Google will completely shut Android Things down in 2022
For the wave of IoT devices, Google developed Android Things based on the Android system in 2016, which is the operating system Google created for the IoT platform.
The early preview version of Android Things was released in December 2016, and Google did not release the official version of Android Things 1.0 until May 2018.
Of course, in the beginning, Google also gave high hopes to the system. After all, relying on Android’s strong market coverage and strength to promote the Internet of Things does not seem to be difficult.
But sometimes you can’t really expect too much. After several years of development, the Android Things system has not dominated the IoT market as Google expected.
“Raspberry Pi 3 Board Pack for Android Things™” by adafruit is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
According to Google, this operating system no longer supports non-commercial deployments from now on, and commercial deployment Google will continue to provide images and version builds until two years later.
Eventually, Android Things will be shut down completely on January 5, 2022. At that time, Google will no longer provide version building and mirroring and will completely delete all data.
Therefore, for devices that still use the Android Things system, whether they can continue to support it after two years is still a problem, depending on whether the hardware manufacturer will support it in the future.
If it is no longer supported, it may affect the use of these IoT devices. Currently, the Android Things system is mainly equipped with smart displays and some smart speakers.
In fact, not many hardware manufacturers use Google’s Internet of Things system, because Google restricts the use of this system to smart displays and smart speakers.
As a result, the scope of application of the system has been greatly reduced and there are not many manufacturers supported, and ultimately the number of end-users using the system is also quite low.
In fact, the main problem is that the support period provided by Google is too short. The support period of this version is only three years. Usually, the support period of the Android system is three years.
However, three years is not short for smartphones, it is really short for IoT devices, and other IoT systems usually provide ten years of support.
This also makes many manufacturers reluctant to adopt Google’s system, but it seems that Google has not made more investment in the system in the later period.
