Design Tool: For designers, Stitch is a game-changer. This AI-powered tool can create high-quality UI designs and frontend code from simple text prompts, accelerating the design workflow significantly.

Developer-focused AI: Google is making it easier than ever for developers to integrate AI into their apps. Updates include new ML Kit GenAI APIs, an agentic Colab experience, and enhancements to Gemini Code Assist for more intuitive coding. They even introduced “Jules,” an asynchronous coding agent that can tackle your backlog of bugs and even take the first cut at building new features!

Quality of Life Improvements and More

Beyond the flashiest announcements, Google continued to refine its core products:

Gmail Smart Replies: These are getting even smarter, analyzing your writing style and past emails to suggest truly personalized responses.

Virtual Try-On for Shopping: You can now upload a photo of yourself to virtually try on different clothes directly within the Google Shopping experience.

New AI Subscription Plans: Google introduced new AI plans, including an AI Pro plan and the more comprehensive Google AI Ultra plan, offering higher usage limits and access to experimental tools like Agent Mode and Veo 3.

Google IO 2023 started with CEO Sundar Pichai’s keynote. The key announcements include Google Pixel Fold, Pixel Tablet, Pixel 7a, Android 14 and lots and lots of AI announcements. You can watch the complete keynote here…

Google Search

Undoubtedly Google’s most successful product, search is at the very core of Google’s mission. Google Search will be getting 2 new features.

Bringing Google’s generative AI Bard to its search platform, Generative AI capabilities in Search will help you when deciding what to buy. It taps into Google’s Shopping Graph, the world’s most comprehensive dataset of constantly-changing products, sellers, brands, reviews and inventory.

With the new generative AI experience in Search, you’ll get even more from a single search. You’ll be able to quickly make sense of information with an AI-powered snapshot, pointers to explore more and natural ways to ask.

What’s new from Android

Large-screen Android devices will be better than ever with more than 50 Google apps have been optimized for large screens, including Gmail, Photos and Meet. And your favorite apps like Spotify, Minecraft and Disney+ look beautiful and feel intuitive on larger screens.

With the foldables becoming the driving force to revive the tablets market, Google has been focusing on improving the Android experience on tablets.

The next screen real estate getting popularity is the smart watch market. Wear OS has grown over five times since the launch of Wear OS 3 in 2021, and it is the fastest-growing smartwatch platform in the world. Developers are investing in the platform as well. Soon, WhatsApp is bringing their first-ever smartwatch app to Wear OS, and more great experiences are coming this year from Gmail, Calendar and more.

Bringing the power of generative AI to Android, soon, you’ll be able to give your compose-itions an extra spark of personality. Magic Compose, a new Messages feature powered by generative AI, will help you transform your text message to your desired vibe before you hit send.

Pixel 7a

Pixel 7a, the next generation Pixel phones, is powered by Google’s Tensor G2 chip, 8GB RAM, 6.1 inch screen, a much larger camera sensor and will be going on sale today at the Google Store for $499. As a launch offer, Google is giving away their PixelBuds A-Series free of cost for a limited time!

Pixel Tablet

Large screens still have a lot of potential. PixelTablet is built to deliver uniquely helpful experiences—11 inch display, AI powered Google Tensor G2 chip, amazing battery life and a completely reimagined docking stand!

When the Pixel Tablet is in the docked or as Google calls it, in the hub mode, it turns into a digital photo frame and a voice assisted smart home controller.

Pixel Fold

One of the big announcements, unveiling the foldable Pixel phone. It’s also quite thin while folded, at 12.1 millimeters, the hinge is a big part of that. This is 180-degree fluid friction hinge, which means that you can put it to any place you want.

PixelFold is the thinnest foldable on the market. Comes with and expansive 7.6-inch immersive display and a 5.8-inch front display.

The device houses a three-camera system: a 48-megapixel main, 10.8-megapixel ultrawide and a 10.8-megapixel telephoto with 5x optical Zoom and 20x Super Res Zoom. The front-facing camera, meanwhile, is 9.5 megapixels. Is a IPX8 water-resistant design.

