Inside Andy Rubin's Quest to Create an OS for Everything | Hacker News Reader

Inside Andy Rubin's Quest to Create an OS for Everything

wired.com

103 pointscpeterso92 comments

This is a serious hype piece. The problem is stated clearly: the smart home industry is expensive, fragmented, and complicated. This isn't news to anyone at all but there seems to be a lack of a viable solution.

Simply connecting every gadget to some variety of interfaces has already been done dozens of times over (e.g. Crestron, control4, smartthings)

I'm in the camp that one company should make all the devices versus an open standard. That's the only way to guarantee quality.

Candidly, I don't think everything in the modern home will look like Andy's home. Instead our homes will have a few key devices like lights, speakers, locks and HVAC that make sense to interconnect.

Once we agree that not every fridge or microwave needs an internet connection, you'll see how ridiculous his vision statement becomes.

My 700sqft apartment doesn't benefit from any of this "innovation" and doesnt suffer from the mess of gadgets that don't talk to each other.

This is a wealthy persons problem and a tinkerers desires.

In a decade every electrical appliance will have a chip linking it to a central controller much as cars work now. Sensors allow the automotive computer to minutely control every detail of the car's functions. In the same way, house functions will become more efficient and automated.

I am not at all a fan of this future, but it is coming on fast. Those of us opposed will be like people now stubbornly driving older, less complex autos.

I hear you... commoditization of connected hardware makes this future a real possibility, and yet it hasn't gained consumer traction and it does add real cost to the products. $3-5 of hardware cost + thousands of hours of software adds $30+ of cost to the consumer on most devices. Thats a lot

When that changes I'm still not sure it'll happen. There needs to be a consumer demand and today there isn't.

Yup. My 1987 Toyota pickup contains no digital computer whatsoever. It's so mechanically simple. I'm pretty sure I could do or have done any major repair (e.g., full transmission replacement, major engine overhaul) for less money than the cost to replace a just-out-of-warranty computer module in a newer vehicle. I realize that computers enable better fuel efficiency, but I just don't see how all that added complexity is worth it in a gasoline-powered vehicle. I'll willingly part with it only when all-electric becomes economically viable.

If it has a carburetor it isn't mechanically simple.

lol. when i bought my first motorcycle, i explicitly avoided any motorcycle with a carburetor and only looked at fuel injected engines. there's no point in not having FI.

and modern cars aren't just mechanically "complex" for the sake of being complex. they are safer in crashes, safer when driving, more comfortable, and are some of the most reliable machines we make. you basically change the oil often and tires every now and then, and that's your maintenance. i drove my last car for 13 years and well over a 100,000 miles (not a lot really), and yet basically zero problems with that maintenance. that's pretty insane reliability for something used everyday.

You either have no computer but rather complex mechanical things (carburetor, mechanical ignition) or you have computers and quite simple mechanical things (EFI, Electronic Ignition). The computers actually make the car more reliable because there are fewer mechanical things to tweak, tune and fix.

I have nothing against FI, but on my previous motorcycle I could (and did) take apart the carburetor, fix whatever needed to be fixed (old sealings in my case) and put it back, just by reading some stuff on the internet. It is not something very complex.

I don't think I could do anything like that with my current fuel injected bike. But then again, I never needed to, because it is objectively more reliable.

There is a lot of charm in a computer-free car or bike, but I think most of the aversion people have to electronics is due to the fact that vehicles went through an "uncanny valley" of computerization, where reliability was not substantially better than previous models, yet repairability was substantially worse. I would say we've bridge that already.

City buses already need to be pulled over and rebooted periodically.

The reason computers are increasingly used in cars is that they make the car cheaper. High-precision, high-durability mechanical parts are expensive.

Go shop for a decent motorcycle chain, compare it to the cost of a Raspberry Pi. Removing a complex mechanical part and replacing it with a simpler computer-controller part is a no-brainer.

Successful product first, open standards second, rich ecosystem third.

Fully agree that not everything needs internet access, but you listed some useful ones.

I don't think this is actually a hardware company at all, to be honest. The actual hardware here is practically trivial, like an ESP8266 that bitbangs the legacy interface. Hopefully some tinkerer would design some PCBs once and just release them as CC, problem solved forever.

