This is reaching levels of absurdity nowadays. I mean, Android / Android Studio and "productive", compared on how you work with ESP8266? With NodeMCU, all you need is simple Lua, few console commands and a text editor. We're replacing that with a huge cow Android Studio is, shit ton more of commands and complexity need to operate it, and what?
Now each new toaster, instead of shipping an uC, will ship a whole PC inside? :/.
I find the ESP8266 quite good, specially its successor ESP32.
Given the programming languages we already could use on MS-DOS, both those chips are quite good.
However, I bet Google is trying to put Android into those areas that are now moving from C and C++ to Java.
This is the same game currently being played in HPT, it is cheaper to get Java developers, even with the increased hardware costs, than to keep writing trading systems in pure C++. Hence the pressure Oracle has got into improving Java's story in regards to AOT and value types.
So if a business is just going to deploy a couple of units, the difference between $15.15 (ESP8266) and $39.95 (Raspberry PI 3) might not be significant, when adding the salaries and respective development costs on top.
Of course, the best approach for those that care about Java and IoT is to just use a plain GNU/Linux distribution like Yocto and standard Embedded Java, instead of Android Java fork.
I get that the cost of the developers working with more high-level platforms might be lower and that an SDK in Java-like language probably will be more popular than one in C.
It's just that using 512 MB RAM and a quad-core processor for something as simple as a light switch just seems to be so very wasteful.
There's also security aspect - there's only so much you can exploit in a simple uC running some tight firmware. Number of ways you can hack an embedded Linux system is dramatically higher.
This is reaching levels of absurdity nowadays. I mean, Android / Android Studio and "productive", compared on how you work with ESP8266? With NodeMCU, all you need is simple Lua, few console commands and a text editor. We're replacing that with a huge cow Android Studio is, shit ton more of commands and complexity need to operate it, and what?
Now each new toaster, instead of shipping an uC, will ship a whole PC inside? :/.