The real secret sauce in the Pixel Fold experience is, unsurprisingly, the software. The app continuity when switching between the external and internal screens is quite seamless, allowing you to pick where you left off as you change screen sizes. Naturally, Google has optimized its most popular third-party apps for the big screen experience, including Gmail and YouTube.

The system is powered by the same Tensor G2 chip you’ll find in the Pixel 7, 7a and Pixel tablet.

Starting at $1799, this ultra-premium device combines personal AI, Google Tensor G2, and innovation for a Pixel smartphone that unfolds into an incredible compact tablet. Google is giving away free Pixel Watch for limited time pre-orders!

Find my device, even when offline

Currently, Find My Device helps you locate misplaced devices that have location capabilities and are connected to the internet. However, Google will be launching a refreshed Find My Device experience that makes it easier than ever to locate your devices and belongings quickly and securely by ringing compatible devices or viewing their location on a map in the app – even when they’re offline.

The new Find My Device network will harness over a billion Android devices across the world to help you locate your missing belongings like headphones, tracker tags, or even your phone via Bluetooth proximity.

RCS adoption

When you are texting in a group chat, you shouldn’t have to worry about what kind of phone everyone is using – sharing high-quality images and video, seeing typing notifications and staying protected with end-to-end encryption should just work. Out with the old (SMS & MMS) and in with the new. RCS is a modern standard that provides end-to-end encryption and supports high quality videos and photos in texts. There are now over 800 million people with RCS, on the way to 1 billion by the end of the year.

Bard – Conversational AI from Google

Bard lets you collaborate with generative AI. Google is not only removing its waitlist for Bard and making it available, in English, in over 180 countries and territories, but it’s also launching support for Japanese and Korean with a goal of supporting 40 languages in the near future.

As a creative and helpful collaborator, Bard can supercharge your imagination, boost your productivity, and help you bring your ideas to life—whether you want help planning the perfect birthday party and drafting the invitation, creating a pro & con list for a big decision, or understanding really complex topics simply.

Bard will soon become more visual in a couple of helpful ways. Bard will incorporate relevant images in its responses. It’ll also become easy for you to prompt Bard with images, giving you even more ways to explore and create.

Google Maps

Google Maps unveiled a new “Immersive View for Routes” feature in select cities. The new feature brings all of the information that a user may need into one place, including details about traffic simulations, bike lanes, complex intersections, parking and more. You can even see air quality, weather and traffic.

PaLM 2

PaLM – Pathways Language Model from Google, a 540-billion parameter, dense decoder-only Transformer model trained with the Pathways system. PaLM 2 will power Google’s updated Bard chat tool, the company’s competitor to OpenAI’s ChatGPT, and function as the foundation model for most of the new AI features the company is announcing today.

Sec-PaLM, introduced last month, is trained on security intelligence and powers new Google Cloud offerings that help organizations and security analysts detect, understand and defend against threats.

Med-PaLM 2 can help answer questions and summarize insights from a variety of dense medical texts.

Workspace

From the very beginning, Google Workspace was built for collaborating in real time with other people — and now you can also collaborate in real time with AI!

These new Workspace features can help you turn ideas into action. Simply describe what you’re trying to accomplish, and Google Sheets will generate a plan that helps you get organized.

New AI tools in can help you level up your Slides presentations. Simply pick a slide and use a simple text prompt to generate an original visual that conveys your unique artistic vision.

All of these new features are part of a powerful new way of working that Google is calling Duet AI for Google Workspace.

After the extravagent event that ended last week, here are all the 2023 MWC Barcelona Highlights targeted to the consumer market, for those who couldn’t attend!

MWC Barcelona 20203 edition attracted over 88,500 visitors from 202 countries, including decision-makers and top executives.

