Google “Brightness”: the answer to HomeKit?.
This week a piece of news has jumped to the blogs that in itself is not news, but one of the many promises of Google that then take a year to materialize, if they do… It is about Project BrightnessGoogle’s response to the “Internet of Things”.
There is not much information about it and supposedly it will be presented in the I/O of this year, but basically a «Android-based operating system» to intercommunicate devices of a very diverse nature, even those with few capacities and resources (such as small chips). So far the idea is curious. Now we will see why it is likely to remain in borage water.
A bad habit Google has is promising things and then delivering half a year or a year later, creating unnecessary smoke. It needs to be that way because they have to introduce things every year like Apple does. The problem is that Apple presents real things, while they present promises. Sometimes they even have the nerve to introduce computers shortly after Apple, as happened with the new MacBook and Chromebook Pixel. But this happens with Android: each year they present a version that does not reach the terminals until at least 6 to 9 months later and it takes between a year and two to have a sufficient audience to consider that it is accepted by the public. So possibly for us to see something really functional and popular with “Brightness” (I don’t mean to make a joke…) it will probably take a lot longer than we expect.
Because in the end the problem lies precisely in what they are supposed to solve with this new platform, which is the “Internet of Things”. This pipe dream, the buzzword in the technology market (these things that are produced in the MIT and that then take twenty years to see) can be visualized as a hodgepodge of chips connected to the Internet or as Apple sees it, that is, devices interconnected with each other with the already known protocols and that can be controlled from centralized elements such as a telephone. And for this reason, this proposal comes somewhat late, but with the probability of not really answering the unknowns of a very complex system to manage. And excuse my skepticism, but wanting to develop an Android-based OS that can run on a device with few features such as chips or embedded elements for example with 32 MB of RAM, honestly, seems a bit far-fetched to me. Sun already tried with him J2EEE Well, we already saw what happened: Android itself, as Google’s response to the Java consortium’s own inefficiency in giving a valid response to the mobile world. And stop counting.
Google is presenting proposals in tow from Apple constantly, this is known. And here they do it again, copying what Apple has been doing for years now. Basically, «Brightness» is a clone of HomeKit for Android. But it turns out that before HomeKit, and supported by it, Apple has spent many years with a communications protocol for the presentation and transport of its own data called Bonjour that it is multiplatform (it works on both OS X and iOS and Windows, among others) and that it has been doing the tasks that Google now presents as highlights of its new system for a long time. Actually, Bonjour is what everything Apple does to intercommunicate its devices is based on. With what they have an abysmal advantage in this regard, with dozens of third-party devices that have supported it for a long time. If in two weeks everything is confirmed, the new Apple TV It will be the machine where all the operations between all the devices compatible with Bonjour will be centralized. logical evolution. We cannot know what plans Google has in this regard, but for now, until this project and its content are confirmed, we can only talk about smoke. And yes, I’m not forgetting about Microsoft: they were the first to do all this with their UPnP, which they don’t even use and which is completely abandoned because, as always, they have great ideas that they then simply let die. Which is probably what ends up happening to this latest big idea from Mountain View.
Via: BGR
