What Display Daily thinks: You can have an OS, and you can have an OS, and even you can have an OS. Building your own OS on top of Android is within the grasp of almost any company. Building an OS because you have a lot of devices, and you want to create some sort of seamless experience or branding for your users across all of them makes total sense.
The question is, where does it all end? Are we looking at hundreds of Android platforms skinned with some OS moniker from a smartphone or display maker? Maybe. More likely, we are looking at a mess of support issues for Android apps that appear on these devices, for the manufacturers that produce their own software infrastructure across multiple devices and then lose momentum or focus on their software strategy because hardware isn’t selling as it should.
One thing is for sure, you cannot separate your screens from user experiences, and you need to have your own branded experiences if you want to have your own brand. To calculate the long-term costs and viability of having a software strategy based on creating your own OS and infrastructure is probably easy today, you’re only just getting started, but the problems are going to add up.
Maybe the first place to look is Android itself. This ain’t no Open Source platform. Google can do whatever it wants with its OS. You’re just going to have accept it. And if all you are doing is minimal customization or building on top of Android then how does that work when the next version from Google is a major upgrade? You can’t support it with a small investment, and if you go big, you can’t rely on it.
User experience is the driving force behind any product that has a display – smartphone, TV, digital signage, whatever and wherever – and that means a software strategy. For now, most of the emphasis seems to be on skinning Android with your own brand, and making sure you have some control over drivers for your various components and hardware pieces.
Xiaomi Announces HyperOS
Like most announcements from Chinese companies, this one came out on Weibo from the account of founder and CEO, Lei Jun. So, Xiaomi is going to replace its Mi operating system with a new, updated version called HyperOS.
HyperOS is built on top of Android, as you would expect, but includes the company’s internet of things (IoT) platform, Vela. Vela is, in turn, built on top of open source embedded OS NuttX. HyperOS brings together the disparate elements of Xiaomi’s device universe under one overarching OS which should make support and application development easier.
It’s also worth noting that you can’t be a consumer electronics company these days without some sort of software infrastructure of your own to support, and connect, your devices. On a technical level it is always interesting to see what applications and integrations companies achieve with these developments, but from the consumer standpoint, it’s hard to say whether this leads to greater benefits.
The first thing to realize is that software can be easy to build and difficult to master. It’s as much an art as it is a technology. Building applications and user experiences on your own platform requires a dedication to building a software organization that is better than good. To be fair, building on top of Android means that you can always default to that platform’s massive base of developers and applications. That comes with its own issues as well.
The real problem is that Android isn’t that great at helping you figure out how to support every device that it runs on, and it runs on a lot of different devices. The chief software advantage that iOS has always held is the limits it puts on who gets to put their apps on Apple’s devices, and everyone knows what the hardware is supposed to do on an iOS device. With Android, your guess is as good as anybody’s.