It's fairly straightforward to send a request to the adapter node and have it do a thing. Again, a hobbyist could probably come up with a reasonably coherent protocol in like an hour or two. There is some small value in a company that can make the act of pairing less painful for consumers, but tinkerers probably won't care.

The actual hard part is coming up with software that does useful things with those peripherals/API. He's selling an app, basically.

This is a common problem in Silicon Valley: building platforms, instead of focusing on solving valuable problems.

But instead let's focus on an important problem many humans have(to a lesser or greater degree) - bad memory. And it's very valuable - employers would be happy for better employees that do less errors, and people would really appreciate better memory. So there's money in this.

But if you think about it - the smartwatch could be a great memory aid[1].

And i've seen some research showing smart watch based checklists could help nurses reduce error rates. And another research app that could help people with Alzheimer.

But nothing on the market. And zero effort from the big guys to work on that specific problem. And thus we get the smartwatch - a useless gadget that solves tiny insignificant problems. And thus it failed.

And it's the same thing with the IOT. Solve the elderly fall detection problem, well. Solve the security problem, well. Find a few more key problems like this and solve them. This will make your solution a must have. Than you could build a good platform and convince others to join(assuming you're not too greedy).

And as for the quality problem you mentioned? There are ways to create platforms that guarantee quality. For example, a rust based microcontorller OS, that severly limits what apps can do.

[1]Think of having voice activated checklists[1](to reduce errors at your job or home) that are always there. Or after having an important conversation , saying "remember", and the watch remembers. And of course voice activated search. And context dependent search(using something like a high-accuracy location detection) to better narrow search and effectively present contextual info. Or use knowledge from psychology about how our memory works,

Who is all this engineering effort for?

How many people live in fortresses of solitude where they need to automatically track the cars that come down the driveway?

How many Silicon Valley billionaires need a computer to tell them what to wear today? (t-shirt and jeans again?)

Why is it useful to have automated control of the lights in every room? Turning lights on and off, using a plain old mechanical switch, is about the easiest, most mindless task I perform on any given day.

Looks like good tech for very automated jail.

Brave New World for corporations, 1984 for governments?

Or mass housing.

Less freedom and choice people have, more their life can be automated. And jails are probably more affordable business.

Then we should make homelessness a crime to ensure affordable housing for all.

A jail with bars made out of numbers is still a jail.

Light is not just on/off, it's a million different shades and intensities, some more appropriate depending on the time of day.

> Who is all this engineering effort for Everybody.

Sure right now philips hue cost hundreds of dollars, but that price is going to drop seriously. The price of smart-everything is going to drop.

Try to imagine a house where there's a thousand different machines just there to make your life nicer.

> Light is not just on/off, it's a million different shades and intensities, some more appropriate depending on the time of day.

remarkable! how did people ever live without this before?

but i'd still be stuck having to chew my own food? oh wait, soylent!

Wow this is seriously not constructive at all.

I'll bet in the 90s you were saying what's the purpose of sending email from your phone if you can already send email from your computer.

Being able to change your light intensity a few shades (more than a manual light intensity switch) is a far cry from being able to send e-mail in critical situations from your phone. Even then I'd say e-mail on your phone just isn't that useful; your example to show "this totally isn't a gimmick" could have been much better.

i'd say there's a substantial difference between having a computer that takes up a large room and needs wires, a PC that is small enough to fit on a desk and still needs wires, and a computer you can put in your pocket and doesn't need wires.

If I can send e-mail from my computer, I will. My phone is for those rare times where I have a pressing need to e-mail someone, but don't have any other way to do it.

I could see some use in smart-home devices to do things that "always" need done, and that don't need a connection outside of the home. Like "if anyone's home, keep it between 65 and 80 degrees, depending on humidity and delta with the outdoor temperature".

But I've never seen an example of something that I'd call anything more than a minor convenience, at best. Will I use it when it's ubiquitous in society? Meh, probably. But I don't feel the same excitement about it that others seem to.

You're confusing niceties with necessities, and in not a very productive manner.

