Showing posts with label Google's Android Things. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Google's Android Things. Show all posts

Wednesday 14 December 2016

Google's Android Things is here to make IoT great again


Google's venture into the sphere of Internet-of-Things was through its Project Brillo. Now when IoT devices are increasingly coming under attack from hackers, Google announced a rebranding of the experimental project to 'Android Things' and even dropped a developer preview for users to test.

As the name suggest, this is Android for the smart devices that have started cropping up everywhere from the likes of a smart fridge to a room heater. Put it simply, it is a stripped down version of Android for low-powered IoT hardware. From today, the developer preview is offering 'turnkey' solutions for the NXP Pico, Raspberry Pi 3 and Intel Edison.

The new OS for IoT hardware enables developers to make smart devices using the Android APIs and Google ecosystem. In general, Android Things makes use of the usual Android Studio, official SDK and Google Play Services to 'smarten' up the devices. Developers also have the option of using Google Weave protocol to ensure communication between devices and Google Cloud Services.

Considering the dismal state of security when it comes to IoT devices, Google has actually taken some steps to improve the situation. While Android phones remain plagued with update issues and fragmentation, Google says it is trying to avoid the problem for IoT devices by promising updates directly from Google. The upcoming developer previews will have some sort of an infrastructure to allow developers push out OTA updates on their own.

Android Things joins Android Auto, Android TV and Android Wear as Google's answer for making everything from watches to cars to televisions to other consumer electronics smart enough to communicate with each other.

After the announcement, Project Brillo finally comes out of its closed 'invite' program and now awaits a public source code dump. Soon enough, we will realize the full potential of Google's venture into IoT.