Andy Rubin Says Essential's Ambient OS Will Be Open Source, Hints at Better Update Cycle (theverge.com)

An anonymous reader shares a report: Playground CEO Andy Rubin, whose new company Essential unveiled a new premium Android smartphone and Amazon Echo competitor yesterday, says his company's Ambient OS smart home platform will be open source. That means that Rubin, who rose to fame in the tech industry for co-founding Android, essentially wants to apply the same open source philosophy that made Android the most dominant mobile operating system to the smart home. [...] Rubin did agree that Android's upgrade rate was much lower, but said that his new venture's Ambient OS had "a solution for that." He stopped short of describing what that solution was, however, noting only that it was "more of a managed service on the back-end."

Comments

Better update cycle

[DontBeAMoran]

A new version every hour!

Re:Better update cycle

[110010001000]

And each version will have a silly nickname associated with it.

:\ Hmm...

[ilsaloving]

Is it just me or is this whole Essentials enterprise starting to smell a bit fishy?

All these announcements with vague details are making my alarm bells ring.

Re::\ Hmm...

[Anonymous Coward]

Agree - this seems like a bunch of really cool ideas without the manpower behind them to actually make them real. Rubin has my attention, but I'm already skeptical. For a startup like this to fly, he should be delivering early on rather than just speaking about what is allegedly going to happen with these products. We have no reason to trust at this point.

Re:That's nice. But

[DontBeAMoran]

...location tracking information. All that data has tremendous marketplace value.

Not mine. The marketplace value of "still at the same location" for over a month non-stop is worthless.

Nonremovable battery

[WaffleMonster]

For all the talk about expandability and planned obsolescence = BAD I come to find out essential phone's battery is non-removable.

The wording on privacy is vague. They don't just come out and say they won't do x, y and z. Privacy policy on their website is the same boiler plate we'll do whatever we please including retroactively changing terms whenever we feel like it with no recourse machination.

Re:That's nice. But

[DontBeAMoran]

I'm sure my smartphone-that-never-leaves-home will appreciate it.

Re:That's nice. But

[IMightB]

Thanks Dick, I'm allergic to cinnamon.

So does that mean I can modify it myself?

[gweihir]

And then build it and put it on my phone? That may finally convince me to go to Android.

Re:So does that mean I can modify it myself?

[squiggleslash]

If you buy the right Android phone, you can do that already. Go to xda-developers.com for help if you need it.

Re:OS Didn't Make Android Popular

[MightyYar]

Being licensed FOR FREE is the essential part. There were a handful of mature mobile OSes at the time, some much more mature. But none that were free to use and modify. Microsoft and Palm were both happy to license you for a fee. Maemo and Blackberry had proprietary solutions ahead of even iPhone. (Technically I think Maemo was "open source", but I don't think all of it was free to sell. Like Android, it had a Linux kernel.)

Re:OS Didn't Make Android Popular

[MightyYar]

You are correct - Apple changed everything.

With that said, early Android was an interface nightmare, too. It was 2-3 years before it was on-par with the iPhone (maybe even before it was really usable?). WebOS (which oddly still lives on in TVs), and MS both gave early Android a good run feature-wise, but they were not free as in beer.