Probably the most commonly asked question is: how does Android Things position itself with Arduino?

They are completely different platforms. Android Things is a full operating system running on an SoM, while Arduino runs on microcontrollers. From a capabilities point of view, they are in different orders of magnitude.

Everything you can do on Arduino, you can do with Android Things, but the opposite is not true; there are many things you can do on Android Things that you can't even get close to with Arduino, and we will cover some of them in the final chapter.

Lastly, there is the comparison of SDK and tools. Android Studio is one of the best IDEs overall. The Arduino IDE is very simple and limited. Not to mention how much easier it is to manage project dependencies on Android Studio compared to Arduino libraries.

However, not everything is better on Android Things. There are a few areas where Arduino has the upper hand, namely, power consumption and analog input/output.

The power consumption of Arduino is very low; you can run it on batteries or even solar power for extended periods of time. That is definitely not possible with the current developer kits for Android Things; even a large battery pack will get depleted in just a matter of days.

There is room for everything on IoT. I think Arduino is best at having sensor data collection on the field, but then a central hub running Android Things can do aggregation, cloud upload, and even use machine learning to interpret the readings.

The other platform I usually get asked to compare Android Things with is a Raspberry Pi running Linux and programming it on Python. In this case the hardware is exactly the same, but there are two main advantages of Android Things.

Firstly, if you plan to eventually release and sell your IoT project, Android Things offers a developer console and even a means to mass produce devices, as well as automatic security updates.

Secondly, even with all the libraries that are available on Python, there are more and better examples of using Android. Building an IoT app is a lot closer to a mobile app than it is to a desktop app, so all your prior Android knowledge is easily transferable to Android Things.

Android Things shines when using all the tools that it has available; be it services such as Firebase for cloud storage or cloud messaging and TensorFlow for image classifiers, or libraries such as Retrofit to create API clients and NanoHTTPD to create a server, or just SDK classes, such as Thread, Alarm, Timer, and so on.