It took Android devicemakers a very long time to commit to long-term update support. Samsung and Google have only recently decided to offer seven years of updates for their flagship Android devices, but a decade ago, you were lucky to get more than one or two updates on even the most expensive Android phones and tablets. How is it, then, that an Android-powered set-top box from 2015 is still going strong?
Nvidia released the first Shield Android TV in 2015, and according to the company’s senior VP of hardware engineering, Andrew Bell, supporting these devices has been a labor of love. And the team at Nvidia still loves the Shield. Bell assures us that Nvidia has never given up, even when it looked like support for the Shield was waning, and it doesn’t plan to stop any time soon.
The soul of Shield
Gaming has been central to Nvidia since its start, and that focus gave rise to the Shield. “Pretty much everybody who worked at Nvidia in the early days really wanted to make a game console,” said Bell, who has worked at the company for 25 years.
However, Nvidia didn’t have what it needed back then. Before gaming, crypto, and AI turned it into the multi-trillion-dollar powerhouse it is today, Nvidia had a startup mentality and the budget to match. When Shield devices began percolating in the company’s labs, it was seen as an important way to gain experience with “full-stack” systems and all the complications that arise when managing them.
“To build a game console was pretty complicated because, of course, you have to have a GPU, which we know how to make,” Bell explained. “But in addition to that, you need a CPU, an OS, games, and you need a UI.”