5
Android@Home because nothing could go wrong with an android in your house
I've been hearing about the smart house for as long as I've been alive. How one day everything in the house will run on the same computer system and you'll be able to control it all from a computer at home or at work. Sounds magical and still hasn't happened. The reason is that it would take a whole lot of interoperability between the makers of the appliances, the software, the computer equipment. Everything would have to be on a common protocol. AND EVERYONE WANTS TO OWN THE PROTOCOL. If you're Sony, you don't want to play by Microsoft's rules. If you're Sears, you don't want to do what Cisco tells you to do. And no one gets along and nothing gets done.
So now here comes Google with a plan to have apps run your house (lights, fridge, coffee maker, and beyond) in a system called Android@Home. Google is "hoping to spark a wave of creativity similar to what Apple started when it opened the iPhone apps store," and capturing the home app market. Will it work? It could. Yeah, but will it? Well, nothing ever has before!
It will, we will have a working prototype in less than two weeks, but we take it a step further and tie in google voice and google voice feedback. Don't believe me?
call my cell 7577848130
It will, we will have a working prototype in less than two weeks, but we take it a step further and tie in google voice and google voice feedback. Don't believe me?
call my cell 7577848130
It will, we will have a working prototype in less than two weeks, but we take it a step further and tie in google voice and google voice feedback. Don't believe me?
call my cell 7577848130
There are a few differences between this effort and the past (I date back to before X-10 myself.)
First of all, the whole understanding of (in my words) an accessory ecosystem was created with the iPod/iPhone albeit with a licensing price tag. What grew up around this was a nicely sized industry. I always find it amusing that while Apple doesn't attend CES, a good 70% of the vendors there are hawking Apple-related goods. Why? Because they can. Apple selected a 'standard', their own, and kept it as such.
Fast forward to Android devices. They have a standard interface too, USB, but the number of layers of code that were required to bring support of a USB device all the way up to the app level made it difficult to just recreate the Apple data connector phenomenon. So Google, or perhaps more accurately the Android guys at Google, recognized that they needed to make this simpler with all of the "services" that would come along with any UPnP implementation. Why not use one of the previous discovery/upnp attempts? Well, the whole ownership issue is enough to make one say "no thanks" to the past. Just seeing how Microsoft is trying to slow down Android with inane IP claims is enough to tell you that you need to make the solution as open and transparent as possible, if only to thwart such attempts to impede progress and hurt consumers.
I haven't tried any of the the ADK and Android@Home code support yet (as I'm still waiting for my hardware) but if it is reasonably well done and as easy to use as other Android APIs, this should push developer uptake. Fail here and you have another stillborn standard.
The other key factor in making this a success will be the availability of cheap silicon to support the interface builders. If I have to buy $30 worth of parts for a single adaptation, it won't fly. However, if Google is smart, they will foot the bill to have some custom chips created that pack all of the necessary hardware for a particular device profiles into a single package...and make sure it is damn cheap. Here again, if they fail to solve this economic problem and simply hope that others will do so, they may be disappointed. Talk to any of the semi guys who have been around a while and they'll be happy to recount stories of such ambitious plans to establish new standards.
