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Friday, October 25, 2013

Will Android Be the One Operating System to Rule Them All?

October 25, 2013, 7:40 AM
Android, the mobile-phone operating system that powers most of the world’s smartphones, was never intended just to be used on phones, even though that is where it has had the greatest success. London’s Droidcon conference, which closes Friday, is full of developers trying to integrate it into every device they can think of.
What about a smart washbasin and mirror? Tokyo-based Seraku Co. has embedded it into a bathroom mirror. Want to watch the news, or check traffic, while brushing your teeth, or keep a detailed log of your weight? The mirror will do it for you.
There are watches, cars, augmented-reality goggles, even a device for growing food hydroponically, all of which use the operating system.
Kevin McDonagh, CEO of Novoda Ltd., a London-based Android development agency, and organizer of Droidcon, is as passionate an evangelist as you are going to find. He sees a future where it will be in everything—”the one operating system to bind them all.”
“Android was envisaged as an operating system of interconnected devices,” he said. “It is in washing machines, it is microwaves. It is even in a rice cooker.”
Why would you want such a thing? Well, putting smarts in dumb machines makes a lot of sense. Domestic machines have for a very long time had microprocessors in them to optimize processes, but the problem for many is that they exist in their own silos. Can a washing machine talk to a dryer?
Adding a common platform like Android makes it easier to integrate devices, easier for developers to build on them, easier for consumers to interact with them (controlling them over the Internet or via a mobile phone, for example), easier for them to interact with consumers. If your washing machine could talk to your TV, it could tell you when the wash was done.
There is some confusion between what is Android and what is GoogleGOOG -0.57%. Typically when people talk about Android they mean Google, but, said Mr. McDonagh, they are not synonymous. There is an open-source (meaning it is free for anyone to download and do as they like with it) project called AOSP (Android Open Source Project), and there is Google’s version of Android, augmented by its own proprietary services (maps, Gmail, etc.).
In the hotly contested area of smartphones, the distinction between the two can be significant. In the world of embedded devices, it is unlikely that your washing machine is going to have a Gmail account, so the distinction between the two becomes less important.
But if every device from your phone to your rice maker is running the same operating system, isn’t this a huge vulnerability? “Yes,” Mr. McDonagh said bluntly. “But having it open to a global pool of experts to tackle the problems is much more reassuring than the secular scrutiny of Microsoft or Apple. I am sure they have incredible experts, but they don’t have a world of experts.”
Paradoxically, the future for Android (outside the smartphone), said Mr. McDonagh, is for it to disappear—it will become almost invisible, the thing that makes everything tick. “If Android is successful, it will vanish into every area of our daily lives.”

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