Google SVP Sundar Pichai Announces Plans to Launch Android SDK for Wearables

People often remark that Google is seemingly entering every industry. With Google Fiber, the search engine company has entered the Internet service provider business. With its brief ownership of Motorola Mobility, the company became a mobile hardware manufacturer. And with its groundbreaking Google Glass prototype, the company claimed a bold stake in the wearables race early on.

Google Glass has been a visible project since 2012 but it exists in a bit of a purgatory, since it’s not an official product that consumers can pick up at the store. As of now, only developers who apply to the beta program and pay over $1,000 are lucky enough to get their hands on Glass.

But Senior Vice President of Android, Chrome and Apps Sundar Pichai made it clear while speaking at SXSW Interactive in Austin, Texas, that the company is ready to make serious investments in wearable devices.

During his interview with author and journalist John Battelle, Pichai announced that Google would be releasing an Android-based software development kit for wearables in the next two weeks.

“We will lay out a vision for developers as to how we see this market working, and give them a version of the OS so they can start playing around with it. That’s gonna happen in about two weeks,” he said.

While building an SDK for wearables makes sense for smartwatches and Google Glass, Pichai indicated that Google was thinking far beyond those two specific products.

“Computing is getting so powerful, so much smaller that you can start deploying [computers] in interesting ways to solve new problems,” he said. “I think we are just scratching the surface.”