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I can't speak to this directly because of numerous reasons, chiefly among them being that I don't get to make those decisions. Standard disclaimer follows: I re

I can't speak to this directly because of numerous reasons, chiefly among them being that I don't get to make those decisions. Standard disclaimer follows: I rejoined in the last two years, what follows are my opinions, these opinions are my own, blah blah. Android has never been about driving the hardware narrative -- it's always been about building a phone with mostly open contributions and driving the start of a wedge to open up the phone industry a bit. It's always been a software answer to a hardware problem, even today. Prior to Android, all we had were closed source low powered feature phones and Blackberries. That being said, building silicon is non trivial work, and building a BLE stack and controller is even more so. Will a solid BLE stack sell phones? Hard to say how it could drive that narrative, realistically, and even harder to say if such a controller could be made cost effectively. Given Android's archetype (software solution to closed hardware), this puts such a project into a much more difficult position politically and financially. I can't see this kind of thing having much in the way of legs in a large corp. That being said, I do think if a startup could challenge this landscape, it is a HUGE opportunity.

qbasic_forever 6y ago
Yeah from the Android platform side it would be weird to build chips. For products like the Pixel phone though, that would be a great place to innovate. And realistically, Google needs to get into the custom chip game sooner rather than later... GCE needs to start competing with Amazon's Graviton ARM processors. The sooner you get the expertise and talent to churn out chips (and maybe even a fab or two?), the better. The global shortage for fab usage and chips could kind of force your hand soon.
- vlovich123 6y ago
  Google doesn't have the volume on its first-party hardware to drive something like this yet & they would never start with BLE chips. Additionally, there's some really good vendors out of China already challenging BCOM & QCOM FWIW, which further complicates the "build it yourself" narrative (look at the Pixel buds which have an AirPods-like experience running a Chinese BLE chip for the buds which other Western vendors weren't able to match). The Android org generally isn't the right org to build hardware, let alone do chip design. Maybe the camera team got closest when I worked there? Source: worked on Pixel Buds @ Google & was one of several engineers responsible for selecting the chip vendor. We got source access to the entire stack/OS except for the microcode & some parts of the stack they hid. I found BES a way better partner to work with than the BCOM/QCOM mess.
  - jasonvorhe 6y ago
    Are you talking about the 1st or 2nd Gen Buds? Because the 2nd gens seem to have severe connection issues: a) they frequently flip flop between at least two BT profiles, leading to a lackluster listening experience b) they lose connection to each other (leading to intermittend profile switches during reconnects, possibly due to lack of available bandwidth) c) they have severe signal quality issues, leading to limited range and audio interruptions All these issues only happen with the 2nd Gen Pixel Buds, but not with a random sample of various other true wireless earbuds (I tested Sony WF-1000XM3, 1More True Wireless ANC, Airpods Pro) leading me to believe that this must be a hardware issue on Google's side, especially because the amount of people with the same issues is pretty high. No other pair of true wireless earbuds hat any issues with music playback while I'm on a road bike, with my phone being on my back, only the Pixel Buds do - and I'm on my 2nd replacement already.
- johnflan 6y ago
  Aren’t they already with TPUs?
  - boulos 6y ago
    Yes. And several generations in.
  - geodel 6y ago
    Huge difference between designing for their own data centers vs consumer chips.
kungito 6y ago
Google throws money at problems which don't generate revenue all the time. I feel like all it takes is someone inside Google with enough leverage to push it through without the thing having to make business sense
- Infinitesimus 6y ago
  That could work but the other side of that coin is: if it stops making financial sense Google will do the responsible thing and end it. "Your BT hardware's software is no longer supported" will do more damage to the problem they're trying to solve here
  - Lammy 6y ago
    I’ve already had Android phones that didn’t get more than a single major update where the BT/WiFi blobs were locked to some ancient kernel.
- Groxx 6y ago
  tbh, Android consistently having a good bluetooth experience would probably be good for the platform.
edent 6y ago
> Prior to Android, all we had were closed source low powered feature phones and Blackberries. Symbian was open source, ran on millions of smartphones - most of which had app stores and web browsers. Some of which had touchscreens, GPS, augmented reality features etc. Don't get me wrong - Android has been brilliant. But let's not completely rewrite history, eh?
