Google Kills Android Things, Its IoT OS, in January | Hacker News Reader

Google Kills Android Things, Its IoT OS, in January

arstechnica.com

72 pointspjmlp24 comments

Google should create an annual dead product event each year, say on Halloween / Day of the Dead. It would be easier to keep up.

Instead of waiting for the latest product announcement before buying, it will be, wait until November before building on Google so that you know you have at least 11 months of runway with the platform.

Oh man, it's easier than that! I use Google Dampener (tm). It's a new revolutionary, cloud-based product, coming to you soon (tm). Basically works like this - something that Google makes/announces makes you excited? Dampen you expectations. New revolutionary social product? Dampen you expectations! IoT platform? Dampen it! A great RSS Reader? A responsible and honest approach to AI ethics? Unified approach to messaging? Making the world a better place? You've guessed it! Dampen it!

Sounds very cool, how do I get Google Dampener (tm)? Is it invite only beta?

Oh I'm sorry it's been sunseted already :p

They should host a de:Invent conference. Migration workshops. What to look forward to being canceled next year. Bar events where where participants can pour one out for Reader and Inbox.

Google creates endless new products and services and will only provide it love and attention if it does well, but it won't do well unless it gets love and attention, thus a seemingly endless cycle of new things that get killed before many even are aware of them. And of course, people are aware of this trend so when Google launches something that does sound interesting many may choose to not use it because they know it will be taking away just as they start to rely on it.

It is a fragmented company in which anyone looking to stand out creates a whole new product. Once they've moved on the new team has no real interest and another cycle starts with them looking to create a new product to standout.

I can only assume something similar in AWS world since that thing is crammed pack with some new feature that tweaks something.

I cant really fault the employees, companies don't have much culture of loyalty anymore. May as well get in and get what you need before getting out.

Has AWS ever killed a product? I used simple DB forever before switching to dynamoDb - I didn't remember I was using it - but it kept working

Oh no I dont think so. I meant more that success seems to be more measured by launching features rather than any other metric.

Except people's complaint about google is that they kill products. These companies are so large they launch TONS of stuff to avoid being out innovated. Echo took off for example, fire phone flopped, book store did well, AWS took off, I'm sure some other things flopped.

But AWS just does not seem to actually kill their compute products. So my example was simply SimpleDB I'm not sure is even available in console anymore, but it all still worked (a few years ago - they've probably killed it by now I guess).

All of their products are cloud open source tools, not SaaS type creations.

Here is another good examples,

- Jetpack Composer vs Flutter vs PWAs

Android vs ChromeOS vs Fuchsia

Somehow those promos have to get done right ? Couple of OKRs, a few perf cycles, launch, and move on. Also great perf stories for people who took care of sunsets

Not surprised. What were they thinking, everybody is buying Raspberry PIs instead of ESP32 now just to send some weather station data? Amazon was right to pick FreeRTOS as its foundation.

The irony is that Brillo (Things original design) was supposed to be Android, but with the frameworks rewritten in C++.

Somehow along the development, managment decided to impose a subset of Java Android frameworks instead, even the drivers for OEMs were only possible in user space Java code in the very first release.

Thus Brillo was killed and reborn as Android Things.

One could say that forcing Java into their possible audience was the mistake.

However sucessful commercial products like microEJ, PTC Perc, Aicas JamaicaVM prove otherwise.

As usual it is the traditional not caring enough from Google.

I love it. This is great corporate lore.

Wow, TIL that Google had an IoT OS.

That's probably among the reasons it's getting killed.

Off topic, just came to know Microsoft has its own RTOS, Azure RTOS.

Anyone have any experience with it?

No experience here, they actually bought it, Azure RTOS was previously known as ThreadX.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ThreadX

It's like their attitude towards legacy software is "Who controls the present controls the past! Who controls the past controls the future!"

Another product down the memory hole.

It's puzzling to me about how their reputation for unreliability in providing services like this never seems to affect their business.

Because it's a gnat on the windshield of a 20,000 car freight train moving at high speed.

Advertising rules all, everything else is a cheap experiment to find a way to push out more advertising.

Anything embedded-related out of Google should be treated as a throwaway project by an intern that is already gone. Lots of us don't even look at announcements from them anymore.

IBM used to be that freight train too. It used to be "Noone got fired for buying IBM." They made a lot of decisions like this on their way to becoming a consulting company.

Well, google is the new IBM, even Microsoft is more elegant and succesful in long term relationships. And this is huge from execution point of view IoT is a permanent blooming market with a brilliant immediate future, CEO and CTOs, or their respective product owners, are the solely responsables for this failure.

Waiting for a disruptor who will hit google on their main business within the next 10 years.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com