The problems are so much more pronounced in space and extraplanetary exploration that it really is a totally different thing. Bandwidth is lower, latency is mu

The problems are so much more pronounced in space and extraplanetary exploration that it really is a totally different thing. Bandwidth is lower, latency is much higher, power is a huge issue, and the hardware itself is far more primitive. The curiosity rover runs on a radiation hardened CPU capable of about 400 MIPs, which would be considered utterly obsolete for a cell phone these days. Imagine programming your phone to drive hundreds of millions of dollars of payload around an alien environment where, if something goes wrong, there will be no human intervention for anywhere from 3 to 22 minutes! Everything on Earth should be easier. An android could rely on remote servers a hundred kilomters away and incur less than a millisecond of additional delay. This is not a problem at all. The problem is that cloud services take several orders of magnitude more time to respond. An android doesn't need to carry all of its brains around with it the way a rover or spacecraft does. However, it does need to have a box dedicated to providing its intelligence within a reasonable distance. It can't rely on google cloud services. It needs software running on one, specific box.