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Comment by contrarian1234 | Hacker News Reader

Is it going to be open like Android or closed like Google Play? They seem to be evasive about licensing

I also don't quite get why AI needs to be on the OS level (AI seems to make more sense on an app level) and what connection it has to XR. They're also very vague about what tangible OS integration they're planning. Sounds like a buzzword soup. They just forgot decentralized crytocurrencies

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I suspect we agree, but to try to steelman here there is a signficant and increasing need for hardware to support on-device AI, and anytime you're talking hardware there has to be a baseline level of support in the OS.

My guess though is that they are doing it because it's easier to just move AI stuff to the OS than have to do the hard work of modularizing and isolating, defining APIs and such. Also worth remembering that many of the Android decision makers don't seem to actually like Android and want to make it more like their iPhones. Android seems determined to erase (or bury to the point of impracticality) all the things that I originally loved about it. It's getting more and more closed and "the user is a security threat" with every release. I would guess that somebody is loving the amount of power and control that they can gain by doing it this way, and as long as the people continue to reward behavior like that we're going to get more of it. The iPhone being a textbook example.

I'd bet a lot of money it's not running anything significant on device AI-wise, maybe a speech model, but not anything in the key assistant pipeline that wasn't there in 2020.

It just feels a closed collaboration between Samsung and Google at this time. And there is too much unknown.

Meta apparently isn't onboard, and they don't need to. Meta knows they can't rely on Google or trust Google, so they built their own Android based platform.

There really are just a few big players in the VR world, most of which build their own platform. Meta focuses on the lower end, Apple and a few others focuses on the higher end (I am still not sure that's a real market where there is money), and Sony has just about abandoned their platform. That's it.

There are other Android XR headset manufacturers: https://www.uploadvr.com/sony-lynx-xreal-android-xr-devices/

Right, most probably closed-source just like Android wear. Even manufacturers may not have access to the source code, they would just put their stuff in the vendor partition.

A good friend of mine works for a manufacturer that make watches running on Android Wear, and closed-source system updates pushed by Google turn OS-level regressions (like battery consumption issues) into nightmares. So they are switching back to their own AOSP-based OS.

I thought Meta was doing a collab with LG on a high end headset

It has essentially nothing to do with AI, they seem to have thrown that in for bonus PR points. Sure, ML is plenty involved behind the scenes for both actual use cases (AR and VR) but it's not relevant and not what people think of when they read AI.

Reading the dev blog or the actual documentation was more informative to me:

https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2024/12/introducin...

https://developer.android.com/develop/xr

Alternatively, maybe Alphabet actually came to understand that while it would have been a pointless waste of time to flush money away on AR and VR in the manner of Apple and Meta, AI use cases and work on stuff like like Gemini streaming and Project Astra (both prominently highlighted yesterday) convinced them that AR might actually have some general use in the future.

So they decided to put some more effort and attention behind this rather than, say, shutting it down to invest more in AI, or simply keeping it on a back burner as tech portfolio hedge.

Sometimes corporate communications actually contain a bit of meaning, as shocking as that might seem.

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