MWC live telecast

Like the previous couple of years, MWC Barcelona 2023 was also broadcasted live. All the recorded videos including the keynote sessions, interviews, and highlights from the showfloor, covering the biggest stories from the event are now available at Mobile World Live broadcast site.

Nokia New Logo

Nokia announced an update of their logo almost 60 years after their last branding activity! With the announcement of the new brand identity and logo, Nokia plans to accelerate their enterprise business towards selling telecom equipments and helping telecom operators setup their 5G networks globally.

GSMA Open Gateway, a framework of universal network APIs

GSMA announced the Open Gateway – A framework of universal network Application Programmable Interfaces (APIs), designed to provide universal access to operator networks for developers.

GSMA Open Gateway will enable single points of access to ultra-broadband networks and provide a catalyst for immersive technologies and Web3 – giving them the ability to fulfill their potential and reach critical mass. By applying the concept of interconnection for operators to the API economy developers can utilise technology once, for services such as identity, cybersecurity or billing, but with the potential to be integrated with every operator worldwide.

Google announced new features to Keep notes, Meet and WearOS

Google announced 9 new features across their products including Google Keep, Google Meet and their smart watch OS WearOS. Google has been working on leveraging their ecosystem of multiple devices and as a step forward, they have now enabled Keep notes on their WearOS based watches! Along with that, many more features on Google Meet and PDF annotations and others.

Xiaomi demoed their 300W charger

With Xiaomi demoing their 300W charger, its now possible to charge your smartphone from 0 to full in less than 5 minutes!

Huawei Showcases Petal Maps

After the all so famous exit of Huawei from the American market, they’ve been dedicatedly working on getting their own eco system built for and AOSP based OS for Huawei range of smartphone devices. One of the biggest announcement this year from Huawei, as part of this new ecosystem, comes the Huawei Petal Maps – The Google Maps rival.

At MWC Barcelona 2023, they demoed the full-screen lane-level guidance, real-time traffic monitoring, diverse map layers, life services, and watch collaborative navigation. These functions mean Petal Maps can provide global users with reliable navigation and map services that are supported by a co-created ecosystem.

Currently, Petal Maps covers more than 160 countries and regions, boasting over 40 million MAUs, and can display map data in over 70 languages. Thanks to its extensive suite of functions, Petal Maps has been well received by users around the world, and serves as an always-on co-pilot that is ready to support users as they explore the world.

2023 GLOMO Awards

“Apple iPhone 14 Pro” gets the award for the best smartphone with their “Emergency SOS via Satellite” receiving the award for the best disruptive device innovation amongst the devices in the consumer markets. You can get the details of all the other winners of 2023 GLOMO awards here.

The GSMA has honoured Martin Cooper, as the first recipient of the GLOMO Lifetime Achievement Award. This award recognises Marty’s innovative and pioneering leadership in the technology industry. Martin placed the first public call from a handheld portable cell phone at Motorola, on 3rd April 1973. Now cited as the ‘father of the cell phone’, within ten years, Martin had led the team that brought the first handheld cellular mobile phone to market in 1983.

The GLOMO Awards are the most prestigious accolade in the mobile industry, judged by over 150 independent judges worldwide.

It was an eventful MWC Barcelona 2023 with a lot more announcements on the enterprise side, which we’ll soon be summarizing. However at the above is more or less the summary of some of the most important and note worthy highlights of the consumer mobile industry.

MWC 2023 is under way and every company in the mobile market, be it the mobile equipment providers, smartphone manufacturers, wearables manufacturers as well as tech giants supporting them are all present on the floor announcing their newest features. As part of the summit, Google has now announced 9 new exciting features for Android and WearOS.

Google Keep single note widget

For those of you who love the checklist/to-do feature of Keep, can now pin notes, check off to-do lists, view reminders and customize the colors and images from your Home screen—all from the new Google Keep widget on Android phones and tablets.

Google Keep notes on your smart watch

If you are one of the smart watch users running WearOS, you can now browse or create notes on Google Keep using your voice with two new shortcuts for your Wear OS watch face.

