News from the cemetery of Google projects: Android Things, an operating system for embedded systems and the Internet of Things, is apparently about to be finally over. From January 5th 2021 the Android Things Dashboard will no longer accept new projects, updates for existing deployments will run on January 5th 2022 from.

Silence in the forest since last release Originally, Google had promised to deliver at least three years of updates (purely arithmetically: by May 2021), but the last release has already hung off (August 2019). A look at the release page reveals that there are no more waiting in the pipeline. Apparently Google wants to bury the project in silence, an official statement beyond the dashboard deadlines in the FAQ is – at least so far – not available.

Android for every thing? With Android Things, Google had gone beyond the smartphone and had taken “an aggressive step into the world of hardware control”, as hardware experts said Tam Hanna had commented on the first announcements. Google launched Android Things with the official release in May 2018 after a year and a half of development, then there was nothing to hear for a long time. Android Things was intended as the successor to the less successful Brillo (from ).

Already in February 2019 the Californians cut the initially very broad approach as a large IoT platform with Android for Everything and rowed back a more modest project with a continued existence as Android Things SDK as a platform for experimentation for hobbyists and OEMs (original equipment manufacturers, i.e. manufacturers of hardware components). At that time, Google referred commercial customers to Cloud IoT Core and Cloud IoT Edge, the in-house cloud offerings for everything to do with the Internet of Things.

Deadlines in the FAQ stone chiseled The original support promise for updates for three years can still be read in the first release message in the Android developer blog. The frozen release plan had been fueling the assumption for some time that Google discontinued the project internally after the fall 2019. This is underpinned by an FAQ entry, which now sets the deadlines in stone.

(sih)