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Example of Android Pay in PaymentRequest.

Today at Alphabet's annual developer's conference, the company announced a host of new tools for developers working with Android Pay—including support for Android Instant Apps, a new feature called PaymentRequest, and improvements to the Save To Android Pay API.

In a call with Ars on Tuesday, Senior Director of Product Management for Android Pay Pali Bhat said that the Android Pay team has been working to increase user signups and encourage continued use of the platform, something that all mobile payment platforms have struggled with in the last five years. “We have to deliver more utility and value," Bhat said.

The new Android Pay features announced today are a means to that end. For instance, Instant Apps—Android's new name for creating an app-like experience without having to download an app—will come with support for an Android Pay checkout feature. If users tap an Instant App URL, the app will run without installing or taking up valuable space on the user's phone. With an Android Pay button, an Instant App from a parking garage could speed along the checkout process, for example.

With Instant Apps, clicking a link can give you an app-like experience even if you don't have the app installed already. (credit: Google)

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.—Mobile websites are often more convenient than their desktop counterparts when you're on your phone, but they're also usually missing some important functionality that's available (or just easier to find) on the desktop. Apps can help solve the problem, but only if you have the foresight and/or bandwidth to install them when you need them.

Android's just-announced Instant Apps feature, which should be available to all phones running Android 4.2 or later and via an update to the Google Play Services software coming "later this year," will attempt to bridge that gap. Instant Apps are designed to provide the richer, Android-native experience of an app combined with the convenience and the lower data and storage usage of a mobile website.

When users tap an Instant App URL, they are taken directly to an app that runs without installing. Developers who want to offer Instant Apps will have to modularize their apps so that users don't have to install the entire app just to use certain features of it—this is where most of the data savings come from. Google's examples included museum or resort apps with maps and schedules, along with apps that help you pay for parking. These are the kinds of rarely-used apps that are useful in the moment, though you wouldn't necessarily want to install them on your phone beforehand or keep them around afterward. Developers can, however, can provide "call to action" links that encourage users to download and install apps that they find particularly useful.

A screenshot of Allo's predictive replies. "Yum clams!" may have to be attunded to the user's taste.

On Wednesday at Google I/O, the company announced a new messaging app called Allo and a new video messaging app called Duo. Both apps are based on your phone number and are focused on bringing more information to users as they're typing or about to pick up the phone.

Allo's claim to fame is that Assistant is built into the app so that, as you exchange information with someone else, the app can offer auto-replies—even based on photos—or it can see if you're thinking of getting Italian food for dinner and suggest restaurants nearby. The messenger has a wide variety of stickers you can exchange with others, and the “Whisper Shout” function lets users decide how big or small they'd like to send their message to give the impression of volume (NO MORE ALL CAPS WHEN YOU'RE SHOUTING!!!!!). You can also write on pictures that you send and type @google to use the search engine while you're still in the messaging app.

With Allo, third-party developers will be invited to work with Assistant to increase the app's usefulness. OpenTable, for instance, is working with Allo to help users make reservations at a restaurant if they're talking about going there later that evening.

Enlarge / Android Wear 2.0 promises major improvements for Google smartwatches. (credit: Google)

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.—Google has provided three major updates to Android Wear since it came to market two years ago—every time the version of Android that Wear is built on top of is updated, Google also adds Wear-specific features. Android 5.0, 5.1, and 6.0 all had corresponding Wear releases that smoothed out rough edges, refined the interface, and made the watches more capable.

Today at its developer conference, Google is announcing Android Wear 2.0, a version number bump that reflects the magnitude of the changes it introduces. The update gives the UI a comprehensive Material Design-themed overhaul, enables compatible watches to do more without a phone attached, introduces some new input methods to make communication easier, and copies one of the things that the Apple Watch gets right. And since it’s based on Android N, it picks up support for features like Data Saver, Java 8, and new emoji, among other platform features. Here are the highlights.

Standalone apps

Probably the biggest addition to Wear 2.0 is the ability for apps to communicate directly over the Internet via Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, or (for the few watches that have it) cellular, rather than relying exclusively on a tethered phone or cloud syncing between your watch and your phone for communication.

Enlarge / The Android mascot wearing the Vive. We don't know what the hardware will look like yet. (credit: Ron Amadeo)

MOUNTAIN VIEW, CALIFORNIA—As we've been obsessively tracking for about a year and a half now, Google is making a big push into virtual reality. This week at I/O 2016 the company is finally ready to talk about its VR ambitions, and the first news out of the gate is about the "Virtual Reality Mode" built into Android N Developer Preview 3. Google is also announcing a hardware certification program that allows an Android phone to earn the title "VR ready," and the first "VR ready" phone will be the Nexus 6P.

Google has done a lot of work whipping Android into shape for VR with Android N DP 3. Previously Google's only smartphone VR project was "Cardboard," a cardboard box with plastic lenses that could hold a smartphone. Cardboard gave a rough approximation of VR a very low cost, but it wasn't a serious platform for real VR immersion.

"Google currently has Cardboard but Cardboard worked in spite of Android, if you'd like," explained Android VP of Engineering Dave Burke to Ars. "It's clever and simple but we never did anything at the platform level to make it work. With N, we have." In Android N, those changes come down to improving motion-to-photon latency—how quickly you can get the display pixels to change in response to your head moving. When you move in VR, the sensors detect the movement, signal the GPU to draw new frames, and those frames get sent to the display to be drawn. If this doesn't happen fast enough, you'll feel sick.