Google Prepares to Better Integrate Android Things with Chromecast in Android P

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Earlier this year, we got our first glimpse at Android Things, previously called Brillo, along with several developer previews to date. Android Things aims to be an Android-based solution for embedded systems. As an OS for the Internet of Things (IoT), it’s designed to work on systems with as low as 32 MBs of RAM. While it sounds promising, we probably won’t see many Android Things devices in the wild until next year when the OS is more mature. This means we’re sure to see more improvements in the coming months. One such improvement that we’ve spotted in the source code is Chromecast integration, set to be rolled out with the release of Android Things based on Android P (9.0).

We discovered this recent commit in the Chromium Gerrit. It introduces a new volume control API, which is an Android Things system API (it will be a public API when Android P comes around) to synchronize the volume level between Android Things and Chromecast devices. This is a pretty small change, but it’s noteworthy as it shows how Google is working to better integrate the Android Things and Chromecast platforms.

The end goal of Android Things is to integrate Android with every device in your household. As such, this is just one small change of many to come for Android Things-powered systems to integrate seamlessly with the rest of the Google ecosystem. We have previously shown our excitement for Android Things and all its capabilities and potentials, and seeing more of these capabilities slowly come to life only increases our excitement further.

Android Things is currently on its 5th developer preview, and as we said earlier, it’s really unlikely that we’ll be getting finalized versions before the end of the year. We expect to hear more about the new IoT OS during the course of the next year.