San Francisco, Dec 18 (IANS): Google has announced that Android Things, a heavily stripped-down Android-based operating system for Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices, will shut down early next year.

The Android Things Dashboard, which is used for managing devices, will stop accepting new devices and projects in just three weeks-on January 5, 2021. Developers will be able to continue updating existing deployments until January 5, 2022, the company said in a statement.

After the given date, the console will be shut down completely for non-commercial use and all project data will be permanently deleted.

The only products that can run Android Things will be the ones built on commercial hardware SoMs (system-on-modules) from vendors like NXP, Qualcomm and MediaTek.

Google launched Android Things back in 2016 as a simple operating system for use on a variety of smart appliances.

The search engine giant originally wanted to create an Internet-of-Things OS where it would handle the "heavy lifting" of maintaining a platform so that developers could just focus on products.