> remarkable! how did people ever live without this before?

In a sense, they didn't! When you're outside, the sun and sky already provide "a million different shades and intensities" of ambient light, depending on the time of day and the weather. Those fancy colored light systems could be seen as replicating that variety indoors.

A thousand different unnecessary components to break and require fixing. Some people will like this, but I think it's going to cause more headache than it helps.

>Light is not just on/off, it's a million different shades and intensities, some more appropriate depending on the time of day.

Yea so you install one of these http://www.homedepot.com/b/Electrical-Dimmers-Switches-Outle...

>Try to imagine a house where there's a thousand different machines just there to make your life nicer.

Now try to imagine all the gaping security holes emanating from your house. And oh man it's gonna suck when the remote server goes down and your thermostat can't phone home so you're stuck at 55F during the winter

There'll always be people who lose their data because they don't have proper backups, people who lose control of their iot devices because they are open to and require an internet connection and people who die in a car crash because they think they are sober enough.

There are always tons of ways to make stupid decisions, a small amount of research usually helps.

Why would a "smart home" need to interact with the outside world? Most applications cited in the story certainly don't require it, and if they do, there's no technical reason they need to be connected directly to the internet.

If people are too hesitant to give up their homes' security and privacy to corporations, some company will eventually come up with an open-source self-hosted solution that doesn't suffer from those issues.

It shouldn't, but it seems like most of the smart devices being marketed do, apparently for remote monitoring and access to data.

There are already a bunch of open solutions. You can self host OpenHAB or Home Assistant right now and integrate many different devices from many different manufacturers using open protocols like Z-Wave.

In such a case neither the devices nor the main controller need to phone home.

> Yea so you install one of these

Which one of those lets you customize the color and hue?

What exactly is your point?

That he shouldn't be inventing all this stuff? Why not?

As the article says, he's ahead of the curve. The next generation will consider all this stuff normal, and just the way the world works.

But if we didn't have people making stuff just because they wanted it, nothing would ever happen.

My point is that people probably don't want this stuff.

It really depends on how much it costs and how well it works.

The bigger market for vehicle monitoring is probably second homes though.

But people generally don't know what they want. Just yesterday I talked with my mom about how in j2me times I worked to set up sync'd calendars, mails, notes, etc. Back then people told me no one needs it. Nowadays everyone is used to exactly that and loves it.

Who would weigh themselves down with a high cost phone in your pocket when there's one on the wall?

Who needs a website showing pictures of goldfish when you can interact on a bulletin board?

Hard to predict which technologies get adopted.

> Who would weigh themselves down with a high cost phone in your pocket when there's one on the wall?

This was correct. People aren't carrying their high-cost phones everywhere because they want to make telephone calls. They're just called "phones" by coincidence.

People carried actual phones with them long before smartphones existed.

There were carphones which required a big box in the trunk. There were cellphones that did nothing but make calls. It wasn't until much later that mobile phones started doing anything but making phone calls.

So no, "this was" not "correct".

> Who would weigh themselves down with a high cost phone in your pocket when there's one on the wall?

Anyone who sits in a place waiting. Put a phone a smartphone in their hands where they can look up the thing they're thinking about (or anything else on the net that they can access). Instant comprehension.

> Who needs a website showing pictures of goldfish when you can interact on a bulletin board?

Ask anyone to imagine what the bulletin board looks like in a geographical location far away. Then enter a URL for that far away location and receive the response in seconds (vs days of travel). Instant comprehension.

> Hard to predict which technologies get adopted.

That's true. For the two examples I gave above, there are many more where respondents instantly recognized the benefit but the technology still didn't take off.

However, that's beside the point. The point is-- what is the moment of "instant comprehension" for all of someone's appliances phoning home to a third party?

Edit: just to add another example. Someone does an hour commute to and from work. Put them in a self-driving vehicle. Now they potentially have two extra hours of concentration they can devote to something other than the road. Even if they're fearful of using it in the automated drive demo-- instant comprehension.

I don't think the instant comprehension comes until hindsight. I don't know what the killer app will be for the home OS (or even if there will be one) but history will make it look like a logical step that was inevitable. It's hindsight bias.

