Google’s past failures were on full display at I/O 2022 - Ars Technica

Its development peaked with the initial release of Android 3.0 Honeycomb in 2011, and every subsequent Android release and Google app update watered down the tablet interface until it disappeared.

After the 2015 Pixel C release, Google quit the tablet market for three years, then launched the Pixel Slate Chrome-OS tablet.

It then quit the tablet market for another three years.

The company announced it would bring tablet interfaces to over 20 Google apps, and it showed off screenshots for most of them.

Tablet versions of Google Play, YouTube, Google Maps, Chrome, and a bunch of other heavy hitters were all on display.

Google even got some third parties committed to making Android tablet apps, including Facebook, Zoom, and TikTok.

Google also announced a new tablet, the Pixel Tablet, with a release scheduled for the very distant date of "sometime in 2023." It's a widescreen, large-looking tablet, and regular phone apps will not look good on it. I'm speculating here, but the Pixel Tablet looks cheap.

They are the most popular (forked) Android tablets on the market.

So far, all of this work makes it seem like Google is trying to get back what it threw away shortly after the release of Honeycomb. The company already released a tablet-centric update to Android in March—Android 12L—but that was a lot less ambitious than the Honeycomb release.

The rise of foldables has also changed the market, and these devices need tablet apps to work well.

If people with flagship Android phones suddenly have devices that open up into tablets, the market for tablet apps would be a lot stronger.