The father of Android says it has ‘forced us to fight’ with technology – The Verge

Heres the big question for Andy Rubin, widely known as the father of Android: whats next? The answer, in part, is that his new company is announcing an entire ecosystem of products that will work together: an intelligent assistant device for you home, a 360 camera, and (of course) a phone. That last one runs Android, which is what youd expect from any new phone maker.

The company he started to make all this is called Essential. In a blog post explaining why it exists, Rubin tells a typical founder story: going out for the night with a friend, talking about the state of technology and how to fix it. Funny thing, though, is that one of the problems he sees with the state of tech today involves the OS he helped create, Android:

For all the good Android has done to help bring technology to nearly everyone it has also helped create this weird new world where people are forced to fight with the very technology that was supposed to simplify their lives. Was this what we had intended? Was this the best we could do?

Rubins new phone, the Essential Phone, is, of course, based on that very operating system. But its probably safe to assume that it will either try to simplify Android somehow or that its just a stopgap until its viable for Essential to ship a phone running its other system, Ambient OS. Or maybe both or neither! Rubins statement seems to serve both as a mea culpa and as a platform to launch something better.

We dont know yet whether the Essential phone or Ambient OS will mean less fighting with technology or whether Rubin is planning on building more on top of Android or supplanting it. Presumably some of those questions will be answered today as he speaks at the Code conference.

What we can say is this: Rubin has some core principles for his company that would make the two-billion-device Android ecosystem a lot better. Here are a few of his bullet points that seem relevant:

Devices are your personal property. We wont force you to have anything on them you dont want to have.

We will always play well with others. Closed ecosystems are divisive and outdated.

Devices shouldnt become outdated every year. They should evolve with you.

Those principles all make sense, but theyve also been damnably hard to live up to in a world where carriers not only hold back updates, but also enmesh themselves into the very operating systems of the phones they sell. Even powerhouses like Samsung struggle to ship their phones without carrier software loaded on them. Plenty of Android makers have shipped clean, unlocked phones without extra crapware on them, promising prompt updates. Most of them have languished in obscurity.

But just because a problem is hard doesnt mean its impossible. Well be watching to see how Essential tackles it.

Andy Rubin will be onstage tonight at Code. You can watch it live starting at 6PM PT / 9PM ET.

See the original post here:

The father of Android says it has 'forced us to fight' with technology - The Verge