- mondoshawan 6y ago
  Right. I didn't think I was trying to rewrite history -- I'm simply pointing out a gap in the market that Android was attempting to fill. Asking me to enumerate everything out there at the time is silly -- especially given the haze of memory. Symbian was far more popular in Europe than it ever was Stateside, so bear that in mind. I had to import my Nokia E70 gullwing phone before I received my sooner, and what functionality it had was okay, but the browser was hardly more than a WAP browser in a feature phone. The app store was barely there as well, including only a handful of very simple apps at the time.
  - spacehunt 6y ago
    The browser in S60 phones was actually WebKit. In fact it was Nokia that started the work of fitting WebKit into memory-constrained devices.
    - mondoshawan 6y ago
      Oh, neat! I had no idea it was WebKit on there. Still, what I had wasn't exactly what you'd be comfortable using for more than a few moments. I bought one of the original Nokia Internet Tablets and put together a full wearable system back then to make things a bit better for myself, but I never used the browser in S60 for anything serious because it was so cut down.
gecko 6y ago
Prior to Android, all we had were closed source low powered feature phones and Blackberries. I...what? Even if we want to ignore the iPhone for whatever reason, the Palm Treo, Nokia N900, and Windows Phone were firmly established by the time Android started getting demoed--and that was the variant that was very much reminiscent of Windows Phone, with a strong emphasis on the cursor keys over a touchscreen. The rest of your comment makes sense, but the cognitive dissonance of that sentence was so extreme I had to respond.
- mondoshawan 6y ago
  I missed a comma in that: closed source phones, low power feature phones, and Blackberries. The N900 is a different, rare breed that did not see widespread adoption. Fun fact: the first Android phone was the sooner, and it looked and behaved much like a blackberry. Still have mine, in fact.
  - berbec 6y ago
    I loved my Symbian E62
conradev 6y ago
> Android has never been about driving the hardware narrative Apple has been building its own hardware from the beginning, but still also uses Broadcom chips.
- serf 6y ago
  >Apple has been building its own hardware from the beginning do you mean designing? I'm not familiar with any point in time where Apple was building phones, but maybe i'm mistaken. A quick google search indicates that even the first generation phones were built by Hon Hai.
- mondoshawan 6y ago
  They have been integrating hardware from the beginning, not making it all themselves. What they do, though, is demand the ability to vet and fix vendor firmware.
- skzv 6y ago
  They acquired Intel's modem division, so that may change in the future as well.
KingHenryVIII 6y ago
What a hopelessly naive perspective. Android has always been about ensuring the Google surveillance operation doesn't get shut out of mobile. The whole OS is designed to enable snooping on the user not just while in the browser, but at all times. The fact that they've had to build actual hardware that functions at times, and includes things like driver stacks is purely incidental to the main mission. Try seeing how willing they are to add support for chipsets on phones that don't include Google Services.
- mondoshawan 6y ago
  > What a hopelessly naive perspective. Maybe, but I was there, helping it develop in the early days, which is the time span we're talking about. I can tell you the core of the Android team was fighting to keep it open -- so much so that about three years in one of the guys who dedicated his job to open sourcing drivers and kernel patches burnt out because of it. What Android is about is decidedly not what Play Services and GCM core are about. > Try seeing how willing they are to add support for chipsets on phones that don't include Google Services It's always been the system integrator's job to work with the OEM vendors to integrate drivers and functionality into Android -- not the Android team's. Even on Glass we had to do this as though we were outside system integrators.
  - asddubs 6y ago
    too bad more and more of android was moved into play services over time
    - mondoshawan 6y ago
      It wasn't. Play services is just add on features that proxy app permissions and centralize push notifications -- no actual Android features moved into Play services that I know of. Ie: auto filling SMS OTP codes. It feels like Android is being sucked up that way, but that's because there are a lot of really nice features in there, like push notifications, geofencing, etc. You can still run Android without GMS core and Play services -- I do that, myself, on a Pixel 3a running Graphene. The trick is that you lose some nice functionality (which Android actually makes up for in some cases, ie: SMS OTP copy buttons), and the mapping experience is god-awful (mostly because the OSS mapping scene is hopelessly stuck in the 1990s GPS model)

