Google kills Android Things, its IoT OS, in January

Enlarge / The Android Things Rainbow Hat from Pimoroni. (credit: PImoroni)

The latest dead Google project is Android Things, a version of Android meant for the Internet of Things. Google announced it had basically given up on the project as a general-purpose IoT OS in 2019, but now there's an official shutdown date thanks to a new FAQ page detailing the demise of the OS.

The Android Things Dashboard, which is used for managing devices, will stop accepting new devices and projects in just three weeks: January 5, 2021. Developers will be able to continue updating existing deployments until January 5, 2022, at which point Google says "the console will be turned down completely and all project data will be permanently deleted—including build configurations and factory images."

Android Things was a stripped-down version of Google phone OS meant for the Internet of Things, a network of small, cheap devices like sensors and smart home devices. The idea was that Android would bring wide hardware compatibility, an established app SDK, and easy access to Google's cloud platform to IoT, along with regular security updates, which are currently unheard-of in the fire-and-forget IoT firmware space. Android gets a lot of flak for its inability to update every smartphone quickly, but that's based on smartphone standards. In IoT, where your device will probably never get a firmware update, Android's typical three-to-six-month-late update cycle would be an incredible upgrade to the nightmare security world of IoT.

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