Google has announced the latest developer preview for Android Things, its platform for creating Internet of Things solutions. While primarily used for IoT, Google says the platform now also supports video and audio processing applications and on-board machine learning using TensorFlow.
The Developer Preview 7 is based on Android 8.1 and supports version 11.8.0 of Google Play Services. A key feature of this release includes the ability to create multiple variations in software for the same hardware product while being able to manage each build separately. Additional user accounts can also be given access to view and manage models, builds, and updates for any product, according to Google.
Other features include analytics for devices activations and update statistics, and the ability to deploy software builds to groups of devices for testing without disrupting production devices.
According to Google, the team also worked hard to address several of the top reported issues that came from user feedback. This issues included improving camera resolution support, support for MIDI, better testability of Android Things apps, and consistent API naming.
In addition, the preview adds a new Bluetooth API to allow applications to take control of the device pairing and connection process.
For this preview, Google is releasing Android Things samples in both Kotlin and Java, such as the Button and LED sample. The company has also announced it has migrated the TensorFlow Image Classifier sample to use TensorFlow Lite. This reduces the size of the pre-trained model by more than 90 percent and the time needed to classify the images by about 50 percent.
