Google kills Cloud IoT Core

Google introduced Cloud IoT Core, a fully managed service for securely connecting and managing devices, at the Google I/O conference in May 2017. In September of that year, Google revealed the public availability of Cloud IoT Core to all users in beta.

Cloud IoT Core fell short of its stated goal to make it easy for developers to build enterprise IoT applications, as Google just decided to kill the project.

“Google Cloud IoT Core is being retired on August 16, 2023. Contact your Google Cloud account team for more information”, reads the only public statement on Google Cloud’s web page. As per a Hackernews post, the Google Cloud IoT Core Product Team shared an email to existing users, clarifying their access to the IoT Core Device Manager APIs will no longer be available on August 16, 2023. As of that date, devices will be unable to connect to the Google Cloud IoT Core MQTT and HTTP bridges, and Google Cloud will shut down existing connections.

Google hasn’t historically been shy about retiring its short-lived products from the IoT landscape. Google introduced Brillo, an IoT OS allegedly capable of running on 32MB RAM at Google I/O in 2015. After renaming Brillo to Android Things the following year, Google released the first non-preview version of Android Things 1.0, promising three years of updates for every device. That things weren’t taking off was easy to spot, as, in early 2019, Google decided to ‘refocus’ Android Things for OEMs building speakers and displays, giving up on its vision as a general-purpose OS for IoT devices. A couple of years later, Google killed Android Things. They first stopped supporting new projects in 2021 and later turned it down for all projects in 2022.

Google Cloud IoT Core is just the latest joiner of the infamous “Killed by Google” list.
What options are left for Google Cloud IoT Core users? And will the company manage to kill its reputation of constant product shutdowns?