qbasic_forever 6y ago

Yeah from the Android platform side it would be weird to build chips. For products like the Pixel phone though, that would be a great place to innovate. And realistically, Google needs to get into the custom chip game sooner rather than later... GCE needs to start competing with Amazon's Graviton ARM processors. The sooner you get the expertise and talent to churn out chips (and maybe even a fab or two?), the better. The global shortage for fab usage and chips could kind of force your hand soon.

vlovich123 6y ago
Google doesn't have the volume on its first-party hardware to drive something like this yet & they would never start with BLE chips. Additionally, there's some really good vendors out of China already challenging BCOM & QCOM FWIW, which further complicates the "build it yourself" narrative (look at the Pixel buds which have an AirPods-like experience running a Chinese BLE chip for the buds which other Western vendors weren't able to match). The Android org generally isn't the right org to build hardware, let alone do chip design. Maybe the camera team got closest when I worked there? Source: worked on Pixel Buds @ Google & was one of several engineers responsible for selecting the chip vendor. We got source access to the entire stack/OS except for the microcode & some parts of the stack they hid. I found BES a way better partner to work with than the BCOM/QCOM mess.
- jasonvorhe 6y ago
  Are you talking about the 1st or 2nd Gen Buds? Because the 2nd gens seem to have severe connection issues: a) they frequently flip flop between at least two BT profiles, leading to a lackluster listening experience b) they lose connection to each other (leading to intermittend profile switches during reconnects, possibly due to lack of available bandwidth) c) they have severe signal quality issues, leading to limited range and audio interruptions All these issues only happen with the 2nd Gen Pixel Buds, but not with a random sample of various other true wireless earbuds (I tested Sony WF-1000XM3, 1More True Wireless ANC, Airpods Pro) leading me to believe that this must be a hardware issue on Google's side, especially because the amount of people with the same issues is pretty high. No other pair of true wireless earbuds hat any issues with music playback while I'm on a road bike, with my phone being on my back, only the Pixel Buds do - and I'm on my 2nd replacement already.
johnflan 6y ago
Aren’t they already with TPUs?
- boulos 6y ago
  Yes. And several generations in.
- geodel 6y ago
  Huge difference between designing for their own data centers vs consumer chips.

kungito 6y ago

Google throws money at problems which don't generate revenue all the time. I feel like all it takes is someone inside Google with enough leverage to push it through without the thing having to make business sense

Infinitesimus 6y ago
That could work but the other side of that coin is: if it stops making financial sense Google will do the responsible thing and end it. "Your BT hardware's software is no longer supported" will do more damage to the problem they're trying to solve here
- Lammy 6y ago
  I’ve already had Android phones that didn’t get more than a single major update where the BT/WiFi blobs were locked to some ancient kernel.
Groxx 6y ago
tbh, Android consistently having a good bluetooth experience would probably be good for the platform.

edent 6y ago

> Prior to Android, all we had were closed source low powered feature phones and Blackberries. Symbian was open source, ran on millions of smartphones - most of which had app stores and web browsers. Some of which had touchscreens, GPS, augmented reality features etc. Don't get me wrong - Android has been brilliant. But let's not completely rewrite history, eh?

