Enlarge (credit: Android)

Here in the US and other developed countries, the smartphone and Internet markets are more or less saturated—most people are online and swiping away at their smartphones. This isn't the case everywhere though—only about half of the worldwide population is on the Internet. That means there are more than 3.5 billion people that don't have access to the largest collection of human knowledge (and dank memes) ever assembled.
These throngs of disconnected people come from poorer countries, so when they do eventually get online, they will do so via the most inexpensive devices they can get. The cheapest online-capable devices we make are also the smallest: smartphones. And on smartphones, unless you're spending several hundred dollars on an Apple device, there's one OS out there: Android.
Google has taken to calling these people the "next billion users" and has been chasing them for some time with various programs. The effort we're looking at today, Android Go, is Google's largest to date. It offers the whole Android package but reworked with entry-level phones in mind.

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