Sundar Pichai on Android vs. Chrome, Facebook Home, Google I/O and more

Sundar Pichai who took over as the Android chief replacing Andy Rubin, has reiterated that both Android and Chrome, the operating system for lightweight laptop computers which is also being developed under his leadership, will co-exist and offer choice for both users and developers.

In a recent interview with Wired, Pichai said that both platforms will play a strong role and not not merely exist.

He said that the biggest challenge for Android was to find  a way to improve the user experience for all devices without changing the 'open nature' of Android. On Facebook Home, Pichai commented that it was exciting that Facebook thought of Android first and the OS was intended to be very customizable. However, he did not seem to agree with Mark Zuckerberg's philosophy that people are the center of everything.

Sundar Pichai also downplayed commentary on Samsung's dominance on Android and said that Google works with Samsung pretty much almost all our important products. In fact, Pichai has been using a Galaxy S4 smartphone, although he said that he has never used the phone's fancy eye-tracking feature.

He also put to rest all assumptions that Motorola got special treatment since it had been acquired by Google and clarified that for the purposes of the Android ecosystem, Motorola is just like any other partner. He said that Google will continue to offer Google branded hardware on the lines of Nexus and Chromebooks and that the company's hardware projects will majorly be an 'effort to push the ecosystem forward'.

He also said that Google wants to handle Android updates in a better manner and that it's talking with its partners and working on a solution.

Pichai also shed some light on the upcoming Google I/O event and  said that it will be different with the company focusing more on things it's doing for developers, rather than on launching new products or operating systems. He said," It's going to be different. It's not a time when we have much in the way of launches of new products or a new operating system. Both on Android and Chrome, we're going to focus this I/O on all of the kinds of things we're doing for developers, so that they can write better things. We will show how Google services are doing amazing things on top of these two platforms."