mondoshawan 6y ago
Right. I didn't think I was trying to rewrite history -- I'm simply pointing out a gap in the market that Android was attempting to fill. Asking me to enumerate everything out there at the time is silly -- especially given the haze of memory. Symbian was far more popular in Europe than it ever was Stateside, so bear that in mind. I had to import my Nokia E70 gullwing phone before I received my sooner, and what functionality it had was okay, but the browser was hardly more than a WAP browser in a feature phone. The app store was barely there as well, including only a handful of very simple apps at the time.
- spacehunt 6y ago
  The browser in S60 phones was actually WebKit. In fact it was Nokia that started the work of fitting WebKit into memory-constrained devices.
  - mondoshawan 6y ago
    Oh, neat! I had no idea it was WebKit on there. Still, what I had wasn't exactly what you'd be comfortable using for more than a few moments. I bought one of the original Nokia Internet Tablets and put together a full wearable system back then to make things a bit better for myself, but I never used the browser in S60 for anything serious because it was so cut down.

gecko 6y ago

Prior to Android, all we had were closed source low powered feature phones and Blackberries. I...what? Even if we want to ignore the iPhone for whatever reason, the Palm Treo, Nokia N900, and Windows Phone were firmly established by the time Android started getting demoed--and that was the variant that was very much reminiscent of Windows Phone, with a strong emphasis on the cursor keys over a touchscreen. The rest of your comment makes sense, but the cognitive dissonance of that sentence was so extreme I had to respond.

mondoshawan 6y ago
I missed a comma in that: closed source phones, low power feature phones, and Blackberries. The N900 is a different, rare breed that did not see widespread adoption. Fun fact: the first Android phone was the sooner, and it looked and behaved much like a blackberry. Still have mine, in fact.
- berbec 6y ago
  I loved my Symbian E62

conradev 6y ago

> Android has never been about driving the hardware narrative Apple has been building its own hardware from the beginning, but still also uses Broadcom chips.

serf 6y ago
>Apple has been building its own hardware from the beginning do you mean designing? I'm not familiar with any point in time where Apple was building phones, but maybe i'm mistaken. A quick google search indicates that even the first generation phones were built by Hon Hai.
mondoshawan 6y ago
They have been integrating hardware from the beginning, not making it all themselves. What they do, though, is demand the ability to vet and fix vendor firmware.
skzv 6y ago
They acquired Intel's modem division, so that may change in the future as well.

KingHenryVIII 6y ago

What a hopelessly naive perspective. Android has always been about ensuring the Google surveillance operation doesn't get shut out of mobile. The whole OS is designed to enable snooping on the user not just while in the browser, but at all times. The fact that they've had to build actual hardware that functions at times, and includes things like driver stacks is purely incidental to the main mission. Try seeing how willing they are to add support for chipsets on phones that don't include Google Services.

mondoshawan 6y ago
> What a hopelessly naive perspective. Maybe, but I was there, helping it develop in the early days, which is the time span we're talking about. I can tell you the core of the Android team was fighting to keep it open -- so much so that about three years in one of the guys who dedicated his job to open sourcing drivers and kernel patches burnt out because of it. What Android is about is decidedly not what Play Services and GCM core are about. > Try seeing how willing they are to add support for chipsets on phones that don't include Google Services It's always been the system integrator's job to work with the OEM vendors to integrate drivers and functionality into Android -- not the Android team's. Even on Glass we had to do this as though we were outside system integrators.
- asddubs 6y ago
  too bad more and more of android was moved into play services over time
  - mondoshawan 6y ago
    It wasn't. Play services is just add on features that proxy app permissions and centralize push notifications -- no actual Android features moved into Play services that I know of. Ie: auto filling SMS OTP codes. It feels like Android is being sucked up that way, but that's because there are a lot of really nice features in there, like push notifications, geofencing, etc. You can still run Android without GMS core and Play services -- I do that, myself, on a Pixel 3a running Graphene. The trick is that you lose some nice functionality (which Android actually makes up for in some cases, ie: SMS OTP copy buttons), and the mapping experience is god-awful (mostly because the OSS mapping scene is hopelessly stuck in the 1990s GPS model)