Android developer Till Kottmann managed to outsmart Google and ruin its PR team’s riddle meant to lead the public on a prolonged chase for I/O 2019 dates. About an hour after the official Google Developers Twitter account started teasing this year’s edition of the company’s conference, hinting at yet another bizarre date hunt, Mr. Kottmann responded with the main details of the happening, ensuring an anticlimactic end to the short-lived plan.
The resourceful developer hence revealed that Google I/O 2019 will be taking place from May 7 to May 9, i.e. run from the second Tuesday through Friday of the month. His investigation also yielded the venue of the vent – the Shoreline Amphitheatre near Google’s campus in Mountain View, California. That location choice is in line with Google’s established track record that saw the company move the annual gathering closer to its headquarters in 2015, after eight years of events in San Francisco’s Moscone Center.
And while things certainly didn’t go according to Google’s plan, if the ultimate goal was to amuse, Mr. Kottmann’s sharp response to the date hunt tease certainly did so, at least if reactions from Twitter users who already saw the interaction are anything to go by. Though that isn’t to say Google couldn’t come up with an entirely new riddle, perhaps even more bizarre and cunning than what it delivered in the past, it’s unlikely the company would reschedule its yearly developer conference just to keep its gag running. The proof of the aforementioned dates being accurate can be seen below and comes in the form of swiftly captured HTML code hosted by storage.googleapis.com. The contents of the publicly accessible backend have been deleted mere minutes after being posted but it was already too late.
And while the record-breaking time Mr. Kottmann took to solve the riddle before it was even posted suggest Google should have tried harder this year, it appears the Swiss-based developer opted for some proactive action as he took to digging through the publicly available files hosted by googleapis.com and even managed to identify a Twitter account someone at Google used for testing this year’s failed I/O date riddle. The account in question used a handle of “@internaltest189” which manages to be both generic and informative of its true purpose. While the profile was deleted shortly thereafter, the nimble investigator found it early enough to identify some important clues, including the promo image that can be seen above.
As years went by, I/O lost some of its developer focus and was used as a launch vehicle for a wide variety of consumer-facing services which only promise to deliver new monetization opportunities to developers, assuming they’re prepared to embrace them. That strategy may change this year seeing how Google is presently laying low to a degree, as much as a $740-billion corporation can. Between reports of its controlling HR politics and ambitions to invest in China amid Beijing’s ongoing trade war with the U.S., as well as major privacy concerns and security incidents, Google may avoid looking for extra public attention in the coming months as it has already gotten plenty of it in recent times, largely due to its own missteps.