Rick Osterloh says ‘very few’ Pixel users come from Samsung and Google’s hardware goal

Pixel and Android/Chrome lead Rick Osterloh was interviewed by Ben Thompson after Made by Google 2024 in a wide-ranging and interesting conversation. 

Back in April, hardware chief Rick Osterloh was tasked with leading Android (and Chrome/OS). Sundar Pichai said this was to drive faster AI updates and launches. He reiterated that in the interview, while adding that it was in discussion “for the last three or four years.” 

Well, the reason to do it was because we needed to put all of our effort behind trying to innovate an AI as fast as we could. We also, when we merged the two groups together, pulled in a portion of Google Research into our organization. They’re working on Applied AI stuff and putting that all together just really makes sense now given our feeling of urgency to try to improve overall AI velocity for the company, and we felt like now is the time. The technology was at the state where you could start to build an AI OS, like you could really actually start to bake the models into your design thinking for how the OS functions and how it does things.

Overall, this merger allows for better coordination between teams.

The tension here is that Android has to serve more than just Pixel with Samsung arguably being the most important partner. In regards to that, Osterloh says Google has “not changed strategy at all, and so when we work with Samsung, we work with them very closely and we work with them as we did.” One example of this is Gemini Live rolling out to Pixel and Samsung phones today before the Pixel 9 launch.

That led to this particularly interesting exchange:

At the end of day, aren’t Pixel users coming from Samsung?

Rick Osterloh: Actually very few of them.

Interesting. So where do they come from?

RO: They’re coming from a large number of people, some of whom who’ve left the market and then also from Apple but ultimately, we think what we’re trying to do is we’re trying to gain Android share overall and that’s my principal goal is to try to improve Android competitiveness, improve our innovation, improve the problems we’re able to solve for users at all tiers. But we’ve certainly had issues in the premium space that we want to try to address.

The interview also asked about Pixel’s goal and Osterloh said it’s to “lead [on] AI innovation” and “gain more share for Android in that [premium] space” — with the iPhone being the elephant in the room — as well as as express Google’s brand without dilution:

…it is our direct brand projection from Google. This is how we sort of intend Android to look for our users, and brings a lot of Google services exactly how we want them to be delivered for users without anything else.