Google scales back Android Things IoT ambitions
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Google said it is scaling back its Android Things ambitions to focus on consumer smart speakers and displays.
In a blog post, Dave Smith, developer advocate for IoT, said Google is refocusing its efforts to build out its consumer devices.
Support for production systems based on NXP, Qualcomm and MediaTek devices won't be available. Developers can use the Android Things software developer kit to run on top of NXP and Raspberry Pi 3B hardware. These builds would be for experiments more than commercial use.
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Smith said Google is supporting developers and their Internet of things efforts via its Cloud IoT Core and the upcoming cloud IoT Edge runtime. By focusing its efforts on cloud IoT, Google is more in line with approaches by Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services.
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The move is quite the about-face for Google. Android Things had support from NXP, Qualcomm and had early momentum. In May, Google's Android Things graduated to a 1.0 release with more reference designs and support for developer hardware. Android Things was played up as an IoT platform at Google I/O 2017.