Serious question, why doesn't Google build its own bluetooth & BLE chips? Please put some competition on Broadcoam and the like and either push them entirely out of the market (good riddance), or force them to step up their game.
I can't speak to this directly because of numerous reasons, chiefly among them being that I don't get to make those decisions. Standard disclaimer follows: I rejoined in the last two years, what follows are my opinions, these opinions are my own, blah blah.
Android has never been about driving the hardware narrative -- it's always been about building a phone with mostly open contributions and driving the start of a wedge to open up the phone industry a bit. It's always been a software answer to a hardware problem, even today. Prior to Android, all we had were closed source low powered feature phones and Blackberries.
That being said, building silicon is non trivial work, and building a BLE stack and controller is even more so. Will a solid BLE stack sell phones? Hard to say how it could drive that narrative, realistically, and even harder to say if such a controller could be made cost effectively. Given Android's archetype (software solution to closed hardware), this puts such a project into a much more difficult position politically and financially.
I can't see this kind of thing having much in the way of legs in a large corp. That being said, I do think if a startup could challenge this landscape, it is a HUGE opportunity.
Prior to Android, all we had were closed source low
powered feature phones and Blackberries.
I...what? Even if we want to ignore the iPhone for whatever reason, the Palm Treo, Nokia N900, and Windows Phone were firmly established by the time Android started getting demoed--and that was the variant that was very much reminiscent of Windows Phone, with a strong emphasis on the cursor keys over a touchscreen.
The rest of your comment makes sense, but the cognitive dissonance of that sentence was so extreme I had to respond.
I missed a comma in that: closed source phones, low power feature phones, and Blackberries. The N900 is a different, rare breed that did not see widespread adoption.
Fun fact: the first Android phone was the sooner, and it looked and behaved much like a blackberry. Still have mine, in fact.
Yeah from the Android platform side it would be weird to build chips. For products like the Pixel phone though, that would be a great place to innovate. And realistically, Google needs to get into the custom chip game sooner rather than later... GCE needs to start competing with Amazon's Graviton ARM processors. The sooner you get the expertise and talent to churn out chips (and maybe even a fab or two?), the better. The global shortage for fab usage and chips could kind of force your hand soon.
Google doesn't have the volume on its first-party hardware to drive something like this yet & they would never start with BLE chips. Additionally, there's some really good vendors out of China already challenging BCOM & QCOM FWIW, which further complicates the "build it yourself" narrative (look at the Pixel buds which have an AirPods-like experience running a Chinese BLE chip for the buds which other Western vendors weren't able to match).
The Android org generally isn't the right org to build hardware, let alone do chip design. Maybe the camera team got closest when I worked there?
Source: worked on Pixel Buds @ Google & was one of several engineers responsible for selecting the chip vendor. We got source access to the entire stack/OS except for the microcode & some parts of the stack they hid. I found BES a way better partner to work with than the BCOM/QCOM mess.
Are you talking about the 1st or 2nd Gen Buds? Because the 2nd gens seem to have severe connection issues:
a) they frequently flip flop between at least two BT profiles, leading to a lackluster listening experience
b) they lose connection to each other (leading to intermittend profile switches during reconnects, possibly due to lack of available bandwidth)
c) they have severe signal quality issues, leading to limited range and audio interruptions
All these issues only happen with the 2nd Gen Pixel Buds, but not with a random sample of various other true wireless earbuds (I tested Sony WF-1000XM3, 1More True Wireless ANC, Airpods Pro) leading me to believe that this must be a hardware issue on Google's side, especially because the amount of people with the same issues is pretty high.
No other pair of true wireless earbuds hat any issues with music playback while I'm on a road bike, with my phone being on my back, only the Pixel Buds do - and I'm on my 2nd replacement already.
> Prior to Android, all we had were closed source low powered feature phones and Blackberries.
Symbian was open source, ran on millions of smartphones - most of which had app stores and web browsers. Some of which had touchscreens, GPS, augmented reality features etc.
Don't get me wrong - Android has been brilliant. But let's not completely rewrite history, eh?
Right. I didn't think I was trying to rewrite history -- I'm simply pointing out a gap in the market that Android was attempting to fill. Asking me to enumerate everything out there at the time is silly -- especially given the haze of memory.
Symbian was far more popular in Europe than it ever was Stateside, so bear that in mind. I had to import my Nokia E70 gullwing phone before I received my sooner, and what functionality it had was okay, but the browser was hardly more than a WAP browser in a feature phone. The app store was barely there as well, including only a handful of very simple apps at the time.
Oh, neat! I had no idea it was WebKit on there. Still, what I had wasn't exactly what you'd be comfortable using for more than a few moments. I bought one of the original Nokia Internet Tablets and put together a full wearable system back then to make things a bit better for myself, but I never used the browser in S60 for anything serious because it was so cut down.
Google throws money at problems which don't generate revenue all the time. I feel like all it takes is someone inside Google with enough leverage to push it through without the thing having to make business sense
That could work but the other side of that coin is: if it stops making financial sense Google will do the responsible thing and end it. "Your BT hardware's software is no longer supported" will do more damage to the problem they're trying to solve here
They have been integrating hardware from the beginning, not making it all themselves. What they do, though, is demand the ability to vet and fix vendor firmware.
Maybe, but I was there, helping it develop in the early days, which is the time span we're talking about. I can tell you the core of the Android team was fighting to keep it open -- so much so that about three years in one of the guys who dedicated his job to open sourcing drivers and kernel patches burnt out because of it.
