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For that dev part they have the developer keynote. Google just gave away many online training classes for free, which includes many many hands on coding labs.

I doubt it's press who is the audience. People behind these projects want to be seen by SVPs and above, so they get those 5 minutes of attention, get their promos and immediately switch teams to chase the next promo.

Okay so it wasn't just me. The I/O event in the past always had much interesting content. I was surprised to find that not a single one made me even consider reading about it.

When they introduce new products, do they say "and really we won't abandon this in 2 years" and keep a straight face, or do they just not even bother?

They push as if they firmly believe in it and then let it drop, see Project Tango, Sceneform, NDK packages,...