For the first two examples I gave I remember seeing an early adopter do exactly what I described and it was instant comprehension for me. Again-- it doesn't mean I knew those technologies would take off, that they'd be important, or even that I was excited about them. But it did mean I at least understood one glaringly obvious potential if they happened to take off.

Also, the third example does not yet exist as a common vehicle so I cannot have hindsight bias. But again, glaringly obvious that reading a book instead of staring at the road for an hour would be an enormous gain in productivity and agency for lots of people.

Or even take a failed futurism-- If I had a jet pack I could quickly fly on a whim to the beach and have a picnic. Instant comprehension.

What's the cool thing I get to do that I currently cannot if my household appliances all send streams of sensor data to a third party?

No one needs it, just as no one needs online video streaming

To better understand, the movie Her is good for context: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Her_(film) - everything is seemless and automatic, like having an omniscient butler

As others have mentioned, China and Singapore are also other motivations ie. 'automated jails', especially since western governments are moving closer to their philsophy of control while they simultaneously criticize it.

I assure you, turning lights on and off by hand in a large house full of kids is a royal pain in the ass. If you live in a half a room size appt in SF, not so much

Why is a connected light better than a simple motion activated one?

Anecdotally, fwiw.

We installed a motion activated light in our laundry room, years ago, since the switch was not in any convenient/sensible location. It worked for awhile, but eventually would turn on, if at all, for like 3 seconds (even when the switch inside was set to 10 minutes).

Probably it was just a cheap, crappy fixture. But I don't think I'll ever try to use a "simple" motion activated light again.

Of course, connected lights, whatever that means, are probably even buggier...

In my old house, not a single light switch is where you'd expect it to be, and a number of the rooms are byways between other rooms.

So being able to turn the light on when you walked in was no guarantee you'd be able to do the same when you walked out again.

So your parents never yelled at you about leaving the lights on when you were a kid?

And you never yell at anyone you know about doing the same?

I'm not at all against people automating the hell out of their homes, so I'm on "your side" as it were, but this isn't the greatest argument in favor.

People yelling at family members over leaving the lights are essentially "penny pinching" fractional cents of energy costs. I'm sure all the computers, sensors, networking gear, etc, that make this all work consume significantly more power than if you were just to leave every light in your house on 100% of the time, especially if we're talking about LED bulbs.

It's interesting that people are real sticklers about turning off unnecessary lights. As you said, the electricity costs are negligible. Today's "bulbs" are either CFL or LED and they consume virtually zero electricity. But I still have this itch to turn each one of before going to sleep.

You're going to need 10 watts to light even a tiny room with a single bulb. You can run a raspberry Pi (not even really designed to be low power) on half of that.

If your house is so small you only need one bulb per room and has a couple of rooms (i.e., you live in an apartment), where the light is fove feet from you, nobody is going to market a product for that.

As the other responder said, you're still in for at a minimum 20 watts in a room for an actual house. Further, you pay for those watts again if there is AC (so more like 25-30 watts), the lights might not all be tied to the light switch, and they may not all be rooms you frequent. And then add on that rooms you don't frequent may still have incandescent bulbs in them because you stopped, like me, after replacing 20 or 30 bulbs and you're replacing the rest as they burn out.

That isn't really accurate. An Aeotec Smart Switch 6 for example consumes <0.8W, while a single LED lamp consumes 4-20W depending on brightness. So the lights in a single room could reasonably be consuming 20-100W, vs. a smart switch consuming <1W.

You don't have to optimise your usage much to totally offset the power cost of using smart devices

My kitchen, with all of the light sockets populated, is 45 watts of LEDs, and it's not even a modern-sized kitchen.

That switch stays on fro, sun up to bedtime.

> Turning lights on and off, using a plain old mechanical switch, is about the easiest, most mindless task I perform on any given day.

Agreed, but ...

The switch and light are where the original house owner wanted them. If I want to move either of them, I'm calling an electrician and tearing through walls. And, if you want to add a second switch that controls one light, good luck.

Being able to wire the light and the switch separately is useful.