Annotate PDFs in the Google Drive app for Android

Use a stylus or simply touch the screen to annotate PDFs in the Google Drive app for Android. You can also try different ink strokes to provide notes or feedback freehand, or use the highlighter tool to save important text neatly on your tablet or phone. Then hide, undo, delete or save a new copy of your annotated documents.

Google Meet noise cancellation

Google Meet now has built in noise cancellation feature, available to all Android devices. You can now be better prepared for your next meeting!

Fast Pair on Chromebook

Soon, Fast Pair will be able to connect new Bluetooth headphones to your Chromebook with just one tap. And if you’ve already set up headphones with your Android phone, your Chromebook will automatically connect to them as well.

New Emojis

Google seems to keeping adding to the collection of its emoji library and this time its not missed either. New emoji combinations are now available on Emoji Kitchen for you to mash up, remix and share as stickers via Gboard. Use them to make some noise for your favorite basketball team (just in time for March Madness ) or express your spring colors with friends.

Google Wallet Tap to Pay Animations

Fun new tap to pay animations on Google Wallet to help confirm your in-store transactions, so keep an eye out for some cheerful penguins, plus many others.

Google Chrome Zoom upto 300% while still preserving page layout

You can now easily increase the size of content on Chrome — including text, images, video and interactive controls — by up to 300% to suit your vision preferences while still preserving the page layout. This includes the ability to set your preferred content size as a default so you don’t have to change it every time you open up Chrome.

Improvements in smart watch accessibility

With Wear OS 3+, we’ll now have Mono-audio to help limit disorientation caused by split-audio and while color-correction and grayscale modes give you more choice for your watch display.

It can get really irritating if an email containing an event that you didn’t ask for, or don’t want to attend, directly gets added to your Google Calendar. This in effect is spamming your calendar.

Google has now brought in an easy way to keep your calendars clean. If you’ve never interacted with someone, their invitations won’t be added automatically to your calendar unless you indicate that you do know them. You’ll still be able to respond to the invitation sent to you in the email and change this behaviour at any time in Settings > General > Event settings > Add invitations to my calendar. Here you can select whether you would like to add invitations from everyone / only if the sender is known / when I respond to the invitation in email.

On Android, you can check your device’s permissions to prevent untrusted third-party apps from adding events to your calendar.

Google has decided to appeal Competition Commission of India’s fine over ‘unfair’ business practices on Android.

Google was fined $113.60 million by Competition Commission of India in relation with Play Store policies in October 2022. The Competition Commission of India found Google requiring device manufacturers to pre-install its entire Google Mobile Suite and mandating prominent placement of those apps “imposition of unfair condition on the device manufacturers” and thus was in “contravention of the provisions of Section 4(2)(a)(i) of the Act.

Google informed that it has decided to approach National Company Law Appellate Tribunal (NCLAT), the nation’s appellate tribunal, to appeal against the fine.

Digilocker, the cloud storage platform for all Government issued official documents in India is soon going to be integrated into the Files app in Android. Now Digilocker users on Android can directly access official government issued documents, straight from their Files app.

Google made the announcement during the annual Google for India event. “We expect that DigiLocker’s integration and partnership on Android will drive smoother and ubiquitous access to digitised documents in a safe and secure manner for all our users” Abhishek Singh, President and CEO, NeGD and MyGov, MD and CEO, Digital India Corporation, said in a statement.

Google will make the Digilocker issued files accessible only with a secure password, inside the Files app.

DigiLocker has more than 137 million registered users who have issued more than 5.6 billion documents to date.

Google is yet to disclose the date of launch and support for iOS.

Ever tried to search for something in Google and due to some unfortunate event, didn’t receive a response? Ever wondered is there a problem with your network or with Google? Are you amongst the ones who’d open Google Search to simply check if your network is working?

Google finally launches its own official Google Search Status Dashboard, where you can check exactly this. Ofcourse with this, you can check if the issue is with your network or with Google. But while at it, one can even check if their search engine is all up and running. If their crawlers are crawling the world wide web. If the search engine is indexing the pages and ofcourse if the search engine itself is working or not.

