Android is a poor example here especially with how more and more features are moved from the OS to Play services. Google is shipping so many features without even an OS update that's how Android has always been. Even for their OS, Pixel feature drops happen every quarter. AOSP is only a base for others to build anyway, have you seen how fast samsung and others are pushing updates and uncountable number of features. It's not comparable to iOS at all.

Okay, I agree with your premise, but can you point to some tangible acceleration in innovation.

Are these Google Play features coming out faster than they used to in a way that coincides with AI adoption?

Not really no. It's pretty much the same pace as before. I wanted to point out Android is not playing catch up to iOS in anyway in features or quality, it's the opposite. Your comment asked why Google isn't catching up to Apple with AI's help. iOS meanwhile has been regressing since 18 and is a mess now on 26.

Yes, to clarify, I’m not making any claim on Android versus Apple and which one is better, who is catching up to whom. Which operating system is ahead or better is essentially irrelevant to the point I’m making.

My main claim revolves around your second sentence: Google is a major primary source of AI research and has access to frontier models before all their customers, especially competitors like Apple who are clearly behind in the AI race and/or not participating in the same way.

In theory, if AI is transformational to developer velocity, Android and all other products under Google’s umbrella should be moving faster than competitors that don’t have early access and preferential wholesale cost AI infrastructure, and they should be clearly iterating faster and better than they did prior to ~2022-2024.

To me, the biggest argument for an AI bubble burst is that companies like Meta and Google won’t actually be able to show their prospective customers that their own workflows have benefitted. Google can’t say “we now ship major [Google Product] features n% faster/better” because there’s no evidence of it. They might make the claim but nobody will believe them.

Major corporations will try the products, start spending $20-200 per engineer per month extra, they’ll see productivity gains of <5% and maybe even see code quality drop, then they’ll decide that the experiment was a bust.

Essentially, this experience will be the most common one: https://www.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/1r6olcv/an...

This I do agree with. All I've seen is reducing headcounts and forcing people to take up other roles as well.