
An Update on Android Things - ingve
https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2019/02/an-update-on-android-things.html
======
rrix2
Has Google (or any tech company) ever had a post behind "An Update on X"
titles that was good for their consumer or hobbyist customers?

~~~
puzzle
This became so common that "An update on ${employee_name}" was a humorous way
inside Google to announce one's departure. Or to joke about it when merely
switching teams.

Searching for ["an update on" Google] and ignoring other sites gives results
such as

[https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/06/update-on-google-
hea...](https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/06/update-on-google-health-and-
google.html) [https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/08/update-on-google-
wav...](https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/08/update-on-google-wave.html)
[https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2019/01/an-update-on-
googl...](https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2019/01/an-update-on-google-
webmaster-central.html)

While the discontinued product that is still most commonly brought up, Reader,
had a quite different headline, probably because that day was a carnage:

[https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2013/03/a-second-spring-
of-c...](https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2013/03/a-second-spring-of-
cleaning.html)

But you can also find "An update on" for neutral or positive posts.

[https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2012/02/update-on-google-
bar...](https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2012/02/update-on-google-bar.html)
[https://blog.google/around-the-globe/google-europe/update-
ou...](https://blog.google/around-the-globe/google-europe/update-our-work-
prevent-abuse-ahead-eu-elections/)
[https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2017/12/better-
ads](https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2017/12/better-ads)

Still, it does have that negative connotation.

~~~
wlesieutre
You can limit the search to googleblog using the site: operator!

[https://www.google.com/search?q=site:googleblog.blogspot.com...](https://www.google.com/search?q=site:googleblog.blogspot.com%20"an%20update%20on")

~~~
puzzle
I used to work at Google on search, among other projects. :-) I left it out
because there's also blog.google now and there isn't a consistent choice of
canonical URLs. It's not merely a hostname change, because the new Reader link
is [https://blog.google/inside-google/company-
announcements/a-se...](https://blog.google/inside-google/company-
announcements/a-second-spring-of-cleaning/)

An even more focused search would be [intitle:"an update on"], which is pretty
effective, and you can see different results depending on which site you
restrict the query to.

Fun!

~~~
wlesieutre
Ah, so what we really need are Boolean operators for multiple URL rules.

On the handy operators note, do you still know people on the Search team, and
could you ask them to give us + back now that Google Plus is shutting down?

------
justpassingby19
I work in this sector. Google has been having a lot of internal problems. They
are turning into Microsoft under Steve Ballmer. Disjointed product teams, not
capable of innovation, hiring the wrong people. Internal fighting.

Bad or mediocre leadership. More "Stewardship" than "Leadership." You get
ongoing cultural decay in that world.

Lots of teams duplicate doing the same things. Google Cloud is likely the
"chosen" team right now. That means they get their way. You can see the
obvious conflict between the Android Team and Cloud Team pursuing IoT and AI
at the same time.

Classic big company internal politics. Looks like Google Cloud is winning the
fight here, not that Android Things was going anywhere.

The key phrase here is: "Therefore, support for production System on Modules
(SoMs) based on NXP, Qualcomm, and MediaTek hardware will not be made
available through the public developer platform at this time."

Translation: They are cancelling major key parts of their IoT story. They had
put into place relationships for 5+ years to guarantee software support for
long lifecycle of certain hardware SoCs for industrial and other purposes.

This is super embarrassing and the language could not be more carefully
designed to obfuscate what is happening. I bet they had to draw straws to
write this.

I feel sorry for the guy.

------
gjsman-1000
Well, that reasoning seems absolutely contrary to what you would do if Android
Things was a success.

~~~
wiremine
I'm a VP for a software consultancy focused on IoT: I'm not surprised it
wasn't a success. I give them props for trying to leverage Android for IoT,
but in the end I think it was a poor fit:

1\. Most IoT devices are still based on smaller MCUs, not Linux. FreeRTOS and
systems like it are where the majority of vendors go.

2\. The smaller (but still sizable) market for embedded linux don't naturally
gravitate to Java.

3\. It was a subpar developer experience, IMHO. For example, see this link for
a "Blinky" app, which is a sort of like the "hello world" for embedded:

[https://medium.com/@monkeytypewritr/android-things-
getting-t...](https://medium.com/@monkeytypewritr/android-things-getting-to-
blinky-8c37dd36b259)

To put that in context, here's a blinky app in mbed, which is C++ based:

[https://github.com/ARMmbed/mbed-os-example-
blinky/blob/maste...](https://github.com/ARMmbed/mbed-os-example-
blinky/blob/master/main.cpp)

To be far: It's apples and oranges comparison (Mbed is for bare metal), but it
gives you a taste for the amount of boilerplate Android Things required.

Now, if one of the major vendors invested in Rust? That would be
interesting...

~~~
bschwindHN
Oh god, I hadn't heard of Android Things before this article, and I do some
hobbyist IoT work. Writing that sort of hardware stuff in Java with the
Android SDK looks downright depressing. I'm not surprised either.

I've enjoyed using Espressif's esp-idf project, though I wish Rust could
target Xtensa processors. mbed looks nice as well!

~~~
jschwartzi
Hilariously if you want to actually use Android Things on anything besides
their supported hardware you'd still have to write all the low-level code to
make it work, plus the Java code to make it work in Android.

I hadn't heard of it before either and I'm pretty sure I work in their target
market, but that's because they're doubling or tripling the amount of work I
have to do to get something working relative to Embedded Linux.

------
hcnews
Is it usual for a Developer Advocate to publish strategy decisions? My default
expectation is that an exec should post such decisions.

~~~
suyash
He is probably just the public voice since the post is targeted towards
developer audience.

------
sigmaml
Could this be a part of the move to Fuchsia?

------
PaulHoule
Is there any actual content here?

------
IshKebab
Not hugely surprising. As I recall it was originally a C++ system, Which
vaguely made sense but was an arse to actually develop with. Then they totally
scrapped it and moved to Java which is an insane decision for an embedded
system.

I suppose the fundamental issue is that embedded systems are massively cost
constrained, so they're always going to use custom hardware, and that hardware
is going to vary a _lot_. Smart scales can get away with an M3
microcontroller, whereas a smart CCTV camera is going to need a proper SoC
with lots of RAM, some kind of DSP etc. Good luck making an OS that works on
both of those.

~~~
izacus
Not sure what you're trying to say here - Android Things was always targeted
at relatively powerful devices. Things where people right now use stripped
down tablets or massacre AOSP Android to make it do things like power a
touchscreen kiosk device. It was never really capable of working on a smart
scale or CCTV camera type thing - it was always a best fit for a phone-like
hardware powering a display.

And it is a decently nice platform to work with for those use-cases - certanly
better than most of the others. It has almost all Android APIs available.

~~~
IshKebab
Android Things was, but its predecessor Brillo was targeted at less powerful
devices (though not down to microcontroller level).

------
keypusher
I'm looking forward to future installments of this series, such 'An Update on
Gmail' and 'An Update on Google Cloud'.

~~~
obenn
Wonderful, which one do you think they'll strip of useful features next?

------
lgleason
The other issues included software update cycles etc.. No wonder they were
giving out android things dev kits at I/O last year.

