Android Things

» see developer.android.com/things as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

I work on the embedded side of computer vision, which means the question of what operating system goes on a small board with a camera on it is a question I have to answer for a living. Android Things was one of the answers Google offered between 2018 and 2021, and almost nobody in that corner of the industry took it. The reason was not mysterious. You were being asked to carry the weight of Android on hardware chosen specifically because it had no weight to spare.

It started at Google I/O in May 2015 as Brillo, an Android derivative stripped down for connected devices, shipped alongside a communication protocol called Weave that was supposed to let all these devices find each other. Brillo was rebranded to Android Things in December 2016 and put into developer preview, and version 1.0 arrived at I/O in May 2018 with support for the Raspberry Pi 3 Model B and a set of NXP and Qualcomm system-on-modules.

Nine months later Google narrowed it to smart speakers and smart displays and dropped the constrained boards entirely. In December 2020 it updated an FAQ to announce the end. The console stopped accepting new projects on 5 January 2021 and was switched off completely on 5 January 2022, taking every build configuration and factory image stored in it.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ it started as brillo ~

Brillo made sense in 2015 in a way that is easy to forget. Nest had been bought the year before, the phrase internet of things was in every keynote, and the fear inside Google was that the home was about to be standardized by somebody else. Brillo plus Weave was a bid to own both the device layer and the protocol layer at once, in the same move Android had pulled off on phones. Weave went on to have its own confusing afterlife inside the Nest ecosystem, which is a separate story with a separate corpse.

~ the retreat ~

The February 2019 change is the part worth reading as a diagnosis. Google announced that Android Things would refocus on smartphone-class hardware, meaning speakers and displays, and that resource-constrained devices were out of scope. Every hobbyist project on a Raspberry Pi was orphaned on that day, and so was every startup that had picked the platform on the assumption that Google shipping a 1.0 meant something.

What was left was a platform available to a short list of OEM partners on a short list of Qualcomm and MediaTek parts. That is a reference design wearing an operating-system name. The developers who had been the reason to run a public console were no longer allowed to use the thing the console was for.

~ the console goes dark ~

The deletion clause is the detail that stings. Withdrawing support is ordinary. Removing the artifacts is something else, and that is what happened here: factory images and build configurations that customers had produced through the console went away on 5 January 2022, which means a device already deployed in the field could no longer be reflashed from the tooling that made it.

Embedded work moved where it was always going to move. Yocto and Buildroot handle the small boards, and a normal Linux distribution handles the ones with room for it. The hardware I point cameras at today runs none of Google's answer, and the market never needed a phone operating system in a doorbell.

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