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

103 points by cpeterso 9y ago

jpm_sd 9y ago
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.
- riku_iki 9y ago
  Looks like good tech for very automated jail.
  - digi_owl 9y ago
    Brave New World for corporations, 1984 for governments?
  - yters 9y ago
    Or mass housing.
    - riku_iki 9y ago
      Less freedom and choice people have, more their life can be automated. And jails are probably more affordable business.
      - yters 9y ago
        Then we should make homelessness a crime to ensure affordable housing for all.
  - stephengillie 9y ago
    A jail with bars made out of numbers is still a jail.
- Jyaif 9y ago
  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.
  - leeoniya 9y ago
    > 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!
    - oh_sigh 9y ago
      You're confusing niceties with necessities, and in not a very productive manner.
    - CardenB 9y ago
      Wow this is seriously not constructive at all.
    - booleandilemma 9y ago
      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.
      - ue_ 9y ago
        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.
      - leeoniya 9y ago
- LeoPanthera 9y ago
  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.
  - jpm_sd 9y ago
    My point is that people probably don't want this stuff.
    - maxerickson 9y ago
      It really depends on how much it costs and how well it works. The bigger market for vehicle monitoring is probably second homes though.
    - Semaphor 9y ago
      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.
      - deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
    - mathattack 9y ago
      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.
      - thaumasiotes 9y ago
        > 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.
- vasilipupkin 9y ago
  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
  - 8ytecoder 9y ago
    Why is a connected light better than a simple motion activated one?
    - ghettoimp 9y ago
      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...
  - hinkley 9y ago
    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.
- chaostheory 9y ago
  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) 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.
- hinkley 9y ago
  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?
  - georgemcbay 9y ago
    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.
    - dingo_bat 9y ago
      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.
      - hinkley 9y ago
        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.
    - 9y ago
- bsder 9y ago
  > 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.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
smacktoward 9y ago
> 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...
- jerrylives 9y ago
  https://hackaday.com/2014/04/04/sql-injection-fools-speed-traps-and-clears-your-record/ https://hackaday.com/2014/04/04/sql-injection-fools-speed-tr...
  - 2_listerine_pls 9y ago
    This is fantastic
- jeff_petersen 9y ago
  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.
- malandrew 9y ago
  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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zVgWpVXb64
balls187 9y ago
> 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.
- backtoyoujim 9y ago
  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 ?
  - ac29 9y ago
    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.
    - backtoyoujim 9y ago
      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.
cairo_x 9y ago
How does this even warrant an article?
debt 9y ago
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.
throwaway47861 9y ago
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.
- j45 9y ago
  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.
  - throwaway47861 9y ago
    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.
    - j45 9y ago
      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.
arnaudsm 9y ago
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-home-company-revolv-bricking-devices-2016-4 http://uk.businessinsider.com/googles-nest-closing-smart-hom...
briandear 9y ago
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.
Duhck 9y ago
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.
- CapitalistCartr 9y ago
  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.
  - Duhck 9y ago
    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.
  - robolange 9y ago
    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.
lanius 9y ago
>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?
miguelrochefort 9y ago
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.
zakki 9y ago
Hasn't Linux become OS for everything?
bryananderson 9y ago
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.
mycall 9y ago
> or to let specific vehicles through the gate Put a fake license plate on a drone, watch his gates open, then fly away.
ShabbosGoy 9y ago
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.
baybal2 9y ago
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
mmjaa 9y ago
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.

103 points by cpeterso 9y ago

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.

riku_iki 9y ago
Looks like good tech for very automated jail.
- digi_owl 9y ago
  Brave New World for corporations, 1984 for governments?
- yters 9y ago
  Or mass housing.
  - riku_iki 9y ago
    Less freedom and choice people have, more their life can be automated. And jails are probably more affordable business.
    - yters 9y ago
      Then we should make homelessness a crime to ensure affordable housing for all.
- stephengillie 9y ago
  A jail with bars made out of numbers is still a jail.
Jyaif 9y ago
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.
- leeoniya 9y ago
  > 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!
  - oh_sigh 9y ago
    You're confusing niceties with necessities, and in not a very productive manner.
  - CardenB 9y ago
    Wow this is seriously not constructive at all.
  - booleandilemma 9y ago
    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.
    - ue_ 9y ago
      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.
    - leeoniya 9y ago
LeoPanthera 9y ago
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.
- jpm_sd 9y ago
  My point is that people probably don't want this stuff.
  - maxerickson 9y ago
    It really depends on how much it costs and how well it works. The bigger market for vehicle monitoring is probably second homes though.
  - Semaphor 9y ago
    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.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
  - mathattack 9y ago
    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.
    - thaumasiotes 9y ago
      > 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.
vasilipupkin 9y ago
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
- 8ytecoder 9y ago
  Why is a connected light better than a simple motion activated one?
  - ghettoimp 9y ago
    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...
- hinkley 9y ago
  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.
chaostheory 9y ago
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) 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.
hinkley 9y ago
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?
- georgemcbay 9y ago
  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.
  - dingo_bat 9y ago
    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.
    - hinkley 9y ago
      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.
  - 9y ago
bsder 9y ago
> 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.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

smacktoward 9y ago

> 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...

jerrylives 9y ago
https://hackaday.com/2014/04/04/sql-injection-fools-speed-traps-and-clears-your-record/ https://hackaday.com/2014/04/04/sql-injection-fools-speed-tr...
- 2_listerine_pls 9y ago
  This is fantastic
jeff_petersen 9y ago
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.
malandrew 9y ago
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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zVgWpVXb64

balls187 9y ago

> 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.

backtoyoujim 9y ago
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 ?
- ac29 9y ago
  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.
  - backtoyoujim 9y ago
    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.

cairo_x 9y ago

How does this even warrant an article?

debt 9y ago

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.

throwaway47861 9y ago

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.

j45 9y ago
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.
- throwaway47861 9y ago
  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.
  - j45 9y ago
    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.

arnaudsm 9y ago

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-home-company-revolv-bricking-devices-2016-4 http://uk.businessinsider.com/googles-nest-closing-smart-hom...

briandear 9y ago

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.

Duhck 9y ago

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.

CapitalistCartr 9y ago
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.
- Duhck 9y ago
  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.
- robolange 9y ago
  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.

lanius 9y ago

>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?

miguelrochefort 9y ago

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.

zakki 9y ago

Hasn't Linux become OS for everything?

bryananderson 9y ago

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.

mycall 9y ago

> or to let specific vehicles through the gate Put a fake license plate on a drone, watch his gates open, then fly away.

ShabbosGoy 9y ago

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.

baybal2 9y ago

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

mmjaa 9y ago

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.