[mik3y]

My best guess is that it was something of a gimmick for Google I/O. They never seemed well-supported by Google.

An alternative to ADK is the Android USB Host driver support. It's like libusb: for phones with the right USB controller, you can write little drivers in Java/userspace.

Here's an Android library you can use to talk to almost any Arduino, great for these type of "make my microcontroller smarter" applications: https://github.com/mik3y/usb-serial-for-android (full disclosure: I'm the author)

[follower]

> My best guess is that it was something of a gimmick for Google I/O. They never seemed well-supported by Google.

I would agree. I created the Handbag for Android project (http://handbagdevices.com/) which was initially based on the ADK so I've spent a lot of time with it. In the ADK 2.0 release Google itself even moved away from having the physical USB link in favour of using Bluetooth.

When 2.0 was released I started converting Handbag to have the option of Bluetooth/WiFi/USB but the ADK stuff was so unreliable (and the debugging was ridiculous due to different issues on each Android version available at the time (2.x/3.x/4.x)) that it seemed like a waste of time to continue.

The goal of Handbag was to enable an Arduino sketch to create an Android UI and have bi-directional communication between the two devices. It could be interesting to adapt that aspect to run with the linked project.

[fat0wl]

Yeah when I heard about it I was really excited. I was big into Arduino back then. But unfortunately didn't have an Android phone.

Then the only time I heard of anyone owning the ADK was my friend who worked at Google. It seems they kindof gave them out as party favors. I thought it was a great idea & wished it would take off but unfortunately had to move away from Arduino anyway to focus on web engineering career and to this day(!) I don't own a smartphone.