Google wants to make it easier for lots of wearables to run on the Android operating system.
In about two weeks, the tech giant will release an Android software-development kit (SDK) for wearable devices. This comes from Sundar Pichai, Google’s senior vice president of Android, Chrome, and apps, today at South by Southwest in Austin, Texas.
“We’ll lay out a vision for developers as to how we’ll see this market working,” Pichai said, according to a report from The Verge.
Sure, Google has turned out the Glass wearable device, but lots of other companies, like OnBeep or Vuzix, have been working on wearables, too. They might be running different operating systems. So developers writing apps on those operating systems are essentially working in isolation, not inside a common ecosystem.
Wearables will be a big topic of discussion at our upcoming VentureBeat Mobile Summit on April 14 to April 15 at Cavallo Point Resort in Sausalito, Calif. It’s an invite-only gathering of 180 top mobile executives.
A common SDK could lighten the burden on wearable makers to do everything on their own.
“We want to develop a set of common protocols by which they can work together,” Pichai said in The Verge report.
At the same time, the move could turn Google into the enabler of a wearable platform, just as it’s made Android a common platform for mobile phones and tablets, alongside Apple. Perhaps Apple will want to cook up a wearable SDK of its own soon, to keep Google from running away with wearable market.