It was a very good year for Google, but especially for its mobile division. The jury's still out on whether hardware sales will match the quality of its latest phones but in all cases the phones we saw from Google in 2021 deserve respect. Google's custom-developed chip Tensor is probably the company's biggest win. It enables advancements in machine learning and computational photography that Google wouldn't have been able to achieve by using an off-the-shelf Qualcomm chip. The processor has two Cortex-X1 cores, instead of the usual one, which means the Tensor is plenty powerful.

Google's open source mobile app development framework Flutter welcomes a new stable release. Version 1.9.1 was introduced at Google Developer Days China in a keynote on September 10, 2019. Chris Sells, PM for the Flutter developer experience calls it "the biggest update yet with more than 1,500 PRs from more than 100 contributors". Check out what's new for mobile developers and catch up with what went down at Google Developers Days in Shanghai. Version 1.9 introduces plenty of new goodies and improvements.