In the past, Google would update the Google Search Central Twitter Account with updates to disruptions in service.

This dashboard provides status information on the systems that power Google Search. The dashboard shows issues that affect many sites or users, so if you see an issue listed in the dashboard, it may be related to the problem you’re experiencing.

Head to the user guide on how the Google Search Status Dashboard works to understand all about the process on what happens when an issue gets listed, how it gets investigated, the followup information and finally how the detected issue gets fixed or migrated.

The Dashboard also lists historical system statuses and incidents in its Summary and History pages for incidents that have occurred duing the past 5 years.

Celebrating 30th Birthday of SMS – Short Message Service! The first SMS, wishing ‘Merry Christmas’ was sent by a software engineer on 3rd December 1992! Most of the first generation mobile phone users would have sent a free SMS as the first operation on their phone to simply get it activated!

To celebrate SMS’ 30th birthday, Google announced that its Messages app will support end-to-end encryption for group chats over the coming weeks – a feature that’s been available for one-on-one conversations for a couple of years.

Texting changed the way we communicate, but it’s out of date (today almost 30 years out of date!). Today we want messaging that lets us do things like share high-res photos and larger files, chat with a group, know when messages are read, or make video calls. To introduce all these features into text messaging, Google had introduced Rich Communication Services (RCS). Google’s native messaging client, Messages, supports RCS.

Most of the mobile world is using RCS, but there is one company, Apple, that’s dragging its heels. But after 30 years of SMS texting, it’s truly time. So here are three big reasons why the whole industry should get behind RCS — one for every decade SMS has been around.

It’s been a long known resistance from Apple to accept the RCS standard, considering all the features of RCS are already available since long, on their iMessages app, although it is restricted to only the iPhone users.

With RCS, Google had already brought end-to-end encryption to messaging, and with its biggest messaging competitor, WhatsApp and its own ever changing chat and messaging strategies, today Google is getting end-to-end encryption to its group messages.

In addition to announcing end-to-end encryption for group chats, Google also announced that the Messages app will soon let users react to RCS (Rich Communication Services) messages with any emoji, similar to WhatsApp.

Here’s wishing a very Happy 30th Birthday to SMS and wishing it a happy farewell for good!

Google, in collaboration with Samsung, has come up with their new Google Health Connect app, now in Beta. It’s the one app that can track all the health and fitness data coming in from multiple other apps which track their own devices respectively.

So I used to have Google Fit to track my runs, Fitbit to track my Heart Rate, WeightWatchers to track my weight and so on. However, with all my fitness data fragmented across apps, I would never have one wholesome view of all my Health data. To answer this problem, Google has launched Health Connect by Android, giving me a simple way to share data between my health, fitness, and wellbeing apps without compromising on privacy.

Whether you’re focused on activity or sleep, nutrition or vitals, sharing data between your apps can help you better understand your health. Health Connect gives you simple controls, so you only share the data you want to. Health Connect stores the health and fitness data from your apps in one place, offline and on your device, so you can easily manage the data from your different apps.

At launch, more than 10 health, fitness, and wellness apps will support Health Connect, including Fitbit, Samsung Health, MyFitnessPal, Oura, and Peloton.

For users, one can easily manage permissions in a single place, with granular controls to see which apps are accessing data at any given time. Android users will now be able to sync and get credit for their Peloton workouts in apps like Oura, MyFitnessPal, WeightWatchers and Lifesum. Now, through a single integration with Health Connect, Peloton Members will have the option to share their workout stats across the ecosystem of apps they use to support their overall wellness.

For developers, the new app reduces the cost of building multiple API connections for data sharing between different apps. Now, with Health Connect, building an integration with a new app is as simple as reading in new data from Health Connect, rather than building a whole new integration. Health Connect’s data schema supports more than 40 data types across six categories to ensure data consistency across apps.