Google I/O 2015 is drawing ever closer, and that means it's time to start lining things up for the big event. As tradition dictates, it's time for a new revision of the Google I/O app. We've now got a beta release of the app, which just started rolling out to a small group of people who signed up last year. The changes aren't too elaborate, but they do bring (more) visual makeovers and subtly change some of what we can expect from this year. There are even a couple tidbits to learn from a quick teardown.
Last year's release of the Google I/O app took a number of steps toward what we would come to know as Material, but it stopped short of things like a navigation drawer that exists below a semi-transparent status bar and above the action bar. Many of those design issues were cleared up in subsequent updates to the open source code, but never made it to the Play Store. Now that this year's iteration is circulating in beta, we can see the transition to Material Design is complete, at least until the guidelines go through another round of changes.
In terms of functional changes, the People I've Met feature appears to be dead and buried. It used to be located in the navigation drawer, just above the Social option. As an attendee of I/O 2014, I have to say that I'm not surprised. Exactly one person scanned my badge, and I only recall seeing it done a handful of other times. I didn't get the impression it was an extensively used feature.
The Map section has also gone through a subtle but important change. Tapping on markers within Moscone no longer produces a pop-up box with the current session, but instead shows a list of every session scheduled for that particular location. This will come in handy for session planning this year since the scheduled times are shorter and it will be difficult to move around between rooms.
The remaining changes are limited to reorganization of elements. The Explore and Videos sections have been converted from a long stack of semi-sorted sessions to a list of groups organized by topics like Design, Android, and Wearables. Likewise, the Social section has been pared down to just the most well recognized hash tags and Google accounts on Twitter and Google+.