It's funny that the article mentions a past Rubin startup that got the timing wrong on the early side - this one seems to be on the late side. Most people have realized by now that most of these smart home gadgets are solutions in search of a problem. They're fun for people like Rubin and myself who like to tinker, hack, and customize, but they don't deliver a compelling value proposition for consumers. Most people simply do not need Internet-connected doorknobs or a ton of cameras all around their property. Household chores take up a lot of time that people would rather spend otherwise, but the IoT smart home industry has addressed virtually none of that. It's the laundry that takes up too much of my time, not getting up to turn on the light switch.

I think we need a programming language for everything not an operating system. Certain language primitives should be connected devices themselves.

Only because a language is more efficient then just another set of SDKs and libraries being cobbled together to access the nearest HomePod for instance.

I assume Apple's HealthKit is in line with the operating system of IoT, as I would assume most connected things would be read-only, and we'd only be reading things like battery life, air quality, lock status, speed, etc from devices. I wouldn't want to be able to for instance turn on the turn signal for my car by accident running some script I wrote.

> Here's some free advice: Don’t try to break into Andy Rubin’s house. As soon as your car turns into the driveway at his sprawling pad in the Silicon Valley hills, a camera will snap a photo of your vehicle, run it through computer-vision software to extract the plate number, and file it into a database. Rubin’s system can be set to text him every time a certain car shows up or to let specific vehicles through the gate.

This just makes me wonder how far you could get if you took a piece of cardboard the size of a license plate and wrote the plate number of Rubin's car on it in magic marker...

https://hackaday.com/2014/04/04/sql-injection-fools-speed-tr...

This is fantastic

Wasn't this actually an X-files episode? I remember a rich techie developing a home AI that Scully and Mulder eventually fooled by stealing a license plate it recognized and putting it on a different car.

Such a system should prompt two-factor auth. Once the license plate is recognized, an auth request is pushed to Andy's phone and then he verifies by voice.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zVgWpVXb64

Ambient OS looks like the Microsoft Windows of smart-homes. We need an open protocol for smart-homes, like TCP/IP for the Web. Something you have control on, that encourages competition and that can't be bricked by the company.

Never forget : http://uk.businessinsider.com/googles-nest-closing-smart-hom...

> Here's some free advice: Don’t try to break into Andy Rubin’s house.

Seems like that is just asking to have people break into his house.

I wonder if he is using wireless cameras because I have an uneducated theory that I would like a smart person here to destroy. So please forgive my lack of knowledge here.

If I made a device that amplified the RF signal from a wifi router ... made it like it had the rf signal power output would that device be capable of "drowning out" other wifi transmitters ... making a wifi camera incapable of seeing its base station ?

RF signal jammers are a thing.... they also are illegal. Certainly if you had a RF source blanket the WiFi spectrum at 1kW, you'd knock out WiFi cameras (legal operation in the WiFi spectrum is limited to 1W, and is often used at less). The same idea would apply to anything using a radio, like cell phones, GPS, etc.

Again, this is completely illegal though.

Thank you. I'm not trying to make one. I am just trying to get a better handle on how RF is used. Thanks again.

I'm turning my house, built in the 70's, into a smart-home: I'm going solar, its got an amazing garden, we have access to deep water reserves, and we're going off the grid.

The hoops to jump through for all of this really are quite insurmountable in some aspects. There really is a need for it - and where I think this is going to be of great benefit to the broader public, is when we get smart-houses going through the same Moores-law iterations that computers went through.

Hell yeah I wanna know how much energy I harvested from the sun and wind and rain this month. No, I don't want it available on the cloud, to anyone else. Yes, I do want a system I can maintain and control myself - definitely I don't want to have a system in my house which is closed off in order to protect the self-interests of other entities.

Its a huge new realm for computing, this off-grid stuff. I really hope the grid'ists don't fuck it up.

I am surprised nobody mentioned this guy's failure to deliver the Essential Phone in time (whether it's essential is a huge argument point by itself).

Cynically speaking, to me that's a paid article to keep hype around the persona since he's losing a lot of PR points lately.

I am not taking such a "visionary" seriously unless he manages to ship the one consumer-level product he promised.

And yes, many of his ideas are COMMON SENSE, I can't for the life of me understand the praise.