What Android is about is decidedly not what Play Services and GCM core are about.
> Try seeing how willing they are to add support for chipsets on phones that don't include Google Services
It's always been the system integrator's job to work with the OEM vendors to integrate drivers and functionality into Android -- not the Android team's. Even on Glass we had to do this as though we were outside system integrators.
It wasn't. Play services is just add on features that proxy app permissions and centralize push notifications -- no actual Android features moved into Play services that I know of. Ie: auto filling SMS OTP codes. It feels like Android is being sucked up that way, but that's because there are a lot of really nice features in there, like push notifications, geofencing, etc.
You can still run Android without GMS core and Play services -- I do that, myself, on a Pixel 3a running Graphene. The trick is that you lose some nice functionality (which Android actually makes up for in some cases, ie: SMS OTP copy buttons), and the mapping experience is god-awful (mostly because the OSS mapping scene is hopelessly stuck in the 1990s GPS model)
one example i can think of without having to look things up is that the music player used to be part of AOSP and then got replaced with a google play variant
e: here's an article from 2018 with some more examples:
So the old music player isn't still included by default. It should still work just fine on modern android if you install it, and there's plenty of foss media players on fdroid (ie not Google-dependent), most of them thin wrappers around the android media apis with a few extras like playlists. Kodi and VLC should work fine without Google services, and LineageOS Eleven doesn't require Google, though I'm not sure if it still works on modern Android.
Lack of media playback options shouldn't be able to stop you from using AOSP.
Stop geocoding by separating out addresses into singular fields, for one. Stop showing mostly irrelevant contours on maps, for another. OsmAnd~ is unfortunately the only game in town, and the UX is freaking terrible.
> Serious question, why doesn't Google build its own bluetooth & BLE chips?
There is a lot of overlap between WiFi and Bluetooth & BLE such that you just have a Wireless chip that does both. In fact I think with Bluetooth 4 the file transfer profile just establishes an adhoc WiFi network. You don't have separate Bluetooth and WiFi chips anymore.
Furthering that, in the mobile space the Wireless capabilities are usually integrated into the mobile SoC. So you don't even have separate chips for CPU and Wireless.
About the only time you see a separate Wireless chip is when a new technology is emerging like 5G and it's usually only an external chip for a generation or two until it can be integrated into the SoC.
So, if you were to design your own Bluetooth chip today you would also be designing a WiFi chip and then you'd probably just roll all that into a SoC with a CPU. No small feat.
> In fact I think with Bluetooth 4 the file transfer profile just establishes an adhoc WiFi network.
This was a feature of Bluetooth 3.0, but almost nothing ever used it. I was once at a big BT testing company and asked about it, and they had like one device that could do it (a crazy feature-packed HTC WinMo device I think).
And then Bluetooth 4.0 added BLE, and it seems like there hasn't been much development of classic BT since then.
Follow-on question for the sake of debate: what if you got a bunch of smaller wannabe startups and interests backing a group effort to do exactly this for a pool of things? Would the legal fees scale linearly? :/
Nearly all modern radio chipsets are mostly software defined. That includes WiFi, LTE and GPS.
The radio frontend is typically a downmixer and then straight into digital.
Some of the typically "software" bits like FFT's, various encodings, checksums, clock recovery etc. are frequently done in digital hardware acceleration blocks for performance, and saving power. If you were writing the firmware of the device, you needn't use them though.
With enough human years of effort, you could take almost any radio hardware for sale today and repurpose it to speak nearly any other radio protocol in similar frequency bands. Performance will probably be terrible though!
It's rare people do this though - all the chips don't have their firmware documented (again mostly to avoid publishing documentation that proves they are violating someone elses patents), and many have various cryptographic elements that makes reverse engineering hard.
The one exception to this is WiFi chips used in the Nexus 5 by Broadcom, which has had a reasonable amount of reverse engineering because Broadcom accidentally published the source code because the firmware code was in part shared with published Linux kernel driver source code.
> all the chips don't have their firmware documented (again mostly to avoid publishing documentation that proves they are violating someone elses patents)
There are a gazillion patents on radio related stuff. Nearly all standards have associated patents.
Companies already in the industry typically have cross-licensing agreements - ie. I can use your patents if you can use mine. Either that or they just violate each others patents knowing that a patent war would be mutual destruction and in neither companies interests.
But a newcomer has nothing to offer - the minute they release any product, every incumbent company will go through their patent portfolio and sue them out of the water.
Google's involvement in any kind of hardware is already a distraction from their core product line. Making their own chips is a distraction on a distraction.
Distraction might not be the right word but I can't conjure up the right one.
Hardware is one of the end goals for Apple, for example. For Google, Android hardware is not. It's just there to serve their goal of selling ads.
IMHO those dynamics are changing. Custom chips are becoming table stakes for new products. Look at Apple M1, W1, or Amazaon's Graviton2 chips. All of those are core parts of products and services which would not be possible without the custom silicon. The pool of talent and resources to build these things is extremely small, and there are geopolitical issues putting ever more pressure and scarcity on them (i.e. China pivoting to reduce dependency on Western designed chips and hoovering up as much chip design talent as possible). The TL;DR is amazing new hardware and services need custom silicon, but custom silicon is only getting more difficult and more challenging to build in the near future.
Getting good yield/performance on the radio is non trivial. Aside from having domain experts you have a pretty significant investment in equipment to do the testing. Broadcom and other semis split that cost over many customers.
