Google Kicks Off I/O Developer Conference With Three New Innovations

Today (May 17) kicks off this year’s Google I/O developer conference. As part of the opening day festivities, Google has just announced three new innovations for its developer base that look to enable businesses to grow – including a major development for enabling in-app payments.

Google just announced an expansion of its payment solutions suite—a new Google Payment API.

Armed with the Google Payment API, merchants and developers will be able to enable users to pay with credit and debit cards that are saved in their Google Account. This includes payment methods saved in Android Pay, the Play Store or stored within the Chrome web browser.

In a nutshell, what this means is that consumers will be able to use their saved payment options for transactions on third-party mobile apps, mobile web and with Google Assistant.

On the consumer end, the goal is to enable a more seamless checkout experience.

“They’ll never miss a deal because they’re stuck on a bus and don’t want to pull out their credit card in front of strangers,” writes Sridhar Ramaswamy, Senior Vice President, Ads and Commerce in a company blog post. “They’ll no longer experience the pain of stumbling on a sale that ends at midnight when they’re tucked in bed with their credit card out of reach.”

On the end of developers and merchants, the Google Payment API aims to drive conversions, increase sales and reduce abandoned cards by leveraging saved payment data for faster checkout without needing to build their own digital payment solution from the ground up.

Google also announced the release of a revamped in-app advertising and monetization platform AdMob which, along with an interface redesign, features new data insights on users’ in-app experiences via an integration of Google Analytics for Firebase.

For developers, this means access to ad revenue data and user insights from a single location after linking their accounts.

Finally, Google announced new additions to its Universal App Campaigns—which scales advertising across Google’s largest properties—to optimize promotion and user base growth for developers.

In specific, the tech giant just announced new ad placement options in Google, the expansion of smart bidding strategies which aims to enable businesses to acquire more high-value users, as well as a whole host of new app attribution partners.

All told, these moves by Google aim to increase the profitability and footprint of its payments and ad businesses as well as to provide developers, merchants and advertisers with key additions to their respective operations.

“As consumers live more of their lives online, it’s increasingly important for developers to build user-centric experiences in everything that you do,” wrote Ramaswamy, “from the apps you design, to the experiences you deliver, to the ways you help people transact.”

Given that this is just the first day of the I/O Conference, it should be interesting to see what else Google has up its sleeve over the next few days.