> Then most of it got tossed

Surely someone "took responsibility" for that one

Pardon my ignorance, but what UI in Chromecast? From what I remember, there are just pretty pictures with clock when you don't play anything and your chosen stream, when you do.

But if you mean UI of Android TV itself, then it seems to be a choice of a suitable SoC, or rather not picking an underpowered one. For example, Nvidia picked well for their Shield line.

The topic in the thread here is the Google/Nest Home Hub / Home Hub Max display assistants.

They initially ran a version of the same "CastOS" (we didn't call it that then) the same as what ran on Chromecast sticks. But the landing screen on it is richer than what boots on a Chromecast, and it had an interactive gesture based touch screen. CastOS is just a Linux distrib with some boot and build stuff stolen from Android, but the user space for it is basically booting straight into a chromium based web shell.

Before it (the display assistant) launched, I wrote (and ported from ChromeOS) some of the gesture stuff on it. And some of the accessibility features (magnification).

The "Dragonglass" UI that ran on it was originally built as a HTML/TypeScript stack application. Later it was rewritten in Flutter/Dart, ran for a while like that on CastOS using a Wayland-based wedge layer; and now it runs on Fuchsia.

(I don't think any of this is particularly internal or secret anymore since it's old news and replaced, and most of it was visible from the public chromium repo. Also they can't fire me anymore because I quit ;-) )

Oh, those devices do have UI... somehow I managed to skip this entire line. As I said, pardon my ignorance :-).

Thanks for the behind the scenes.