Android Things Developer Preview 4.1

Posted by Wayne Piekarski,
Developer Advocate for IoT

Today, we're releasing a new Developer Preview 4.1 (DP4.1) of href="https://developer.android.com/things/index.html">Android Things, with
updates for new supported hardware and bug fixes to the platform. Android Things
is Google's platform to enable Android Developers to create Internet of Things
(IoT) devices, and seamlessly scale from prototype to production.

New hardware

A new Pico i.MX6UL revision B board has been released, which supports many
common external peripherals from partners such as Adafruit and Pimoroni. There
were some prototype Pico i.MX6UL boards made available to some early beta
testers, and these are not compatible with DP4.1.

Improvements

DP4.1 also includes some performance improvements since DP4, such as boot time
optimizations that improve the startup time of i.MX7D based hardware. This
Developer Preview also includes a version of Google Play Services, specifically
optimized for IoT devices. This new IoT variant is a lot smaller and optimized
for use with Android Things, and requires the use of play-services 11.0.0 or
later in your build.gradle. For more information about the supported features in
the IoT variant of Google Play Services, see the href="http://developers.android.com/things/sdk/index.html#google-services">information
page.

Google I/O

Android Things had a large presence at Google I/O this year, with 7 talks
covering different aspects of Android Things for developers, and these are
available as videos in a href="https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLOU2XLYxmsIIUtQeTRlRoDCdncUpWnR4M">playlist
for those who could not attend:

What’s New In Google’s IoT Platform? Ubiquitous Computing at Google

Bringing Device Production to Everyone With Android Things

From Prototype to Production Devices with Android Things

Developing for Android Things Using Android Studio

Security for IoT on Android Things

Using Google Cloud and TensorFlow on Android Things

Building for Enterprise IoT Using Android Things and Google Cloud Platform

Google I/O also had a codelab area, where attendees could sit down and test out
Android Things development with some simple guided training guides. These
codelabs are available for anyone to try at href="https://codelabs.developers.google.com/?cat=IoT">https://codelabs.developers.google.com/?cat=IoT

Feedback

Thank you to all the developers who submitted feedback for the previous
developer previews. Please continue sending us your feedback by filing href="https://code.google.com/p/android/issues/entry?template=Android%20Things%20bug%20report">bug
reports and href="https://code.google.com/p/android/issues/entry?template=Android%20Things%20feature%20request">feature
requests, and asking any questions on href="http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/android-things">stackoverflow.
To download images for DP4.1, visit the Android Things href="https://developer.android.com/things/preview/download.html">download
page and find the changes in the href="https://developer.android.com/things/preview/releases.html">release
notes. You can also join Google's IoT
Developers Community on Google+, a great resource to get updates and discuss
ideas, with over 5,600 members.