What is Android Things? Android Things is an alternative Android version, announced at Google I/O 2015, and released as a first developer preview in December 2016. Its purpose is to develop embedded IoT devices, with a known and widely documented Android ecosystem basis. It’s currently running on three different boards: the Intel Edison, the NXP Pico i.MX6UL, and the Raspberry Pi 3. Some higher-end boards are coming soon. On the SDK side, Android Things comes with a specific support library to ease low-level hardware usage. It consists in two parts: the Peripheral I/O API, which supports GPIO, PWM, I2C, SPI and UART, and the User Driver API, which allows a developer to write a hardware-specific, high-level driver, to ease hardware reusability by injecting events into the Android framework. Other applications can in turn use those events without having to interact with the hardware directly. There’s a downside: the bundled Android is not as complete as the one you can find on a phone. Most of the standard applications aren’t installed (Calendar, Phone…), and standard content providers are absent too (MediaProvider, Dictionary…). Android Things supports displays, with the default Android UI toolkit. However, the display is a bit different from what you’re used to seeing on an Android device: there’s no notification bar, navigation bar or anything, the running application will use the full display. That is, if it uses it at all: displays are purely optional.