I was going to write a positive article about Android Things and how it democratizes smart home development by bringing it to the hands of everyone, including hobbyists, but while this remains true, something was off. Android Things was derived from the open source Brillo source code. Both do the same thing but only one remains continuously updated: Android Things. That’s strange. You would think the two were one in the same, similar to Chromium being the open source cousin to Chrome, but they’re not. Android is open source under ASOP (Android Open Source Project). Brillo is apart of ASOP but was last updated in 2016 while Android Things was just recently updated in August of this year. What gives?
This is a trend that has been going on since 4.4 KitKat, starting with the abandonment of ASOP Search for the proprietary Google Search, and the trend has since moved to other applications. This was all in an attempt to make it easier to update it’s products independently of the OS version. In retrospective, it looks like the catch was that the ASOP version stopped getting updated. Now everything in vanilla Android is frozen in the 2.2 Froya era. Which is a bit of a dick move, to be honest, since Google used to pride itself on it’s open source software but this is also the same company that openly went by the “don’t be evil” motto which has since come into question. So I’m not entirely shocked, just disappointed.
My views on Google has steadily become more negative. In fact, recently I’ve become more favorable to Microsoft since the introduction of .NET Core, a new and fresh implementation of the .NET designed to be open source and cross-platform. Since then they’ve expanded it’s reach to other areas that original Windows-only .NET Framework could only dream of reaching. Now, Windows 10 as a whole is not open source but since a lot of their ecosystem relies on their ever growing open source components, such as .NET Core, I feel like it’s a better trade off then Google’s locking away all the good stuff to themselves.
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