Google shutters its Android Things smart home operating system
The system will shut down entirely in January 2022
Google has decided to shutter the Android Things operating system it launched to run smart home hardware.
This OS was the final version of Google Brillo, which first released all the way back in 2015
. This system aimed to provide underlying architecture that manufacturers could use to update devices that feature Google Assistant integration.
This means that manufacturers are going to have to find another way to develop Google Assistant-enabled speakers and smart displays.
Google’s developer support site says that “The commercial hardware SoMs from NXP, Qualcomm, and MediaTek are only available to specific OEM partners building smart speakers and smart displays.” SoM stands for system on module.
Google has confirmed that a “significant subset” of Gmail users encountered issues with their accounts on Tuesday.
On the company’s service status page, Google writes that “error messages, high latency and/or other unexpected behaviour occurred Tuesday afternoon.” The tech giant says that issues were resolved at 6:51pm ET.
This afternoon I encountered a problem where one of my several email addresses wasn’t forwarding into my main inbox, resulting in nearly 100 missed emails over the course of the day.
Monday, December 14th, Gmail, YouTube, Google Docs and other Google services went down in several countries.
Downdetector, a platform that tracks service outages, lists several thousand reported issues related to Gmail between 3pm and 7pm ET.