Playground CEO Andy Rubin, whose new company Essential unveiled a new premium Android smartphone and Amazon Echo competitor today, says his company’s Ambient OS smart home platform will be open source. That means that Rubin, who rose to fame in the tech industry for co-founding Android, essentially wants to apply the same open source philosophy that made Android the most dominant mobile operating system to the smart home.
Given how disparate the smart home landscape is right now, with myriad interoperability standards and wireless platforms trying to marry various devices together, Essential’s Ambient OS does have a massive opportunity here. However, the decision could also mean that the platform ends up as fragmented and splintered as...