I feel like a lot of those common sense ideas could still use streamlining to put in homes. Why can't I live like Rubin? Why should these devices be only for the rich? Hook up a hydrometer and switch and sell it to me as relative humidity aware fan controller.

I think the hyped euphemisms are carefully crafted to make the people feel important if they buy something. It's a very regular psychological technique in marketing.

Nitpick: Hydrometers measure the specific gravity of liquids and are mostly used for beverages such as to calculate a liquid's sugar or alcohol contents.

You're thinking of hygrometers, which measure relative humidity using capacitive, resistive, or gravimetric methods.

Can’t agree more. Also the “invention” of android is debatable to me. Wasn’t a rushed response to iOS?

AFAIK Android was already under development but arrival of iPhone caused it to be completely modified before release.

It was originally an OS for cameras. It's a pain to develop on. I believe they used an automated tool to convert a C-codebase to Java (judging from method name, usage of bit-fields instead of enums etc.)

Not sure a 1st generation device or creator can be judged like that.

New devices and manufacturers don't typically improve the 3rd or 4th generation.

Rushed devices are largely premature, unusuable, and still move things forward: iPhone 1, Galaxy Note 1..

When did quality, functionality, delivering on scale and time get better? iPhone 3-4, Galaxy Note 3-4, LG G3-G4, Samsung S3-S4, iPad 3-4, Nexus 4-5.

Hype aside, the first effort isn't something that should be undercut.

I don't disagree.

What I am saying is that writing such articles is embarrassing and reads like a paid hype. Plus the guy really doesn't have much under his belt.

I and many other practical people dislike person cults. Especially such forced ones.

The thing that has stood out to me about innovators, and innovation, is they live in a mindset of possibility, not doubt or skepticism.

Guys like Rubin have built something that touched a lot of people, and grew to be much larger than them. I think that's not really something I can look to anyone to credit, or discredit, than, say someone else who has done the same.

I'm not sure if everyone is the type to take an the article immediately as gospel, or trying to immediately debunk it as gospel.

Maybe Wired has been been in my life through a few internet generations. Wired once was a key way of bringing attention to corners of the internet that weren't always easy to locate.

> this guy's failure to deliver the Essential Phone in time

Hasn't been a good month for Essential. The phone he promised in June didn't ship in July, lost VP's of marketing and communication and today Google hired away his lead UX designer to fill the same role for Google Home.

Exactly what I was also aiming at; such mass exodus events signal either (a) that Rubin hired a bunch of greedy freeloaders that leave after the first signs of struggle, or (b) he is a dictator who's not pleasant to work with.

Both of these aren't promising.

Moeller Air Car rings a bell...wonder if any of the SV pursuits got the memo...

This is all well and good, but installing all of this stuff is the substantial blocker for me. I live in a big old house made out of stone with walls that are impenetrable without a very serious drill.

Unless someone solves the installation question, I’m going to have to sit this one out. Even running Ethernet wire to just the next room is a massive undertaking.

Completely wireless home automation that is simple to install – that would be a game changer for me. I shouldn’t have to practically hire an architect to plan the install for some of this stuff.

The secrecy of this project will ensure its failure.

The fragmentation of data and UI affects a lot more people than the fragmentation of smart home products. The solution to both is not a proprietary interface built on top of an aggregator, but a completely new language and communication paradigm.

I'm sure he thinks he's ambitious, but this article failed to demonstrate he's doing anything novel.

Andy Rubin is an engineer, not a hip-startup visionaire director by his nature. "Visionaire directors," are not smart people in their prevalent majority, and Rubin is just to high on intellectual ladder to be one.

And his phone... he believed that hole in the screen is a "smart idea"... That was super disappointing

Hasn't Linux become OS for everything?

>If by some miracle you were to make it all the way to the front door, you’d never get past the retinal scanner.

I thought iris scanners were superior?

This read like a puff piece to me.

Andy Rubin will be judged on execution, not by the quantity of positive news article that are written about him.

> or to let specific vehicles through the gate

Put a fake license plate on a drone, watch his gates open, then fly away.

How does this even warrant an article?

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